Buddy Myer
Player #139D: Charles S. "Buddy" Myer. Second baseman with the Washington Senators in 1925-1927 and 1929-1941. 2,131 hits and 38 home runs in 17 MLB seasons. He had a career OBP of .389. 2-time All-Star. 1935 AL Batting champion. 1928 AL Stolen Base leader. His best season was 1935 for Washington as he posted a .440 OBP with 115 runs scored and 100 RBIs in 719 plate appearances. He was involved in one of baseball's most violent brawls when he was spiked and possibly racially derided by the Yankees' Ben Chapman.
We will follow Myer's SABR biography as we track his career -- Part 4: Early in the 1933 season, the Yankees’ Ben Chapman took him out with a hard slide, slicing open his shoe and cutting his foot. Myer kicked Chapman and Chapman fought back. Both men were ejected, but as Chapman passed through the Senators dugout on his way to the visitors’ clubhouse, he slugged Washington pitcher Earl Whitehill, igniting a near-riot that was remembered for years. The Senators swarmed Chapman, the Yankees charged across the field to his rescue, and angry fans joined the festivities. Police broke it up and arrested five civilians. Chapman, Myer, and Whitehill were suspended for five days and fined $100 each. (Chapman was traded to the Senators three years later. When he joined the team on the road, he walked into the hotel dining room and sat down beside Myer. They were soon talking and laughing together.)
With 26-year-old shortstop Joe Cronin taking over as manager, the Senators fought the Yankees for the 1933 pennant until August, when Washington won 13 straight games and pulled away. The Senators’ lineup included six regulars hitting over .290, backed by a pair of 20-game-winning pitchers. Myer’s .810 OPS was the best of his career so far. “I wasn’t the best player in the league that year, but I was the tiredest,” he remembered. “I led off in front of three good hitters—Goose Goslin, Heinie Manush and Cronin—and they put on the hit and run so many times, they had my tongue hanging out.”
The club won a franchise-record 99 games on the way to its third pennant in 10 years and a meeting with the New York Giants in the World Series. Before Game 1, Myer was riding in a cab to the Polo Grounds when he witnessed a gory traffic accident in which a pedestrian was run down by a truck and killed. A superstitious man would call it an omen. Myer led off the game by striking out, the first of 10 victims of the NL’s Most Valuable Player, Carl Hubbell. He fumbled the first ground ball he saw in the bottom of the inning, leading to two unearned runs. He was charged with another error on a wild throw and a third when he dropped the catcher’s peg as Mel Ott tried to steal second. New York won, 4-2, and beat the Senators again the next day.
When the Series moved to Washington for Game 3, Myer led off the bottom of the first with a single and scored the Senators’ first run. He added an RBI double in the next inning and drove in another run with a seventh-inning single as Whitehill shut out the Giants, 4-0. It was the Senators’ only victory. New York won the championship in five games.
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02-28-2024, 04:46 AM
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