Baseball darkest moments?

Tim Crews and Steve Olin on Little Lake Nellie. That was pretty damn bleak.

 

William Nack wrote a tremendous story in SI on the Hershberger suicide in 1991:

http://sportsillustrated.cnn.com/vault/article/magazine/MAG1140724/index.htm

I'd say darkest moments were as follows (just as my opinion):

1. Black Sox Scandal

2. 1994 work stoppage

3. Ray Chapman death

4. Ben Chapman and the Phillies shouting the most vile insults to Jackie Robinson

5. Steroid hearing in Washington with McGwire, Sosa, Palmeiro.

6. For fans of one NYC borough, the Dodgers leaving for LA.

 

1989 in general was a pretty dark year.

1. Pete Rose scandal was front page all summer long
2. Giamatti's press conference banning Rose from baseball
3. Giamatti dying 10 days later
4. 1989 World Series being postponed two weeks by the earthquake.

 

I forgot one. I'd like to add it as no. 2.

Brook Jacoby getting traded to the A's when that was the only team the Indians had finished their season series with.

 

Utterly ridiculous.

 

It's actually worse, take black and latino players out of todays game.

 

Here's a different kind of dark moment in baseball - February 23, 1960.



"There Used To Be a Ballpark."

This particular ballpark was the home of the 1955 world champions - but the team left two years later and the stadium was gone less than three years after that. How does such a thing even happen?? Rhetorical question - I know the story.

 

Collusion doesn't even make the list, per the OP.

 

The Pittsburgh coke trial in the mid-80s deserves at least a mention.

 

Shortly before I headed out tonight to meet some friends for a couple of drinks I had this song going through my head. It was featured prominently in the HBO documentary "The Ghosts of Flatbush" (there are a couple of threads on it, one of which I started) and just last week I transferred the documentary from my DVR to a VHS tape so that my dad could watch it. The Dodgers were in LA for 2 1/2 years by the time I was born, but as one who loves the game and its history, I consider the Dodgers leaving Brooklyn to be baseball's darkest moment.

I've told a few people this, but if there ever was such a thing as time travel, the first thing I'd do is go back to the 50s and attend a game at Ebbets Field.

 

Another very dark moment not mentioned has to be the two-year period beginning early in the 1939 season when Lou Gehrig left the lineup and was diagnosed with ALS and then dying within two years.

 

It's Ray Chapman's death.

Chapman was a very popular player, a probable HOF electee had he played out his career.
Out of the whole list, this is the only case where a player died as a result of a play on the field -- and it almost certainly wasn't an accident. Carl Mays was a notoriously nasty cuss well known for drilling batters crowding the plate. (Mays might very well have made the HOF as well if not for the Chapman beaning.)


The Black Sox scandal was a big deal, but players gambling on games in the 1910s was like steroid use in the 1990s/2000s -- everybody knew it was going on, but pretended it wasn't. (Cocaine in the 1980s would be comparable as well.)

Ben Chapman, the Phillies, and Cap Anson in the 1880s/90s are simply different manifestations of the same mind-set. From what I've read, Chapman and the Phillies and several other NL teams who attempted to heckle Jackie Robinson off the field were only very indirectly chastised by contemporary news stories -- it was only years later they were actually called out by name for it.

As for Anson, his views and actions seem preposterously racist today, but 120 years ago they were pretty much mainstream. Plessy vs. Ferguson came down in 1896 to general public approval. "Birth of a Nation" was a runaway movie hit in 1915.