RIP Bill Werber

Oldest living major leaguer dies at 100.

I believe there's only two players left who appeared in a game with Babe Ruth: Lonny Frey and Phil Cavaretta.

RIP Bill.

 

Interesting read on him....particularly noteworthy was the 27 Yankees supposedly not wanting him around because he was a college kid.

 

There was a definite rift between college players and non-college players in those days. Lou Gehrig -- then known as "Columbia Lou" -- had to deal with the repercussions of that when he got to the Yankees, too.

 

I remember reading in Asinof's book on the Black Sox scandal that the Chicago players were divided, in part, by their education. Eddie Collins led one clique of players, who were generally more educated than the Chick Gandill (who grew up as a roughneck) clique.

RIP to Werber, who it sounds like had a wonderful career.

 

That's probably the most famous example, of course. Funny thing was, Gandil, Cicotte and certainly McMullin -- the only one of the Eight Men Out to finish high school -- were at least as well schooled as most of the "educated" clique.

Ray Schalk quit high school after two years, same as Gandil and Cicotte. Lefty Williams didn't have much formal education, but he was very intelligent; he could hold his own with Dickey Kerr, John Collins and Eddie Murphy, even though he didn't get along with them (that was due to personality conflicts more than anything -- Lefty was introverted, sensitive and very private; he made few friends just as a rule.)

No excuse for Risberg or Felsch or Weaver -- those guys were just plain dumb. Jackson was smarter than he gets credit for, especially business-wise, but he wasn't intelligent by any means in an educated sense.

Eddie Collins was chided for being a college man throughout most of his career -- that wasn't limited to his "roughneck" White Sox teammates. But he also got along with most of his teammates in Philadelphia and Chicago; the main difference with the Sox, in addition to some personality conflicts, was that his salary was so much larger than anyone else's, because he had it written into his contract when Connie Mack sold him.

So it wasn't really an "educated vs. uneducated" clique as much as it was Gandil not getting along with anybody, Risberg only getting along with McMullin, Williams only getting along with Jackson and all of them resenting Collins (and, to a lesser degree, Schalk.) I think Asinof really overstated that angle of the dissension to make his story better.

Not that any of that has anything to do with Bill Werber. But hell, get me going on this stuff ...

 

In Werber's era, it was a lot meaner game than it is today (beanballs, etc.). There was a lot of ethnic and religious tensions at the time in baseball (the 1920 Indians were divided into Protestant and Catholic camps), and that mirrored society as a whole.

 

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