The Storie of Morrie, or The Rath of Con

One of the fascinating things about researching baseball is that you can look up one thing, go off on a tangent that leads to another, and just lose yourself in the history of the game.

You won’t find Morris “Morrie” Rath on a plaque in Cooperstown, for example, but I found him while I was trying to find out information on Juan Pierre.

Friday night’s RBI single gives Pierre five RBIs in now 224 at-bats. That’s a lot of at-bats to be in single digits, so I looked up the record for fewest RBIs in a season. You’d be surprised sometimes to find how difficult it can be to track down the opposite end of the record book.

I eventually found a reference to Rath and looked up his stat page. In 157 games (I’m assuming some ties) and 591 at-bats, the leadoff-hitting second-baseman drove in nineteen runs for the 1912 White Sox despite 161 hits and a .272 average.

Ninety-two games and a scant 12 RBIs into the following season with a sluggish .200 average, the Sox cut him loose even though he'd stolen 52 bases in under two seasons and finished 1912 eighth in the A.L. in runs scored and first in games played.

Regardless of his impressive numbers (well, some of them, anyway), it took Rath six years to resurface in the big leagues. He was 32 years old when the Cincinnati Reds sold their second-sacker to Brooklyn and brought in Morrie Rath.

For a guy who played one full season, most of two others and parts of six in total to have a footnote in baseball history isn’t rare, but Rath found himself with two footnotes. Two?

If you did the math, you’d notice this puts us at 1919. Based on some strong pitching – 23 shutouts in a shortened 140-game season – the Reds handily won the pennant by nine games and squared up against Rath’s former team. And if you’ve been paying attention and seen Eight Men Out a million times, you know where I’m headed here.

As the Reds’ leadoff hitter, two pitches into the 1919 World Series Sox pitcher Eddie Cicotte sent a message to Arnold Rothstein that the fix was on. Where perhaps a telegram may have sufficed, Cicotte hit Rath in the back with a pitch and one of the ugliest chapters in baseball history had begun.

Rath’s World Series footnote is cemented in history, but let’s just hope Juan Pierre doesn’t take away the other one.

The way things have been going lately, finishing up this column while Pierre was stepping in to lead off the 14th inning in St. Louis Friday night, I thought he might put an exclamation point on it, and a big Cubs win to put some more ground between the Cubbies and the last-place Pirates.

Instead of a home run, Pierre doubled just shy of the warning track, advanced to third on a sac bunt by Neifi Perez and scored on a grounder to first by Todd Walker. Not the Hollywood ending I wanted, but I’ll take it. RBIs are nice, but breaking 14th inning ties on the road against the Cardinals is impressive no matter how you get the job done.

In any case, Cubs win, Cubs win, 5-4 in 14 innings. And that’s all that’s really important in the end no matter how many runs your leadoff hitter drives in.