Baseball Way Back: Big Train, Bucky and the unlikely champion 1924 Senators

This year marks the 100th anniversary of one of the great rags-to-riches stories in baseball, the 1924 World Series champion Washington Senators.

I spoke over the phone this week with fellow New Trier West graduate Gary Sarnoff, the author of a recently published book on the team, “Team of Destiny: Walter Johnson, Clark Griffith, Bucky Harris, and the 1924 Washington Senators.”

Sarnoff, a Cubs fan who attended his first game at Wrigley in 1966, is a baseball historian who writes for the Society for American Baseball Research.

The 1924 Senators intrigued him because they were underdogs.

“They had never won a pennant in franchise history,” Sarnoff said. “They weren’t even expected to finish in the first half of the standings.

Sarnoff said the Senators made few roster moves that year, making contention even less likely.

Above all, he said, what makes the story special is Walter “Big Train” Johnson, who, he said, “had pitched his heart out for the Washington Senators his whole career” and, at 36 years old, was believed to be over the hill.

Johnson was expected to retire without having pitched in a World Series.

The 1924 Senators have a strong Chicago connection. One of the players, Nemo Leibold, was one of the “Clean Sox” on the infamous 1919 White Sox pennant winners.

But the strongest Chicago connection was the team’s owner, Clark Griffith, who, as a pitcher with the pre-Cubs Chicago Colts/Orphans in the 1890s, was a six-time 20-game winner.

In 1901 he jumped to the fledgling American League and became player-manager of the Chicago White Sox, winning 24 games as a pitcher and guiding the team to its first championship in its inaugural season.

“He was not a big man and he was not an overpowering pitcher. He was a very smart pitcher,” Sarnoff said. “And back then you could doctor a ball. You could throw trick pitches. He was really good at that, and he was very crafty. He pitched to batters’ weaknesses. And that’s why he got the nickname ‘The Old Fox.’”

When Griffith came to Washington, the team had yet to have a winning season. To lure him as manager, the team’s board of directors gave him an incentive to buy into the team. He wound up getting 10% of the Senators.

Griffith turned the team around immediately, posting four consecutive winning seasons with the help of Johnson, the most dominant pitcher of his era.

But Griffith craved a pennant and felt the only way to do it was to own the team. He found a business partner, William Richardson, and secured a $100,000 loan. The duo bought out the board of directors, and Griffith became team president.

Ownership, however, did not bring a championship, and in 1924, he rolled the dice by hiring 27-year-old second-baseman Bucky Harris as manager.

Harris, Sarnoff said, had only four full seasons of major-league playing experience, and most of the players were older than he was.

“Sportwriters called it ‘Griffith’s folly,’” Sarnoff said.

But Johnson won 23 games in 1924 and was named AL MVP and headed into the World Series to face the New York GIants.

In addition to Johnson, the Senators were led by outfielders Sam Rice and “Goose” Goslin.

Harris, whom Griffith chose after unsuccessfully trying to get Eddie Collins from the White Sox to be his player-manager, proved a capable leader — he would later pilot the 1947 world champion New York Yankees.

“Bucky Harris was somebody (Griffith) always admired. He liked the way Bucky Harris played,” Sarnoff said. “He was hard-nosed, intense ballplayer.”

Harris’ troops faced the New York Giants in the World Series and took the Fall Classic in seven games. Johnson would lose his two starts, but in the seventh game he earned the victory in one of the most memorable games in series history.

With the Senators down 3-1 in the eighth inning, it looked like the Giants would capture the crown. But Harris, who had homered earlier, hit a routine grounder that struck a pebble and eluded third baseman Freddie Lindstrom’s grasp. Leibold and catcher Muddy Ruel came home to even the score.

Harris brought in Johnson to relieve Firpo Marberry in the ninth, and the Big Train held the Giants until the 12th, when Lindstrom once again had trouble fielding a grounder, this time off the bat of Earl McNeely, who drove in Ruel with the series-winning run.

These were the days before television, but fortunately, newsreel film footage of the seventh game has survived.

You get a wonderful panning shot of Washington’s home park. The cameras capture Harris’ home run trot and President Calvin Coolidge watching the action. Viewers get a glimpse of Johnson’s delivery as he throws a popup, and the action is capped by Senators fans swarming the field after Ruel crosses the plate.

You can enjoy it on YouTube. But you will first want to read Sarnoff’s book.