A Pitcher's Moment: Carl Hubbell and the Quest for Baseball Immortality

By Fritz A. Buckallew

Carl Hubbell knew that every year in July his telephone would start ringing. As baseball's All-Star Game grew near, reporters asked him anew about his legendary moment-the 1934 All-Star Game. He had scored five consecutive strikeouts there: a feat for the ages, considering that all five of the batters he bested were to become among the brightest figures in baseball's Hall of Fame. Lou Gehrig, Joe Cronin, Al Simmons, Jimmie Foxx, and Babe Ruth all failed to master Hub's baffling screwball while the crowd was hushed in disbelief. This book tells of Carl Hubbell's rise from an Oklahoma village to fifteen years (1928-1943) of major league pitching excellence and of his influence beyond that as a top executive with his Giants (in New York and San Francisco). It's a compelling tale of a pitcher who became much more than a baseball player.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Park Hudson Press
• Release date: Feb 17, 2023
• ISBN: 9798215212578

Book preview

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I would like to express my gratitude to the staffs of the Carl Hubbell Museum, Meeker City Museum, and the Lincoln County Historical Society for all the good work they do in keeping their records of the life of Carl Hubbell available as well as helping me use the material. I’d also like to particularly thank Gail Markwell of the Carl Hubbell Museum and Carroll Harper of the Meeker City Museum for taking the time to reminisce with me about Carl Hubbell and his times.

Seemingly every book would never have come to be written without the efforts of two people besides the author. In this case, my particular thanks go to Gwen Dobbs of the University of Central Oklahoma library, whose research assistance was invaluable, and to Buddy Johnson of Forty-Sixth Star Press, who gave me the idea, and worked long and hard gathering illustrations, editing, and doing the Hubbell genealogical research.

This book is for Robin, whose love conquers all, and who had to listen to way too much grousing about where Foxx hit that foul ball…

PROLOGUE

On July 10, 1934, Carl Hubbell arrived at his home field, the New York Giants’ Polo Grounds, to prepare for his starting assignment for the National League All-Stars against their American League counterparts in the second annual All-Star Game. His first stop was a meeting with his catcher: Gabby Hartnett was my catcher that day. He had never caught me before, so we sat down before the game to go over the American League lineup….We knew that no pitcher in their league threw the screwball. We hoped they’d have trouble with it, so we agreed that every strike would be a screwball, and every fastball would be wasted inside. However, he also said: To do it, we had to keep ahead of the hitter all the time. We’d get a screwball over for a first strike, waste a curve or fastball.

Meanwhile, on the American League side, shortstop Joe Cronin had the most experience batting against Hubbell, having faced him in the previous season’s World Series: Hubbell remembered, Joe Cronin told me later that before the game Ruth and Gehrig and Foxx and Simmons and some other guys had been getting on him about the World Series…He kept telling them, ‘You’ll know why we lost the Series when you see Hubbell pitch.

When Hubbell took the field, he was discomfited: I remember going out to watch them take batting practice to learn what they teed off on. They weren’t hitting anything into the seats—they were hitting everything over the roof! You can just imagine how that affected my confidence. Further, the no-nonsense Hubbell was annoyed at the event’s fooferaw: There was a lot of picture taking and stuff before the game. I kept saying to myself, ‘Let’s get going with this thing, let’s get it started.’ I was so pumped up that when the game began, I was throwing too hard.

The game’s first batter was the American League’s second baseman, Charlie Gehringer, from the Tigers. Hubbell was clearly out of control; Gehringer ran the count to 3-1 before he singled to center field and took second when Wally Berger muffed the ball. After running Heinie Manush to a full count, Hubbell lost him, very quickly finding himself in a jam: two men on, nobody out. When Hartnett returned the ball to him, he liked to recall that he called to him, Hey, Hub, why don’t you start throwing that damned thing, by which he meant the screwball.

Hubbell disliked the story: I didn’t need anybody to tell me that, he said curtly. The next thing that happened was his infield joining him for a conference at the mound. Since all four of his infielders were to become Hall-of-Famers and three of them, Pittsburgh’s Pie Traynor, the Cardinals’ Frank Frisch, and New York’s Bill Terry, were currently managers, much has been made of that brain trust, but Hubbell dismissed that, too: None of them could help me a damn bit. It did give me time to get control of my emotions and everything and to realize that I’d beat myself the way I was doing it. In fact, said Hubbell: I never heard what was said. I was too busy having a meeting with myself. I told myself, ‘You’re not going to be around here long if you don’t settle down’.

Indeed, when the others had left, Hubbell was facing the most feared slugger of his, or any other, age: the immortal Babe Ruth. Hubbell delivered a pitch that Ruth took. It was called a strike.

ASPIRANT

George Owen Hubbell loved to complain when the newspaper boys couldn’t get his famous son’s birthplace correct. Always they had it as Carthage, Missouri. As pater familias, he surely was entitled to his opinion, and he would invariably tell friends that Carl Owen Hubbell was born on June 22, 1903 in a farmhouse one-half mile north of Red Oak, Missouri, in Lawrence County, twenty miles northeast of Carthage.

Would that the old gentleman were around to set us straight on the Hubbell clan’s bewildering migrations. George was born in Wapello, Illinois in 1869, and in 1896 took as his bride Margaret Upp, seven years his junior. The senior Hubbell was a catcher by avocation and made his living farming and breeding horses, at first on the farm north of Red Oak, where they started their family with sons Elwin, Kern, Jay, Carl, and Merritt. Later, in Oklahoma, came son John and, much later, daughter Dorothy, born in 1921 when the oldest boys were grown. The 1910 census listed another son, Paul, born in 1908, who doesn’t figure in any other written records, and who had disappeared from the census by 1920.

Soon after Merritt’s birth in 1907, the family picked up and moved to Oklahoma. It is possible to find written narratives describing a move to Meeker, Oklahoma as early as Carl’s first birthday, but these are almost certainly false, with Merritt clearly being born in Missouri. Older brother Kern was cited at Meeker’s seventy-fifth anniversary commemoration as having come to Meeker in 1907, but all the other evidence points to the family having moved first to Stroud, Oklahoma, about forty miles northeast of Meeker, when they came to Oklahoma.

Carl himself said merely that they moved to Oklahoma when he was about three. At the time of Hubbell’s death, a family member recorded his memories in a manuscript which, although spare, contains the most developed narrative of the move. This account has the Hubbells moving to Stroud, where George had siblings, in 1908, and not leaving until 1914. And indeed, the 1910 census does list the family as living in Stroud. George worked in his brother’s grocery, ran a cotton gin, and hired out as a thresher. This version has the family moving only in 1914, and then not to Meeker, but to a farm in the Deep Fork valley southeast of Stroud. Only in 1916 did the Hubbells move to their farm north of Meeker, and then, in 1919, to yet another farm one mile further west.

Both Stroud and Meeker were Lincoln County communities. The county had been settled at the time of Oklahoma’s famed 1889 land run, previously having reserved for several small tribes, principally the Sac and Fox, under the aegis of Indian Territory. The county was primarily hilly, wooded ground, part of Oklahoma’s notable Cross Timbers physiographic region which divides the east from the west in that state.

Meeker, like most villages in the plains states, reached its peak of population and prosperity during the years encircling World War I. On the far southern fringe of Lincoln County, it tended to gravitate economically and socially more to the larger city of Shawnee to its south than to its own county seat of Chandler, and, much later, the entire area would become much more closely tied to the Oklahoma City urban complex to the west as it sprawled toward Meeker after World War II.

The Hubbells farmed cotton, the predominant crop around Meeker in those years. George probably maintained his interest in breeding horses, and they would likely have kept a pecan grove. The family belonged to a church, and George served on a fair board, but in general the family was not prominent. The younger Hubbells all took to sports activities which seem to have been neither encouraged nor discouraged by their parents, as long as their many chores were finished. I guess we started to play something like baseball when I was around ten, remembered Carl. We used to play catch and one-ol-cat on the farm. There wasn’t any kind of field to play a real game on and we didn’t have any equipment, anyway. Didn’t even have a ball. What we used to do was save all the string we could get our hands on around the farm, then wrap it up tight and make what they called a twine ball out of it.

Farm life agreed with Hubbell’s nurture as a pitcher: I had a well-developed arm when I started playing ball. I was either chopping cotton or getting in the wood all the days of my life until just the year before I graduated from high school.

Hubbell’s first formal baseball game was professional: he was paid $1 to ride his horse nine miles to Sparks to pitch a game which he won 1-0. Hubbell also pitched occasionally for Meeker’s town team, which was organized (as, indeed, was the entire Lincoln County league in which it competed) by mercantile man T. J. (Jeff) Hampton, who managed the team and pitched.

Already Hubbell must have been developing the lanky physique characteristic of his adulthood, for he played center on Meeker’s high school basketball team, which was virtually the only scholastic athletic outlet available. However, during his junior year, he wanted the high school to have a baseball team, and, We asked the superintendent if we could form one, and he said okay, ‘but who’re you gonna play?’ Damned good question. The nearest school was ten miles away. Still, we managed to play five or six games that year, and ten or twelve the next one. Hubbell’s typically self-effacing anecdote conceals an accomplishment: Meeker High won the 1922 Class C state tournament in Norman by defeating Lexington 10-1 and Tuttle 5-1 in 17 innings. Hubbell’s line at the tournament would become familiar: 2 hits, 17 strikeouts, 1 base on balls.

Hubbell was clearly a dominant force. There is even an unlikely story which has future Hall of Famer Lloyd Waner, from Harrah, the next town west, throwing his bat at a Hubbell pitch in frustration during a high school game. It’s a difficult scene to envision from one of baseball’s greatest masters of bat control, but players do change; the imperturbable Hubbell once described himself as excitable as a young pitcher.

The Waner brothers, Paul and Lloyd, were only the nearest examples of a considerable number of Oklahomans who emerged from the state in the first part of the century to play professional baseball at or near the major league level. Very soon after the turn of the century, the Iron Man, Joe McGinnity, took his submarine delivery from the mining country of Pittsburg County to the New York Giants and their outstanding teams of the period. Three more pioneering pitchers came from the Sooner State to the majors in the 1910’s and succeeded. The first was Rube Foster, whose career was meteoric but for several years was a mainstay of the Red Sox’ fine pennant-winning teams of the era, one year winning nineteen games. The Hubbells would have been very familiar with the town of Perkins from their years in Stroud, and it had produced Jesse Barnes, a mainstay of the Giants’ dynasty which won pennants from 1921 through 1924. Even better known were Yankees’ ace Carl Mays and, though not primarily known for his baseball career, Hubbell’s fellow Lincoln Countian Jim Thorpe from Prague.

Hubbell’s generation continued sending players up through the ranks. In addition to the Waners,