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THE CHALMERS SCANDAL
Good evening. This is Dead Legends. The daily newsletter that loves baseball as much as Turk Wendell loved black licorice.
Let’s dive in.
Today’s story is about the scandal that birthed the MVP award.
The man behind it all was Hugh Chalmers.
Hugh was the President of the the Chalmers Auto Company, and he was known for his marketing genius.
He was kinda like the Mattress Mack of the early 1900’s.
One day, Chalmer’s came up with another bright idea.
Before the 1910 season, Hugh announced to the world that he would award a Model 30 to the “champion batsmen of the National and American leagues for the season.”
Pretty sick prize if you ask me:
Winning a batting title was also one of the most prestigious individual accomplishments in professional sports at this time.
The AL batting race turned out to be a heated competition between Nap Lajoie and Ty Cobb.
Between the two of them, they had seven batting titles and two Triple Crowns.
Lajoie secured an early season lead, but gradually eased off the gas and Cobb caught up as the year went on.
The Georgia Peach put together a hit streak in September, which moved him slightly ahead going into the final games of the season.
The Tigers were a lost cause at that point, so Cobb benched himself for the final two games of the season.
Entering the final day of the season, Lajoie had 219 hits in 583 at bats (.376).
He trailed Cobb by six or seven points in average.
The leagues didn’t provide daily statistics in those days, so the newspapers had to make their best guess based on their own running tallies.
It was often months before the official league numbers were released.
The point is, Lajoie basically needed a miracle.
Cleveland closed its season with a double header against the St. Louis Browns, managed by Jack O’Connor.
O’Connor hated Cobb.
He instructed Browns third baseman Red Corriden to play deep all day so that any ball Lajoie bunted down the third base line would result in a hit.
That’s exactly what Lajoie did, going 8-for-8, with seven of the hits being bunt singles.
In his ninth plate appearance, Lajoie reached on an error, which caused him to fall short.
The final tally, at the time, was Cobb .385, Lajoie, .384.
Later, it was revealed that Browns scout, Harry Howell, attempted to bribe the official scorer into changing the error to a base hit, giving Lajoie a nine-for-nine day, but the scorer refused.
Some sources had Lajoie beating Cobb by a point; others had Cobb just barely edging Lajoie.
After a brief “investigation”, American League President, Ban Johnson, declared Cobb the official winner of the batting championship.
Johnson ordered Browns President Robert Lee Hedges to fire O’Connor and Howell; neither worked in baseball ever again.
It was determined that Lajoie was not in on O'Connor and Howell's plan, and thus he was not punished.
The showman that he was, Chalmers gave cars to both Cobb and Lajoie.
While the press and many fans were outraged about the lack of integrity and sportsmanship involved with the whole fiasco, Chalmers considered the award a huge success.
The spectacle of the batting title race and the scandalous finale generated a ton of press.
For just a few cars, Chalmers received millions of dollars in publicity.
The following season, he broadened the parameters of the award and created a “Chalmers Commission” (comprised of baseball writers from each major league city) to choose the player deemed “most useful to his club.”
The MVP award was born.
He ran the promotion for another three seasons until 1914, but was never able to recreate the magic of the 1910 campaign, so they discontinued the campaign.
It would be nearly a decade before one of the major leagues brought back an award for individual player achievement, but the Chalmers award was the first of it’s kind.
The Chalmers Trophy established baseball writers as the arbiter of player value.
It used a weighted point system to rank players, and in decoupling the prize from statistical benchmarks (such as a batting title), it clearly established that value was a judgement call.
For what it’s worth, about 70 years after this incident, a baseball statistician named Pete Palmer was going over the old box scores and discovered a discrepancy.
One of the 1910 Detroit Tigers box scores was counted twice in official records, which resulted in Cobb being given an extra 2-for-3 day, which raised his average.
Instead of a .385, he should’ve finished with a .383. Which would’ve made Lajoie the sole batting champion.
If you forget about the cheating part of course.
BELIEVE THE HYPE
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Our friends at The Hype Report drop a wonderful newsletter once a week that keeps you up to date on the latest and greatest from the industry.
For example, the latest edition from Sunday had a featured story about Andre Iguodala, his new VC fund, and some of the investments he’s making - pretty interesting stuff.
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STRANGE NAMES
If you're just joining us, we play this game every day where we try to find the weirdest names throughout baseball history.
Why?
Don't ask us, it's just something we like to do.
If you've been rocking with us for awhile now, you know what time it is.
Today's winner is:
Most of you probably remember Chili, bro used to drop bombs.
He's also pretty underrated.
Davis was a key part of the Twins team that won the World Series in '91 as well as the Yankee teams that won championships in '98 and '99.
He's not going to be in the Hall of Fame by any stretch of the imagination, but there's one good reason Chili Davis always had a spot on the team.
With a .360 lifetime OBP, they'll always find a spot for you.
THE DEAD LEGENDS ARCHIVE
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