88 Years Ago Last Week

My apologies for not having the next to final post of this series up in a more timely manner last week.

To bring you up to speed - in the fall of 1934, the Chatham All Stars made history when they participated in the Ontario Baseball Amateur Association’s Intermediate B playdowns.

Fighting hostile fans, wildly inconsistent umpiring, and white teams that played every game against them like a Death Match, the Stars won three best of three series for the right to advance to the final. Their opponent, the Penetanguishene Rangers (not the Sailors or Shipbuilders, as has been written elsewhere - anyone with even a cursory knowledge of Ontario history would know that Collingwood, further along the Georgian Bay shoreline, had a lengthy history of shipbuilding), were led by future MLB star Phil Marchildon.

The teams split the first two games in a series that was marked by controversy before the first pitch was even thrown. The two sides were locked into a bitter debate about where and when the games - played after Canadian Thanksgiving, with winter lurking in the background - would take place. Chatham took the first game 4-2 in Penetang, but that contest started under a dark cloud, as the visitors claimed they were denied hotel rooms at the town’s small inn, and had to stay a short distance away in nearby Midland. Penetang won the second contest 10-9, a wild affair that saw an angry crowd spill onto the field in the bottom of the 9th inning, upset with a Chatham baserunner ruled out (later overturned) trying to steal 3rd with two out. An irate Chatham fan took a swing at - and connected - the unfortunate base umpire before order was restored.

As befitting the tone of the whole series, the two teams could not agree on the date and location of the deciding game. After the third game, played on a Thursday (October 19th), Chatham wanted the game played on Saturday, so more fans could attend. Penetang, wanting to give Marchildon - who had pitched every inning of their playoff run, beginning with their North Simcoe League playoffs in late August - a few days’ rest, and lobbied for Monday. Then there was the site of the game. Under the custom of the day, it was to be played at a neutral site, preferably one that was an equal distance drive for both teams. Chatham preferred Guelph, while Penetang wanted nearby Galt, where they were assured a large gate. The OBAA, as a compromise, chose Penetang’s date, and Chatham’s location. So, the final contest was to be played on October 22nd in the Royal City.

What was supposed to be the deciding game was played under sloppy conditions. After mild fall temperatures the week before, single digit C (sub 50 F) temperatures moved in for the weekend, and over 25mm (1”) of rain fell before Monday morning. The game didn’t start, for some reason, until 2 pm in an era when Daylight Savings Time began a month earlier than it does now.

With Penetang the home team after winning the pre-game coin flip, Chatham struck for a run in the top of the 1st; Penetang responded with a run in the last of the 3rd. Chatham took the lead with a tally in the 6th, and with the game heading into the last of the 8th, it looked like the lead might hold up. But the home side answered with a run in their half, and after neither side could score in the 9th, the game was off to extra innings.

As I wrote in a previous post, there was no night amateur baseball in Ontario. The International League’s Toronto Maple Leafs, in the face of declining Depression attendance, played ten games under the lights that year with resounding success, and just a year later, the National League’s Cincinnati Reds would become the first MLB team to play floodlit fixtures. But sandlot ball in Ontario was well over a decade away from playing night games.

The two clubs couldn’t score in the 10th, but Chatham did push a run across in the top of the 11th, but as the Chatham Daily News wrote, the team opted for more:

 …with darkness falling fast, elected to go out after more, and that prolonged the game to such an extent that there was not enough light for the Penetang half of the round.

With one out and no runners on in the home half of the 11th, the game was called on account of darkness. The Chatham side erupted. The umpires, reportedly, got in their cars immediately after the call and drove away. Under the rules of the day, the score reverted to the last complete inning, meaning the game was tied, and a replay was to be played.

So much controversy has arisen in the aftermath of that game, and sometimes it’s hard to seperate fact from fiction. Was there plenty of daylight left to finish the inning? That’s hard to say, but the sun certainly wasn’t still shining (if it shone at all that day), as one account has claimed. While the score was only 2-2, it was a long game - even accounting for the quick pace of games in that era, the two clubs combined over ten innings for 11 hits, 9 errors and as many walks, and 31 strikeouts. That’s a lot of baserunners, and quite a few pitches. With the sun setting in Guelph at about 5:30 pm, it’s not unrealistic to think that daylight must have been a factor.

This is such a controversial subject for some, and it’s understandable for the Chatham team and their fans then and now to feel that they were robbed. There is one claim that has emerged that I have to refute - that the Penetang side was “heavily favoured to win the series” (I’ve found no such documentation to support that), and that the umpires were biased on Penetang’s behalf. If such were the case, I find it odd that the home plate ump didn’t give Marchildon a better strike zone - he issued a total of six walks on the day.

I’ll finish this all off with one more post about that replayed game, but in the meantime, if you would like to learn more about this series - and trust me, I do into considerably more depth about it - please head on over to Amazon and get yourself a copy of “On Account of Darkness: the Summer Ontario Baseball Broke the Colour Barrier.”