October 5, 1941: The Mickey Owen Game

October 5, 1941: Game 4 of the World Series at Ebbets Field in Brooklyn. It made the home fans shudder. I read an interview once, with a Brooklyn Dodger fan, whose name I've forgotten, citing a far more important, and more traumatic, event that happened just 63 days (9 weeks) later: "I was there. I remember that like I remember Pearl Harbor."

The Dodgers had opened the season with a lot of hope. They hadn't won a National League Pennant since 1920, and hadn't been in a Pennant race since 1924. But they had been rebuilt, under the auspices of team president Larry MacPhail. He had renovated Ebbets Field, hired Walter "Red" Barber as radio broadcaster, traded for shortstop Leo Durocher, made Durocher the manager, and made other key transactions, including trading for Durocher's replacement as shortstop, Harold "Pee Wee" Reese.

After going 62-91 in the last pre-MacPhail season, 1937, the Dodgers improved to 69-80 in 1938. In 1939, they improved to 84-69, 3rd place, but still 12 1/2 games behind the Pennant-winning Cincinnati Reds. In 1940, they were 88-65, 2nd place, but still 12 games behind the Pennant-winning Reds.

Still, hopes were high for 1941. From April 18 to 30, the Dodgers went 13-1. They ended the month in 1st place by 1 game. From May 6 to 14, they rattled off a 7-game winning streak. From May 23 through June 1, they won 9 straight. They were tied for 1st with the St. Louis Cardinals, with the next-closest team, the Giants, being 8 games behind. From June 19 to July 11, they won 15 out of 19 decisions (plus a game that was called due to rain while tied) through July 11.

They went 9-1 from July 31 through August 11. But the Cards stayed hot, too, so, by that date, the teams were tied for 1st. As late as September 3, the teams were tied for 1st. The Dodgers got hot one more time, going 13-6 from September 6 to 24. This run included a 10-inning win at home to the Giants on the 7th, an 11-inning win away to the Cards on the 11th, and 4 runs in the top of the 17th to beat the defending World Champion Reds.

On September 25, the Dodgers clinched the Pennant when Whitlow Wyatt pitched a shutout for his 22nd win of the season, and was backed by a home run by Pete Reiser. The Dodgers won, 6-0.

The Dodgers and their fans were feeling particularly potent. They were convinced that they would beat the New York Yankees in the World Series and take over New York.

*

October 1, 1941, a Wednesday: Game 1 of the World Series was played at Yankee Stadium. Durocher surprised everyone by choosing Curt Davis as his starting pitcher. He later admitted he messed up the Dodgers' rotation for the Series, one of the few times Leo the Lip admitteda mistake, rather than blaming someone else.

In hindsight, while the rotation was all out of whack, Davis pitched fairly well. But a home run by Joe Gordon and the pitching of Charles "Red" Ruffing gave the Yankees a 3-2 win.

October 2, 1941, a Thursday: Game 2 at Yankee Stadium. The Yankees took a 2-0 lead in the 3rd, but the Dodgers tied the game in the 5th, and Dolph Camilli's single in the 6th won it, 3-2.

October 3, 1941, a Friday: The Maltese Falcon premieres, starring Humphrey Bogart as San Francisco private investigator Sam Spade. If "Bogie" wasn't already a legend, he certainly became one with this film. It was the 3rd film version of Dashiell Hammett's mystery novel, following the 1931 film of the same title (with Ricardo Cortez as Spade) and the 1936 film Satan Met a Lady (Warren William). 

Ernest Evans was born. He would become known as Chubby Checker, the man who popularized (though did not create, nor write the song about) the dance craze The Twist.

Given the proximity of the teams, a travel day wasn't necessary for the World Series, but it got one, anyway.

October 4, 1941, a Saturday: This was the birthdate of journalist Roy Blount Jr., horror novelist Anne Rice, and Elizabeth Eckford of the Little Rock Nine, and Anne Rice.

Game 3 of the World Series is played at Ebbets Field. The game is scoreless in the 7th inning, with Fred Fitzsimmons throwing goose eggs for the Brooklyn team, and Marius Russo doing so for the Bronx outfit. Russo comes to bat, and launches a line drive off Fat Freddie's kneecap. The ball caroms to shortstop Reese, who throws Russo out to the end inning.

On the official World Series highlight film, it's not clear how bad the injury is. Fitzsimmons is shown limping off the field under his own power -- probably a good thing, since he would have been pretty hard to carry off with all that weight. But the film is misleading: It turns out that the kneecap is broken.

Once an All-Star for the Giants, Fitzsimmons seemed to specialize in beating the Dodgers. But in 1937, a slow start led the Giants to trade him to the Dodgers, a big mistake. He was welcomed by the Flatbush Faithful, and they wouldn't have won the Pennant without him. Durocher said, "I wish we had 9 guys like Fitz. We'd never lose."

But now, he was permanently injured. At age 41, he would pitch just 1 game in 1942, and 9 more in 1943, before accepting his injury and retiring to the coaching ranks. He also ran a popular bowling alley in Brooklyn for many years.

Durocher was forced to bring Hugh Casey in to pitch the top of the 8th. The 1st relief pitcher to be called "The Fireman," because he "put out fires," he got the 1st out, but allowed 4 straight singles, scoring 2 runs. Russo allowed a double to Fred "Dixie" Walker and a single to Reese, but hung on to for a complete-game 2-1 win. The Yankees now led, 2 games to 1.

October 5, 1941, a Sunday. This was also the day of the Berdychiv Massacre, when Nazi Germany's Gestapo killed 38,000 Jews in Ukraine. I have a separate entry for that event.

Arnold Malcolm Owen -- sometimes incorrectly listed as "Mickey Owens," but there was never an S on the end -- was a 4-time National League All-Star as catcher for the Dodgers, was elected a County Sheriff, and ran the Mickey Owen Baseball School. For the last 64 years of his life, he was decent enough to field questions about the one part of his life that everyone seems to remember.

In Game 4 of the World Series at Ebbets Field, Charlie Keller of the Yankees singled home a run off Kirby Higbe of the Dodgers in the 1st inning. In the top of the 4th, Johnny Sturm singled home 2 runs to make it 3-0 Yankees.

But in the bottom of the 4th, the Dodgers closed to within 3-2 when Jimmy Wasdell doubled home 2 men that Atley Donald had walked. In the 5th, Reiser hit a home run to give the Dodgers a 4-3 lead.

Reiser was the NL's batting champion that season. The Cardinals had been scouting him since he was 12 years old. He was so talented that Durocher, later to manage the Giants and thus manager Willie Mays, said that Reiser might have been better. But he ended up crashing into outfield walls to make catches, much like Lenny Dykstra in the 1980s and '90s. And when Reiser did it, those walls were not padded. Injuries caught up with him, and he was never able to live up to his Hall of Fame-level talent.

The 4-3 Dodger lead held up until the top of the 9th. Casey got the 1st 2 outs. Tommy Henrich came to the plate as the Yankees' last hope. Casey got 2 strikes on him. Then he threw…

Casey told the press it was a curveball. Owen also said it was a curve, which was what he had signaled for. Henrich called it "the sharpest-breaking curveball that Hugh Casey ever threw." But many observers, including DiMaggio, and the Yankees' rookie shortstop, Phil Rizzuto, said that they thought it was a spitball.

Henrich swung and missed. Strike 3. Ballgame over. Dodgers win, and the World Series is tied at 2 games apiece.

Except… Owen didn't catch the 3rd strike! The ball tailed away from him, as spitballs have been known to do, and he couldn't hold onto it. It rolled all the way to the screen. Henrich saw this, and ran to 1st, and Owen didn't even have time to get off a throw.

He later recalled: "It wasn't a strike. It was a low inside curve that I should have had. But I guess the ball struck my glove, and by the time I got hold of it, I couldn't have thrown anybody out at first. It was an error."

It is the most famous passed ball in baseball history, but if it was a spitball, which was and remains an illegal pitch anyway, then it should, instead, have been credited as a wild pitch, and be the most famous one of those, and Casey, rather than Owen, should be faulted.

No matter. Casey only needed to get 1 more out. Even if Henrich represented the tying run and the next batter represented the winning run. Just 1 more out.

The batter was DiMaggio. Uh-oh, you don't give the Yankee Clipper a written invitation to keep a game alive. Especially not in 1941, when he had become the most celebrated athlete in America, ahead of Ted Williams; ahead of football stars Sammy Baugh, Sid Luckman and Don Hutson; ahead of even the Heavyweight Champion of the World, Joe Louis.

DiMaggio singled to left. Now the tying run was on 2nd, the potential winning run on 1st. But there were still 2 outs. If Casey could get the next batter, the game would still end, however precariously, with a Dodger victory.

The batter was Keller. At this point in his career, before a back injury curtailed it, he looked like he was headed to the Hall of Fame. And he did nothing to dispel that in this at-bat: He rocketed a Casey delivery off the right-field wall, and Henrich and DiMaggio scored.

Keller would later say, "When I got to 2nd base, you could have heard a pin drop in Ebbets Field." The noisiest, most raucous ballpark of his time had been stunned into silence.

The Yankees scored 2 more runs in the inning, and won 7-4. They now led 3 games to 1.

*

As I said, October 5, 1941 was a Sunday. There were NFL "Scores On This Historic Day":

* The football version of the New York Giants beat the Pittsburgh Steelers, 37-10 at Forbes Field in Pittsburgh.

* The football version of the Brooklyn Dodgers lost to the Washington Redskins, 3-0 at Griffith Stadium in Washington.

* The Chicago Bears beat the Cleveland Rams, 48-21 at Cleveland Municipal Stadium. (The Rams moved to Los Angeles in 1946.)

* The Green Bay Packers beat the Chicago Cardinals, 14-13 at the Dairy Bowl in the Milwaukee suburb of West Allis, Wisconsin. The Dairy Bowl was a football stadium built in the infield of a speedway, now known as the Milwaukee Mile, at the Wisconsin State Fair Park.

* And the Philadelphia Eagles and the Detroit Lions had the week off.

October 6, 1941, a Monday. Were the Dodgers rattled by their 9th inning collapse of the day before? Maybe. In the top of the 2nd, Wyatt walked Keller, gave up a single to Bill Dickey that got Keller to 3rd, uncorked a wild pitch that scored Keller and got Dickey to 3rd, and gave up a single to Joe Gordon that scored Dickey.

Dem Bums did have their chances to bounce back. In the bottom of the 3rd, Wyatt helped his own cause with a double down the left-field line off his opposite number, Ernie "Tiny" Bonham. After getting Walker to fly out, Bonham gave up a hit to Lew Riggs, and Reiser hit a sacrifice fly to get Wyatt home. The next batter was Dolph Camilli, who would be named the NL's Most Valuable Player. But Bonham struck him out to end the threat. It was still 2-1 Yankees.

Henrich, who would be nicknamed "Old Reliable" by Yankee broadcaster Mel Allen, hit a home run in the top of the 5th, and that would be all the scoring in the ballgame. Bonham went the distance for the Bronx Bombers, getting the last out when Wasdell flied out to DiMaggio in center field. Yankees 3, Dodgers 1. The Yankees had won their 9th World Series, already more than any other team. It was the 1st time, though, that they had faced the Dodgers in a World Series. There would be more.

The Brooklyn Eagle newspaper printed a big headline, reading, "WAIT TILL NEXT YEAR." The next year, the Dodgers won 104 games, but the Cardinals won 106. The Dodgers would lose the World Series to the Yankees again in 1947, 1949, 1952 and 1953, before finally winning it in 1955. The Eagle had closed earlier that year, so it was up to the New York Daily News to print the obvious headline on October 5, 1955, the day after the great triumph: "THIS IS NEXT YEAR!"

Despite America's entry into World War II, Owen never went into the service. I wonder if some Dodger fans said, "Mickey Owen is such a bum, even the Army don't want him!"

The Dodgers didn't win the Pennant again until 1947, the rookie year of Jackie Robinson. It was a last gasp for the holdovers from 1941, including Dixie Walker, who led the Southerner faction of the team that had initially opposed Robinson's signing. After the clincher, he said that Robinson had more to do with the team winning than anyone, "with the exception of Bruce Edwards." Edwards had succeeded Owen as the Dodgers' starting catcher. He wasn't a great player, but he was reliable, never committing the kind of passed ball that Owen did.

Edwards was succeeded the next year by Negro League star Roy Campanella, who became a Hall-of-Famer and a 3-time Most Valuable Player. And yet, I wonder if a lot of the accolades that would later come his way were due to what became known as "Mickey Owen's Muff." That Campy might have been cheered not just for what he was, a fantastic player and a good guy, but for what he wasn't: Owen.

It's not fair to Owen. He was widely respected prior to the '41 Series, and most Dodger fans didn't go on to hate him. Certainly, he escaped the scorn that was heaped on Ralph Branca after 1951. And neither one of them got the kind of treatment that Bill Buckner got from Boston fans after 1986.

Which is a good thing. Nobody deserves that. Well, maybe not nobody… But certainly not Buckner, nor Branca, nor Owen.

If Owen had hung onto the ball, and the Dodgers had won, tying the Series, what kind of difference would it have made? Probably not much: The Yankees won Game 5 anyway, and would've needed to win Game 6 or Game 7 at Yankee Stadium. They still would have won. Pretty much the only things that would have changed would have been the reputations of Owen and Casey, for the better.

Owen died on July 13, 2005, in his home town of Mount Vernon, Missouri. He was 89. It's a little ironic that he and Branca both came from towns named Mount Vernon, in Branca's case the one in Westchester County, New York.

Henrich died on December 1, 2009, as the last survivor of this game. He was also the last surviving person who had been a teammate of Lou Gehrig. Herman Franks, who later helped steal a Pennant from the Dodgers as a 1951 New York Giant, had died earlier in 2009 as the last surviving '41 Dodger.

Today, the Sandlot Baseball Camp, formerly the Mickey Owen Baseball School, is still open on State Highway 96 in Miller, Missouri, in the southwestern part of the State, in the Ozark Mountains, about halfway between Joplin and Springfield -- 238 miles southwest of St. Louis, 171 miles southeast of Kansas City, 64 miles northwest of Branson (the "Redneck Vegas"), and 80 miles northeast of Mickey Mantle's hometown of Commerce, Oklahoma.

October 3, 1947: The Cookie Game

October 3, 1947: The New York Yankees' Floyd "Bill" Bevens takes a no-hitter into the bottom of the 9th inning against the Brooklyn Dodgers in Game 4 of the World Series. He gets to within 1 out of the 1st World Series (and thus the 1st postseason) no-hitter ever. But 10 walks put him in danger, including putting the tying and winning runs on base -- Al Gionfriddo and Eddie Miksis, respectively.

Dodger manager Burt Shotton send Harry "Cookie" Lavagetto up to pinch-hit for Eddie Stanky. Lavagetto hits a double-off the right-field wall at Ebbets Field, which the Yankees' Tommy Henrich can't catch, and the Dodgers win, 3-2.

Red Barber, calling the game for the Dodgers' radio station, WMGM, AM 1050, watched the hit, and the play, and the pounding on the back Lavagetto got from his teammates, and said this, concluding with one of his Southern expressions:

Gionfriddo walks off second, Miksis off first. They're both ready to go on anything. Two men out, last of the ninth. The pitch, swung on, there's a drive hit out toward the right field corner. Henrich is going back. He can't get it! It's off the wall for a base hit! Here comes the tying run, and here comes the winning run! Friends, they're killin' Lavagetto, his own teammates, they're beatin' him to pieces, and it's taking a police escort to get Lavagetto away from the Dodgers! Well, I'll be a suck-egg mule!

Hugh Casey, the Dodgers' closer throughout the 1940s, and the losing pitcher in The Mickey Owen Game in 1941, is the winning pitcher this time.

Instead of the Yankees being up 3 games to 1, the Series is now tied. This becomes known as The Cookie Game.

Two days later, Al Gionfriddo will rob Joe DiMaggio with an amazing catch to preserve the Dodgers’ lead in Game 6, but the Yankees win the Series in Game 7. By a weird twist of fate, neither Bevens, nor Lavagetto, nor Gionfriddo will ever play again.

Floyd Clifford Bevens (1916-1991) was called "Bill" because, in a minor-league game, he caught a popup after it bounced off the bill of his cap. He said, "I'm lucky it didn't bounce off my nose!"

Harry Arthur Lavagetto (1912-1990) was called "Cookie" because he was signed by Victor Devincenzi, the owner of the Pacific Coast League's Oakland Oaks, whose nickname was Cookie. The Oaks played from 1903 to 1955, winning Pennants in 1912, 1926, 1948 (managed by Casey Stengel, and with Hall of Fame catcher Ernie Lombardi, and 2nd baseman and future manager Billy Martin) and 1954.

A 3rd baseman, Cookie was a fan favorite in Brooklyn, especially in the Pennant season of 1941. A Dodger fan and commercial artist known as Fierce Jack Pierce would buy tickets for 2 seats, one for himself, and one for a helium tank. With the tank, he would blow up balloons with "COOKIE" written on them every time Lavagetto came to the plate, chanting, "Coooo-kie! Coooo-kie!" He was probably not the inspiration for the Sesame Street character Cookie Monster.

October 3, 1947 was a Friday. Elsewhere in Brooklyn, Fred DeLuca, who went on to found the Subway fast-food franchise, was born.

It was too soon for the NBA and the NHL. And the NFL played no games. But there was a game in the All-America Football Conference, which challenged the NFL from 1946 to 1949. The Brooklyn Dodgers beat the Chicago Rockets 35-31 at Soldier Field in Chicago.

Mickey Colmer scored 3 touchdowns for the football version of "Dem Bums," who were coached by former Washington Redskin Hall-of-Fame running back Cliff Battles. The Rockets were coached by Jim Crowley, one of "The Four Horsemen of Notre Dame" in 1924. But their best player, receiver Elroy Hirsch, had suffered a fractured skull earlier in the season, and was out for the season. This gave "Crazy Legs" another nickname, "The Highest-Paid Waterboy In Football." He would later become a Hall-of-Famer for the Los Angeles Rams.

August 26, 1939: The 1st Baseball Game On Television

August 26, 1939: The Brooklyn Dodgers host a doubleheader against the Cincinnati Reds at Ebbets Field. The 2nd game is the 1st Major League Baseball game ever broadcast on television.

In 1935, Larry MacPhail was the general manager of the Reds. He made them the 1st MLB team ever to play under lights. He also put their games on regular radio for the first time, and his broadcaster was Walter "Red" Barber, a rural Floridian who adjusted well to a big city.

In 1938, these two redheads adjusted to a much larger city, New York, when MacPhail was named general manager of the Dodgers, and brought Barber with him, breaking the "gentlemen's agreement" that none of the City's teams would broadcast their games on radio.

MacPhail also made Ebbets Field the 1st of the City's 3 ballparks to put up lights. It may not have been a coincidence that the 1st night game there was against the Reds. Fortunately for baseball history, but unfortunately for the Dodgers, this game, on June 15, 1938, was the game in which the Reds' Johnny Vander Meer became the only man, to this date, to pitch back-to-back no-hitters in the major leagues.

On April 30, 1939, the New York World's Fair got underway in Flushing Meadow-Corona Park in Queens, across Roosevelt Avenue from where Shea Stadium and Citi Field would later be constructed. The opening, with a dedication by President Franklin D. Roosevelt, himself a New Yorker, was the 1st broadcast of W2XBS, New York's 1st television station.

Run by RCA, the Radio Corporation of America, W2XBS was going to be the centerpiece of a new TV network, to go along with the radio network they had established in 1926, the National Broadcasting Company, NBC. Now, it was going to broadcast baseball, and Red Barber was going to call the action.

But only for the 2nd game. The 1st game was won by the Reds, 5-2. This was not surprising: The Dodgers were a team on the rise, and would finish 3rd in the National League that season; but the Reds went on to win the next 2 NL Pennants.

Bucky Walters, the Reds' ace, won his 21st game of the season, outpitching Luke Hamlin. Walters would finish the season 27-11. If there had been a Cy Young Award back then, he surely would have won the NL's edition that season. Hamlin didn't pitch badly, but was undone by 2 errors by his teammates.

Between games, the telecast began. Barber gave a recap of the opener, and conducted interviews, including with Dodger manager and shortstop Leo Durocher. It was the beginning of a long and productive relationship between Barber and television -- and one between Durocher and television, as "Leo the Lip" used the medium, as he had already used print and radio, for his own cynical ends.

The 2nd game was the rescheduling of a game originally set for June 12, postponed not due to weather, but because it was the Opening Day of the Baseball Hall of Fame. Hugh Casey, better known as a reliever, started for Brooklyn, and Johnny Niggeling did so for Cincinnati. As the home team's starting pitcher, Casey thus became the 1st Major League Baseball player to play on television.

The Dodgers got on the board in the bottom of the 2nd inning. Art Parks led off with a single, and Dolph Camilli hit a home run. They broke the game open in the 3rd: Pete Coscarart led off with a single, and Cookie Lavagetto doubled him home. Dixie Walker grounded out, but Parks singled again, and Camilli doubled him home. Al Todd drew a walk, and Ernie Koy singled home Parks and Camilli. The Dodgers led 6-0.

The Reds reached Casey for a run in the 8th, but that was it: The Dodgers won 6-1, and the few hundred people capable of watching this game outside Ebbets Field (where a full house of 33,535 paid to watch) got their money's worth.

Sadly, it appears that no record of this game survives: Not the original TV broadcast, not a radio recording, not a film. The photograph at the top of the page is allegedly from that game.

Later in 1939, W2XBS would also become the 1st TV station in the world to broadcast college football and the 1st to broadcast pro football. In 1940, it became the 1st American TV station to broadcast a National Hockey League game (a British station had telecast a hockey game in London in 1938), the 1st to broadcast a religious service (Easter Mass from St. Patrick's Cathedral, a short walk from the RCA Building at Rockefeller Center), and the 1st to broadcast a political convention (the Republican Convention in Philadelphia, nominating Wendell Willkie to run against FDR, unsuccessfully as it turned out).

On July 1, 1941, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) gave licenses to W2XBS and W2XAB, which was owned by the Columbia Broadcasting Service, CBS. Doing so on the same day meant that neither could claim to be the 1st. W2XBS became WNBT, broadcasting on Channel 4. They changed their call letters to WRCA in 1954, and to WNBC in 1960. W2XAB broadcast on Channel 2, and became WCBW, and then WCBS in 1946.

The other New York VHF TV stations:

* Channel 5 went on the air on May 2, 1944, on the DuMont Network, with its call letters being WABD, for its founder, Allen B. DuMont, went independent when DuMont folded in 1956, became WNEW in 1958, and WNYW when it became a Fox station in 1956.

* Channel 13 went on the air on May 13, 1948, as an independent station, WATV. It became WNTA in 1958, and WNDT in 1962. That year, it joined National Educational Television (NET), America's 1st "public television" network. In 1970, NET became the Public Broadcasting Service, PBS, and the station's call letters were changed to WNET. Why not WPBS? Those call letters were not already being used, but were subsequently given to a PBS station in Watertown, New York, on the St. Lawrence River, Channel 16.

* Channel 11 went on the air on June 15, 1948, as WPIX, the call letters referring to its ownership by the New York Daily News, "New York's Picture Newspaper." This was not unusual: Many radio TV stations were founded by newspapers. WPIX continues to use the Daily News Building on East 42nd Street as its headquarters, even though the paper has moved its offices elsewhere. The station joined Warner Brothers in 1995, becoming part of The WB. When The WB and UPN merged in 2006 to form The CW, WPIX went along with it.

* Channel 7 went on the air on August 10, 1948, as WJZ, an ABC station, becoming WABC in 1953.

* Channel 9 went on the air on October 11, 1949, as WOR, an independent station, becoming WWOR when bought by MCA in 1987, moved to United Paramount Network (UPN) in 1995, and to MyNetwork in 2006, following the WB/UPN merger.

*

August 26, 1939 was a Saturday. It was the off-season for the NFL and the NHL, and the NBA hadn't been founded yet. Here are the other MLB games that were played that day:

* The New York Yankees beat the St. Louis Browns, 6-1 at Sportsman's Park in St. Louis. Irving "Bump" Hadley went the distance. The Yankees hit no home runs, but got 2 hits each from Joe DiMaggio, Red Rolfe, Joe Gordon and Babe Dahlgren, who had replaced Lou Gehrig at 1st base.

* The New York Giants swept a doubleheader from the Pittsburgh Pirates at the Polo Grounds. The Jints won the opener 6-2, and the nightcap 8-0, as Cliff Melton pitched a 3-hit shutout.

* The St. Louis Cardinals swept a doubleheader from the Philadelphia Phillies at Shibe Park in Philadelphia. The Cards won the 1st game 5-0, as Curt Davis allowed 10 hits, but kept the shutout. The Cards won the 2nd game 11-4.

* The Chicago Cubs swept a doubleheader from the Boston Bees at Braves Field in Boston. This was during the stretch when the Braves, trying to change their identity after a horrible 1935 season, changed their name, with their ballpark being nicknamed "The Bee Hive." It didn't take, and they went back to being named the Braves in 1941. Both games in this doubleheader ended 8-1 in the Cubs' favor.

* It was also Chicago beating Boston in the American League, as the Chicago White Sox beat the Boston Red Sox, 5-4 at Comiskey Park in Chicago.

* The Cleveland Indians beat the Philadelphia Athletics, 7-5 at League Park in Cleveland.

* And the Detroit Tigers beat the Washington Senators, 6-3 at Briggs Stadium in Detroit. That ballpark would be renamed Tiger Stadium in 1961.

Also, Arsenal opened what turned out to be their shortest Football League season by drawing with Wolverhampton Wanderers, 2-2 at Molineux Stadium in Wolverhampton, outside Birmingham in England's West Midlands. Two weeks later, the League would suspend play due to the start of World War II.