Last at Bat: You Have to Kill the Spider

As you watch a frustrating Cardinal loss, just think, without Branch Rickey, you might not have a team to boo

By: @CharlesHaasSTL

Charles lost his old Twitter account in service of this article - so give him a new follow as a thank you!

You’ve got to kill the spider.

Think about all the comebacks we’ve seen. Be it a player who has struggled, until he delivers when it matters most (see e.g. left handed hitting Ozzie Smith). Or maybe the team is down to its last strike in Game 6 of the World Series and…well you know how that story ends.

How lucky are we? Literally. Because what’s always amazed me is that people don’t realize the fragility of the Cardinals franchise. They look at it through the current lens. It’s a baseball city. These are the best fans in baseball. Attendance below 3 million? My stars! We’ve really hit on some tough times! But all those great comebacks, all that Cardinal Devil Magic, it was almost non-existent.

So friends, please remember, this is a moment in time. A GREAT moment, to be certain, but just a moment in time. It wasn’t always like this. We are lucky that the Cardinals as a franchise exists. There were several times the team almost disappeared, either by moving to another city or ceasing to exist altogether. Heck, that happened once!

In 1877, the St. Louis Brownstockings acquired some of the best available talent in order to make a serious run at the pennant and weeks later the team was gone. Makes you feel a little bit better about Mo sleeping through last Winter, right?

Perhaps we don’t appreciate enough then that the Cardinals, against all odds, have become one of the most storied franchises in baseball, fielding competitive and sometimes legendary teams in nearly all eras of the game. Think about this, Cardinals have not had the worst record in the league since 1918. That’s now 107 years ago. Remember the Cubs went 108 years without winning the World Series. That’s how remarkable this team has been.

So, in the words of Tim McCarver, How did this happen? How did we go from nearly having no team, to having the greatest National League franchise of all time. Easy. Branch Rickey killed the spider. Branch Rickey made the Cardinals comeback.

Come back from what? You say. Well, quick history lesson. The St. Louis Browns of the 1880s were one of the most famously dominant teams in baseball history. Playing in the American Association, they won 4 consecutive pennants from 1885-1888, became the only AA team to win the predecessor of the World Series (and they should have won two, if not for Cubs cheating), and continued to be a dominant, upper division team until the Association folded after the 1891 season.

Those teams – the stories – the players – they were awesome. Trust me.

After that? Oh, man, it got bad.

I mean, bad. Very very bad.

I told you the Cardinals have not have the worst record in the league since 1918, but between 1892-1918 they had the worst record 8 times, the second worst record 5 times, and the third worst 5 times. That’s 27 total seasons where 18 of them they were easily one of the worst teams in the league. And don’t kid yourself, the other years weren’t grand either. There is not a single first place finish in this group. There aren’t any second place finishes either. Hey, look at that! There’s a third place finish! 1914 was a magical year! Except for Archduke Franz Ferdinand.

Their best season in this stretch was an 84-67 mark, good for fifth place out of twelve teams, and it took cheating to do it.

Look, I’ve written this part over and over again, but there’s just too much to say. It was 27 years of not just bad baseball, but outright embarrassment. I can’t spend 10,000 words telling you all that happened. The TL;DR is this:

The Browns suffered under broke ownership, that included public fights, endless lawsuits, media mockery, kidnapping, the league confiscating the team, deaths, ownership divorce that makes the current Padres situation look normal, and multiple ballpark fires in what became the worst stadium in baseball.

Do you think fans stuck around to cheer this team on? They did not. Thankfully for them in 1902 the Milwaukee Brewers moved to St. Louis and became the new Browns. In 1914 the Federal League started, placing franchise in St. Louis, hoping the town would succumb to Three Finger Modecai Brown fever.

And wouldn’t you know it, once all these other teams showed up, the losing ended. Since 1918 the Cardinals haven’t finished last in the NL. Since 1918 they’ve won the most World Series Championships in the NL. How on Earth did they turn this around?

I think it’s time I told you how to kill the spider.

There’s a book I read recently by Carlos Whitaker called: Kill the Spider: Getting Rid of What's Really Holding You Back.

We all have this in our lives in at least one way, probably more like 50 ways. I myself, might set the record.

The premise is simple: We can go about our day, being productive humans, moving forward , and then there’s this little thing we spot on our wall, and it stops us completely. We’re terrified of it. We can’t move forward. We’re petrified and there’s no way to move on until we get the courage to not just face, but kill the spider.

Who would be afraid of a spider, those of you with more testosterone than me might ask.

But it’s this: You’re in a boat in the middle of the ocean, and it’s taking on water. You keep bailing out the boat again and again. Endlessly. You can’t stop, or you’re scared the boat is going to sink. But because you’re bailing it out, you don’t have time to paddle, you don’t have time to try and plug the hole. You’re stuck in an endless loop bailing out water.

In your brain you think this accomplished your goal. It does not. Your goal isn’t to stand on a boat bailing water forever. You want to make it back to shore safely. To get what you want out of life, you’re going to have to take that risk. You’re going to have to face that fear. Maybe the boat sinks before you can fix it. But ultimately, that was always your fate. You couldn’t bail forever. At some point, the spider has to be killed.

The Cardinals basic need for 27 years was money. And the longer they went without winning, the more forces were working against them. More competition moved to town. The ballpark fell more and more in disrepair. The debts mounted. The fans stayed farther away.

The solution for the Cardinals for years was to bail themselves out. When a player got too expensive? Trade him or sell him. That would help them meet payroll. Maybe they could do some stadium repairs. Maybe it could get them through another few months.

But they were never going to win. And winning was the only way to bring the fans back in.

Then, in 1915, they got lucky. They signed a skinny young kid named Rogers Hornsby. Now, if Rogers Hornsby looked like he was going to be the greatest hitter of all time, the Cardinals never would have gotten him. Basically every other team had better scouts, and higher offers of money. But Hornsby? He was fresh into adulthood, and nothing more than a weak hitting shortstop. He was considered glove-first, and anyone who has ever researched Hornsby knows that his glove wasn’t exactly great.

That’s how he was able to elude all of the other teams. But the Cardinals? They were pathetic. And this was a kid who could handle SS pretty ok. Maybe he’d occasionally get a single, could this version go the Cardinals ask for much more than that?

His debut went as expected. He was a weak hitter with a 66 OPS+ in the DEAD BALL ERA. And it wasn’t just the small sample size. The Cardinals got him out of D-League Denison. He hit .277 over a full season. This is a guy who ended his career with a .358 average in the major leagues.

Yeah, maybe you could say a 19-year-old capably playing SS and hitting above the league average in D baseball maybe SHOULD be a prospect. But they weren’t thinking that way in 1915.

Did you know Hornsby was almost traded ? The Cardinals ended up glad they didn’t. When he reported the next Spring he’d become a man. He’d put on 30 pounds. He was suddenly an instant force.

And that’s when the same old cycle began. The Cardinals were bad. The Cardinals were poor. They actually had some sort of talent on the team. So, when were they going to trade him?

Rumors swirled around Hornsby, but the situation was changed. He was already commanding more. The Cubs and Giants were offering the Cardinals in the $25,000 range. Maybe in the past he’d have been out the door instantly. But…owner Helene Britton refused to trade Rogers Hornsby.

Was this it? Had the spider been killed? Were they finally going to prioritize winning and luring fans to the seats as a way to be financially solvent?

No.

She still intended to sell Hornsby, technically.

She intended to sell the entire team. And Rogers Hornsby was a big part of her team’s value. Or, more specifically, the only part.

Britton filed for divorce from her husband – the team President – following the 1916 season. She managed to sell the team and the stadium for $350,000 dollars to a group of local businessmen later called affectionally, “The Knot-Hole Gang.”

Half the money would go to Britton, while the new owners took over a stadium on the verge of being condemned, and received a whole bunch of debt for their troubles The deal was finalized during the 1917 season. The Cardinals now had a new President by the name of Branch Rickey, and their owners were $175,000 in debt.

In December 1917, Charles Weeghman, from Chicago, offered Branch Rickey $75,000 for Rogers Hornsby. But Rickey knew the Cardinals couldn’t ever win like this. They had to find a way to be good. He had to kill the spider.

At the owner meetings that February, Weeghman tried again. They all did. Barney Dreyfuss of Pittsburgh said the Cardinals could pick any 10 players they wanted for Hornsby.

Branch Rickey said no.

Actually, he didn’t just say no. He stood up to the entire room and shouted it.

To quote the St. Louis Star and Times, January 7, 1918:

“’Hornsby will not be sold or traded to any club in North America, that’s all there is to it,’ shouted President Rickey to a group of early baseball arrivals here. ‘Neither Charley Weeghman nor John McGraw can get him, no matter what they offer in either cash or players’”

He didn’t just kill that spider; he crushed it into paste.

To the league’s surprise, Rickey said that not only were they not selling him, but their purpose at those meetings was to buy pitching from OTHER teams. He said the team was going for the pennant.

Hallelujah! The Cardinals were reborn! They had finally completed their comeback!

Uh, no.

As you recall, they ended up being the worst team in the league that year.

You’ve got to stop bailing. You’ve got to try something different. What’s holding you back is that the boat might sink. And yeah, it might.

For the Cardinals, it almost did.

1918 there was a little thing going on called World War I. The country was in turmoil, players were overseas, and attendance was plummeting. It got no worse than a place called St. Louis, where their attendance was last in the league.

Hornsby? He was suffering through one of the worst years he would ever have. Still a star, sure, but an oft-injured one with depressed stats.

He hated his teammates. He refused to talk to them. He hated his manager. He refused to talk to him also. He was an angry young man.

Oh, and Hornsby – as the sole provider for his widowed mother – was given a class 3 deferment the previous Winter. By July, that was changed to class 1. He was now ordered to find essential employment, or fight in the war. Of all the players, the one good Cardinal was the first to get this order.

And so Hornsby announced he was quitting the Cardinals to find essential employment – his mother had told the press that he was always going to be quitting baseball after the year was over anyway.

On July 7th, mired in a miserable slump, Hornsby went 0-7 in a double header. On July 8^th, Gene Paulette started at SS for the Cardinals. Rogers Hornsby was gone until the end of the Great War. How long would that be? How many years? No one knew.

Bet that $75,000 dollars sounded mighty good to Branch Rickey. Bet it sounded even better to his desperate bosses.

But Branch Rickey knew full well that the old ways weren’t working. He knew they had to stop bailing for water, even if it meant drowning.

On July 17th of that year, with Hornsby still gone from the team, Branch Rickey laid it all out:

“Now, since he has left the club, I await the tirade of criticism about passing up the Chicago club’s offer for Hornsby last Spring. I’m waiting to be told that I made the biggest mistake of my career when I didn’t sell Hornsby.”

“I’ll stand on my decision on that instance until my last day in baseball. There was never any occasion for the Cardinal baseball club to weaken itself for the sake of any amount of money, large or small. I have always blessed the day that I refused to sell him, despite the fact that my club is in last place.”

Articles in that same paper spoke of the franchise’s demise not as a prediction, but as a fact. The first team to fold would be the team with this weird communal owner system. Maybe it would have worked had a literal world war not happened – but it was declared to be a failure. Perhaps this was the end of the St. Louis Cardinals. The boat sank.

Days later the War Department allowed players to return to their teams through Labor Day – and the season would be cut short.

Hornsby’s time off helped him recover from injuries. He got 2 hits in his return game, and hit .300 the rest of the way with 4 of his 5 homers on the year.

Hornsby went back to work after the war, until it ended in December. In 1919 he was back with the Cardinals, under a new manager, and playing back to his old skill level.

The Cardinals finished in seventh place. Baby steps.

Branch Rickey kept saying no. With a focus now on winning, not merely surviving, he turned down an ever-growing amount of money for his star.

Before 1920 John McGraw offered $70,000 plus future Hall of Famer High Pockets Kelly, and other stars.

Rickey said no.

McGraw then upped his offer – to $300,000 – to get Hornsby. They Giant would even let him play for the Cardinals for the entire season and gain his rights for 1921.

Rickey said no.

All the while , Rickey was solving his money problems. Paying the Browns rent, the Cardinals moved in as co-tenants in Sportsman’s Park. Robison Field was sold. Part of the money was used to buy Independent teams and start what we now know as the minor league system.

Six years later, with Rogers Hornsby as player-manager, the Cardinals won their first Championship since 1886. They beat a Yankees team led by Ruth and Gehri. It was Hornsby recording the last out of the series, tagging out the Great Bambino as he tried to steal second.

The Cardinals came back. Not just from downtimes, but from certain death, time and time again.

For more than a generation of baseball fans, the Cardinals were a franchise teetering on the brink of non-existence. 100 years later, they are one of the cornerstone franchises in the game.

It might be the most incredible comeback story in baseball history. And all it took was the elimination of a spider.

So now it must be asked, what’s the spider in your life? What water are you endlessly bailing out? When are you going to decide enough is enough? It’s not enough to try just to not lose. You have it in you to win.