One Summer: America, 1927

for burial. Sometimes, it appears, he would leave a cadaver in his car at Yankee Stadium during a game, then complete the delivery afterwards. Hoyt himself was studying in the off season to be a mortician.
     
    Urban Shocker , also a pitcher, had been born Urbain Jacques Shockor to a French-Canadian family living in Cleveland. He was something of a drunkard, but then many ballplayers in those days were. He had a permanent crook in one of the fingers of his throwing hand, owing to an injury in his younger years, which gave him an unusual grip and greatly improved his slow curve ball. He was also one of the seventeen pitchers allowed to continue throwing a spitball after 1919. He was the third highest salaried player on the team, after Ruth and Pennock, at $13,500.
    Shocker pitched thirteen years in the major leagues and never had a losing season. In 1927 he had a record of 18 wins and 6 losses. He had the second best winning percentage in the league, second fewest walks per batter faced, and third best earned-run average. What is truly extraordinary about all this is that he was dying as he did it. Shocker lived with a heart condition so severe that he had to sleep sitting up. (Some books say standing up, but that seems unlikely.) Photographs of him from 1927 show an ashen figure looking at least ten years more than his age. By the early autumn, he would be too ill to keep his place in the starting rotation. Within a year he would be dead.
     
    Herb Pennock , pitcher, came from a wealthy Quaker family in Philadelphia and was known to his teammates as the Squire ofKennett Square. In the off season he hunted foxes, bred chrysanthemums and collected antiques. A left-hander, he spent twenty-two years in baseball, but by 1927 he was coming to the end of his career. After a game, he was often so sore that he couldn’t raise his arm to comb his own hair. In 1927, Pennock was the second highest paid player on the team with a salary of $17,500. He was later elected to the Hall of Fame.
     
    Wilcy Moore , pitcher, was the most cheerfully improbable member of the team. A rookie, he was at least thirty years old, though possibly considerably older. No one knew and he wouldn’t say. A farm boy from Hollis, Oklahoma, he had been a journeyman pitcher in the minor leagues for years, but in 1925 he broke his wrist and that somehow changed his delivery for the better. Although he occasionally started (as on the Fourth of July), he served mostly as the team ‘fireman’ – a relief pitcher who came in and closed down the opposition with men on base and the situation precarious. The team called him Doc because he specialized ‘in treating ailing ballgames’, as one reporter put it. In 1927 he had an incomparably good year – the only one he would ever have.
     
    Tony Lazzeri , second baseman and shortstop. (A shortstop is a fielder who stands between second and third base.) Although 1927 was only his second season, he was already considered possibly the best middle infielder in the majors. Though he weighed only 165 pounds, Lazzeri was a formidable slugger. He hit 60 home runs and had 222 runs batted in for Salt Lake City in the minor Pacific Coast League in 1925 before breaking into the majors with the Yankees in 1926.
    Lazzeri was a particular hero to Italian-Americans. It is a little surprising to think of Italians as rarities in professional baseball, but in 1927 they were. Italians were associated in the popular mind either with gangsters like Al Capone or anarchists like Sacco and Vanzetti, so an Italian who did well at the most American of sportswas treated with almost godlike reverence in the Italian community. Lazzeri’s great secret was that he had epilepsy – this at a time when epileptics were still frequently detained in institutions – but in fourteen years in the majors he never had a seizure on the field. He was also a future Hall of Famer.
     
    Bob Meusel , left fielder. Known as ‘Silent Bob’, he often went days without speaking and was aloof even with his own teammates. He never acknowledged the cheers of the fans and seemed impervious to both praise and criticism. Meusel had a career year in 1927, batting .337 with 174 hits and 103 runs batted in. He and Ruth got along very well, largely because Meusel liked to party. He just partied in silence.
     
    Earle Combs , centre fielder, was quiet and amiable. He had been a country schoolteacher in Kentucky before he came to professional baseball. He didn’t