Washington DC Baseball

[GeoPoto]

Player #128D: Joseph E. "Joe" Cronin. Shortstop for the Washington Senators in 1928-1934 and the Boston Red Sox in 1935-1945. 2,285 hits and 170 home runs in 20 MLB seasons. He had a career OBP of .390. He was a 7-time All Star. Boston Red Sox #4 retired. Boston Red Sox Hall of Fame. In 1956, he was inducted to the MLB Hall of Fame. His best season was probably 1930 for Washington as he posted a .422 OBP with 127 runs scored and 127 RBIs on 686 plate appearances. He managed the Washington Senators in 1933-1934 and the Boston Red Sox in 1935-1947. He was General Manager of the Boston Red Sox in 1948-1958. He was president of the American League in 1959-1973. When he left the Red Sox in 1959, they were the only MLB team without a black player. He and team owner Tom Yawkey are generally viewed as responsible for this injustice which ended six months after Cronin's departure.

. . . If the season had been nothing but disappointing for Senator fans, the greatest calamity was yet to befall them. The bombshell came 2 1/2 weeks after the conclusion of the World Series, which the Tigers of Goslin and Crowder lost in seven games to the St. Louis Cardinals. Clark Griffith had always maintained that his reputation as a flesh trader aside, he had never sold a player outright for a large sum of cash. Sure, he had sold bit players at times, but never anyone who could, by his absence, have drastically impaired the ballclub's fortunes.

All of this changed on October 26, 1934, when Griffith stole some headlines from Hoover's G-men. Just four days earlier, federal agents had gunned down Charles "Pretty Boy" Floyd, the bank robber and murderer who'd been dubbed the "most dangerous man alive," when he attempted to flee from them in Ohio. With his news, Clark Griffith was to get a lot of attention not only in the baseball world, but with Americans in all walks of life.

Joe Cronin, already Griffith's best player and manager, had become part of the family a month earlier, in late September 1934. Three weeks after he'd broken his wrist, he had married Mildred Robertson, who was not only Griffith's secretary, but also his niece. The Cronins had met shortly after Joe was first assigned to the Senators on Friday the 13th of July 1928.

Joe Cronin had come to Washington highly recommended not only as a shortstop, but as a prospective beau for Mildred, who'd received a note from scout Joe Engel that he was bringing her "a real sweetie." When Cronin walked into Griffith's office on July 16th, there was Mildred, the girl of his dreams, something Joe said he immediately recognized. She, apparently, didn't recognize the boy of her dreams right away, and in fact it would be a number of years before she would even pay any attention to him, according to Cronin. Mildred Robertson was a font of baseball knowledge -- Cronin once said he would have put her up against anyone in terms of the wealth of baseball information her brain contained.

It is not difficult to imagine, then, Clark Griffith's dilemma when he got a phone call from Tom Yawkey of Boston during the 1934 World Series. Yawkey said that he had a check made out in Griffith's name in the amount of $250,000, and that he would part with it in exchange for Joe Cronin. To provide some idea of what this sum meant, Babe Ruth, already a superstar when he was sold by the Red Sox in 1920, had fetched only half that amount. Nothing of the kind had been seen since. Now, in much harder times, here was an offer of a quarter of a million dollars!

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