Frank and beanballs
126 years ago this week, Frank Chance was hit by a record 4 pitches in one doubleheader
With the all due respect to hit-by-pitch magnet Anthony Rizzo, one of his /Chicago/ Cubs forebears could tell him: “Bean there, done that.”
In sheer numbers, Rizzo outranks dead-ball era Cubs great Frank Chance on the all-time list. Rizzo, who led the National League in 2015, ’17 and last season, ranks tied for 24th with 145 HBPs.
Chance, a Hall of Famer who played all but 13 of his 1,288 career games for the Cubs from 18981912, is 33rd with 137.
But keep this in mind: Rizzo plays with a helmet.
And Chance certainly took his lumps in 1904, when he was hit 16 times, second-most of his career. Four came during a doubleheader against the Reds on May 30, when he was plunked four times: three in Game 1 and once in the nightcap at the Palace of the Fans in Cincinnati.
According to Elias Sports Bureau, the four HBPs remain a single-day Major League Baseball record; several players are tied with three.
The legend of Chance’s run-ins with a baseball that day is such that occasionally a fifth hit by pitch gets added to the record, though Elias and the Society for American Baseball Research insists it was “only” four.
But four was plenty, especially considering one of Jack Harper’s pitches hit Chance in the head.
“Capt. Chance was hit in the head by one of Harper’s fast shoots, and was out for several minutes,” according the Chicago Daily Tribune’s archives.
John McMurray, chairman of SABR’s Dead-Ball Era (1901-1919) Committee, said: “Pitchers at that
time didn’t have the control that they do today. Given that pitchers tended to stay in for the entire game for the most part, it’s certainly reasonable to think that they might grow wild.”
Chance also had a tendency to crowd the plate, McMurray said, and it didn’t help that “The Peerless Leader” was known to be an aggressive character who was tough on teammates and opponents alike.
The Tribune article continued: “The Chicago captain recovered, and continued in the game with nothing worse than a blackened eye, but it was a narrow escape, for if the blow had been an inch farther back it would have killed him. Harper hit Chance three times during the game.”
Of course, that account likely treads into hyperbole, but it can’t be understated that Chance put himself in harm’s way by playing both games.
“For a lot of players (at that time), missing games meant they might no longer be with the team,” McMurray said. “The other reason we pay attention to this with Chance is because he did have surgery late in his career to correct blood clots on the brain caused by getting hit in the head. Part of his story is getting hit by pitches.”
Best known as part of the
Cubs’ famous double-play combination with Joe Tinker and Johnny Evers, Chance suffered severe headaches and dizziness in the latter part of his career, when he was a manager and part-time player.
On Sept. 16, 1912, he had surgery in New York to remove a blood clot near the base of his brain.
According to Los Angeles Times article later that month: “By actual count twenty-eight balls have bounced off Frank’s cranium and each one contributed its share of damage to the sensitive nerves and delicate blood vessels of the head until the severe headaches from which he suffered for the past year became unbearable and the knife was the last resort to regain his health.”
In a strange turn of events, while Chance was recovering, he and Cubs President Charles W. Murphy got into a public war of words over Murphy’s decision to institute a contract clause barring players from smoking and drinking and blaming their failure to win the 1909 pennant on booze.
After Chance suggested anyone who made that assertion is a “liar,” Murphy essentially fired Chance the next day.
Chance served as a player-manager for the Yankees the next couple of seasons and once for the Red Sox in 1923. Illness prevented a last go-around with the White Sox in 1924, and he died that September at age 48.