Gashouse Gang
The Gashouse Gang was the nickname of the St. Louis Cardinals baseball team that dominated the National League from the late 1920s to the early 1930s.[1] Owing to their success that started in 1926, the Cardinals would win a total of five National League pennants from 1926 to 1934 (nine seasons) while winning three World Series championships (1926, 1931, 1934).
Some baseball writers use the nickname to refer to a multi-year period. For example, Jack Cavanaugh has used the phrase, "the raucous Gas House era in the 1930s."[2]
Background
The team started out in
Overview
The nickname Gashouse Gang, by most accounts, came from the team's generally very shabby appearance and rough-and-tumble tactics. An opponent once stated the Cardinals players usually went into the field in unwashed, dirty, and smelly uniforms, which alone spread horror among their rivals. According to one account,
The team was led by general manager Branch Rickey, playing manager Frankie Frisch and included other stars such as Joe Medwick and Ripper Collins. Many of the players on the Cardinals roster, including the Dean brothers, Bill DeLancey, Pepper Martin, Spud Davis, and Burgess Whitehead, were Southerners or Southwesterners from working-class backgrounds.
The 1930 Cardinals won 92 games. Every player on the 1930 team with 300 or more at-bats hit a batting average of .300 or higher, which was the first and only time in baseball history. They won the pennant by two games, and faced the Philadelphia Athletics in the World Series. In the 1930 World Series, the Cardinals, a high-scoring offense, could only score more than three runs once in the Series, which they lost in six games.[4]
The 1934 team featured five regulars who hit at least .300, a 30-game winner in Dizzy Dean (the last National League pitcher to win 30 games in a single season, and the last pitcher in Major League Baseball to do so until
Aftermath and legacy
While the next couple of years would see the Cardinals play well to their competition, they finished 2nd place four times in the next seven seasons with no pennants. It was a new generation of players alongside the return of Southworth as manager in 1940 that saw the Cardinals rise back up to champions, as they won three World Series titles in five seasons from 1942 to 1946. From the teams of 1926 to 1934, fourteen total individuals who played or managed the Cardinals would receive induction into the National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum: Rogers Hornsby, Grover Cleveland Alexander, Jim Bottomley, Chick Hafey, Jesse Haines, Billy Southworth, Dizzy Dean, Leo Durocher, Frankie Frisch, Joe Medwick, Dazzy Vance, Bill McKechnie, Rabbit Maranville, and Burleigh Grimes.
In popular culture
- Several Cardinal players participated in the informal "Mudcat Band." Lon Warneke played guitar and sang, Pepper Martin played harmonica and guitar, Bill McGee played a fiddle, Bob Weiland blew into a jug, and outfielder Frenchy Bordagaray "played a contraption that included a washboard, a car horn, a whistle, and an electric light." The band wore variants of the Cardinal uniform (with "Mudcats" replacing "Cardinals" on the birds-on-the-bat logo) and played gigs around the Midwest and South on off-days and during the off-season.[2][5]
- In Goliath season 2 episode 3 "Yeah, well, I like to think that we're the Gashouse Gang, – so fuck the Yankees."
- One of the teams in the 1946 Warner Bros. cartoon Baseball Bugs was the "Gashouse Gorillas".
- Country-bluegrass band Old Crow Medicine Show refers to them in the song "Caroline" on their 2008 album Tennessee Pusher.
- In the 1938 George Cukor remake of the 1930 Romantic comedy film Holiday, starring Cary Grant and Katharine Hepburn, Professor Potter (played by Edward Everett Horton) and his wife (played by Jean Dixon) enter a sophisticated and pompous New Year's Eve Party where they feel uncomfortably under dressed and out of place. They escape to the fourth floor where they hear simple music coming from Hepburn's room, and Professor Potter happily says, "It's the Gashouse Gang, darling."
- In 2015, author Carolyn E. Mueller and illustrator Ed Koehler, in association with Reedy Press, LLC published an illustrated book titled "Dizzy Dean and the Gashouse Gang." (ISBN 978-1-68106-002-6) The book showcases the antics of Dizzy and his brother Paul Dean, Joe Medwick, Pepper Martin, player/manager Frankie Frisch, and the 1934 St. Louis Cardinals seasonin their quest to win their third World Series.
See also
References
- ^ "Dizzy, Dazzy and Ducky". thisgreatgame.com. Retrieved March 15, 2011.
- ^ ISBN 978-1-61321-799-3.
- ^ Robinson, Alan (March 30, 2007). "Turn on the lights; party's over as McKechnie Field gets lights". USA Today. Retrieved February 14, 2012.
- ^ "Sparky Adams". baseballbiography.com. Retrieved March 14, 2008.
- ^ The day the Cardinals played in Stamford: Excerpt from Season of '42, Stamford Advocate (Connecticut), Jack Cavanaugh, April 28, 2012.