Hidden Hall of Fame 3: Grover Cleveland Alexander

Though remembered as a drunken master, "Old Pete" was one tough Cornhusker

Occasionally in this series I will come upon a player whose entire history is more fascinating (and, I think, relatively unknown) than a few little factoids here and there. That is definitely the case with Grover Cleveland Alexander. I’d known of his mound feats, and also that he had a bit of a drinking problem, but I had no idea quite how great he was on the mound nor how low he plummeted. Nor that World War I was partially to blame…It’s hard to think of a modern-day analogue. There’s some Dwight Gooden in there, but Gooden did not sustain his excellence for as long as Alexander. A little bit of Mickey Mantle, though the Mick never wound up penniless in the streets. The pitcher they called “Old Pete” lived in the cruel in-between…

One of 13 children born to a Nebraska farm family, Grover Cleveland Alexander was the only one of his siblings so grandly and pointedly named. Thanks to the pressures of farm work, Alexander did not begin his pro career until he was 20 years old. Two years into that career, in 1909, he was beaned by an opposing player while running the bases; an incident so severe, it is said it almost ended his career. Alexander got up off the mat and by 1911 was on the mound for Philadelphia Phillies, just crushing it with his searing fastball, jaw-dropping curve, and laser-guided control over both.

From that season on — one in which his 28 wins set a rookie record that seems likely to stand for quite some time still to come — he was the dominant pitcher in the National League in the teens through 1920, save for the 1918 season, which mainly found him on the Western Front, getting mustard gassed and nearly blown to smithereens by an artillery shell lobbed his way by The Hun.

Below, we see Alexander with the woman he was to marry three times and divorce twice, Aimee Marie Arrant. (Actually, she was the plaintiffs in the divorces; they were wake-up calls Alexander was not capable of heeding.)

The PTS* he picked up in Flanders exacerbated his drinking — despite his endorsement deal with Coca-Cola, he was quite fond of the night life before he ever shipped out — and also worsened his epilepsy. The roar of artillery incoming and outgoing alike partially deafened him, and what seemed at first a minor shrapnel wound to his right ear would bite him in the ass years later. In later life his seizures could be confused with the symptoms of yet another bender, or perhaps concurrent with one.

(*I read somewhere the other day we should drop the “d” from this ailment, as there is nothing “disordered” about lasting stress over surviving combat in World War I or any other war, or going through any other form of deep lasting trauma.)

In any event, “Old Pete” Alexander had two more dominant years left in his right arm and a decade more good ones, though not another multi-year stretch of sustained excellence. Per modern statistics — the WAR ranking — his apex season came in 1920, by which time he was twirling from the mound as a Chicago Cub at the then-brand-spanking-new Wrigley Field.

Year by year he drank more and more and the Cubs slid into their century-long malaise. In 1926, though his pitching was decent enough, Cubs manager Joe McCarthy sold Alexander to the St. Louis Cardinals for the waiver price. “We finished in last place with Alexander last year,” McCarthy reportedly said. “I’d as soon finish last without him this year.”

Alexander’s baseball career, if not his life, would literally have a Hollywood ending. The very year McCarthy gave him the heave-ho from the Cubs, Alexander helped lead the Cardinals to a National League pennant, and then stifled the Ruth-Gehrig Yankees in two starts, winning games two and six along the way. Believing his work to be done there, Alexander celebrated his game six win so thoroughly he was still plastered on arrival at the ballpark for the deciding game the following day, and sure enough, he was called on in the late innings to shut down the Bronx Bombers one more time. He steeled his way through two shutout innings and the Cardinals were world champs for the first of many times.

It was this performance that would spawn a sanitized biopic 26 years later. That would be 1952’s The Winning Team, starring Doris Day as the long-suffering, aptly-named Aimee Arrant Alexander and none other than Ronald Reagan as Alexander. There’s another record that won’t likely be broken: Grover Cleveland Alexander is the only baseball player to be named after one president and portrayed on film by another.

I saw this movie a very long time ago and I remember it had lots of great footage of old long-gone ballparks and baseball….Critical consensus is that it is of its uber-patriotic time but a decent biopic for all that. Alexander had been resting in a Nebraska graveyard for a few years by the time it came out, and Aimee, his widow, served as “technical adviser” to the film, thereby assuring it was told from her point of view and also granting Day top billing over Reagan.

The movie makes it seem like it was happily ever after for Alexander after that but it was anything but. The Cardinals met the Yankees in another World Series a couple of years later and Alexander was absolutely shelled in a Yankee victory. After a sentimental return season in Philadelphia in 1930, Alexander retired and then, and then, well…he started barnstorming with the House of David. (By 1929, Alexander had taken “the cure” to quit drinking six times, per his wife in the proceedings of their first divorce.)

Any of you who are not hardcore baseball historians who have stuck it out this far with this article are in for a treat, because there are few aspects of American history in the early 20th Century as bizarre as the House of David and its baseball teams.

Space simply won’t allow how weird the cult behind these teams were, so let’s keep it simple — the men didn’t cut their hair or shave, and they loved baseball. Alexander, a big shot, was given a dispensation and thereby didn’t have to look like a hippie or prophet when he pitched.

Alexander, left, as player-coach of his House of David squad.

House of David teams were not overwhelmingly racist and so played against, and sometimes mixed with Negro League teams, so in the early years of the Depression, Alexander pitched against Satchel Paige. (Some of you musicians now know the origin of some of Buddy Rich’s tour bus rants against the bearded members of his band.)

Alexander’s House of David career and Prohibition ended simultaneously, and in 1934, he opened a saloon with Hughie Miller, a highly-decorated former Phillie teammate whose diamond dreams ended when his leg was shattered by a bullet in combat in World War I.

I was unable to find the name of this short-lived endeavor, but I did find this clip.

That tavern apparently failed fast, because by late 1937, Alexander was serving as a greeter in Frank Langley’s South St. Louis saloon, located at 4626 Gravois Avenue, in a building that still stands, albeit in disrepair.

He also gave broadcasting a whirl, but it didn’t take. He publicly begged to be hired as a pitching coach, but no club, major or minor league, would have him. And so he just kind of knocked around the midwest for the rest of his life, the headlines getting sadder and sadder.

One found him hospitalized after an auto-pedestrian hit-and-run in Evansville, Indiana; per a 1942 AP item, his right ear, thanks to an infection from that World War I shrapnel wound, was amputated — thereafter, Alexander would appear in public with his head bandaged. A reporter tracked him down to a Springfield, Illinois tavern to get his reaction to his admission to the Baseball Hall of Fame in 1938. Alexander said it did little to raise his spirits or improve his bottom line; he said at the time that while it was an honor, it did nothing to bring him “bread or butter.” The tavern where he worked as a greeter, he insisted, was Hall of Fame enough for him. Alexander told the reporter he’d arrived in the Illinois capital the year before, “flat broke, sick, and discouraged.”

Alexander, looking ill at ease on the back row second from left, pictured with 13 of the earliest Hall of Famers. He is flanked by Honus Wagner (left) and Texan Tris Speaker. To Speaker’s left are Napoleon Lajoie, George Sisler and Walter Johnson. Front row, left to right: Eddie Collins, Babe Ruth, Connie Mack, and Cy Young.

Bar owner Johnny Connors got the legend back on his feet and gave him a job at his bar, “so long as he promised to lay off the hard stuff.”

Evidently he didn’t, because he perhaps hit rock bottom in 1944, when the greatest pitcher in National League history up that point was found wandering the streets of St. Louis in pyjamas and by his own account, penniless. He told police at the time he’d sprung himself from a hospital, for which, probably, one should read as rehab.

He gets harder to track after that….By the mid 1940s, baseball writers had developed a keen since of nostalgia, and often as not, his name comes up in connection with his feats of the past, rather than his contemporary stumbles, and they were many. At some point he sold tickets to a race track and worked as a greeter in a New York “flea circus,” where for money he told and retold the story of how he took down the mighty New York Yankees back in ‘26. (All through his life, he denied being drunk or even hungover when he took the mound that day.)

Mercifully MLB developed a pension fund, and for the last few years of his life, Alexander was drawing $150/monthly; roughly $1500 today, a sum he supplemented by giving paid speeches. (After an epic bender on a 1950 lecture tour, Alexander found himself alone in Cincinnati, having missed the train.) There followed gigs as a security guard and cafe manager, neither of which his then-failing legs could see him through.

Death, in the form of a heart attack, found him in 1950. By then he was living as as a lodger in a rented room in the home of an old friend in St. Paul, Nebraska, a few miles from the farm where he was born.

His image is painted on the St. Paul water tower today, though oddly, he is swinging a bat rather than firing a fastball. Each year on the weekend following the Fourth of July, St. Paul celebrates their illustrious native son.

It wasn’t always such — when he returned home that last time in 1950, the homecoming parades that used to meet him at the railroad depot had fizzled to nothing. So few people greeted him, an editorialist for the local paper saw fit to chastise the entire town for turning its back on their wayward hero.

Alexander was 63 when he died. He was buried with military honors, and the St. Louis Cardinals picked up the tab.

Contrary to popular belief, it’s hard work being a drunk. Harder still to hold a job, hardest of all to maintain the level of mastery Alexander held for the better part of a decade. Add to that his epilepsy and his war wounds — psychic and physical — and that he was able to function at all is praiseworthy. That he was able to claw out a spot as one of Major League Baseball’s all-time greats is astounding.

Epilogue: Alexander had several nicknames. There was “Alexander the Great,” which requires no explanation, and “Pete,” or “Old Pete,” which do. Both come from a once-popular star of silent westerns — one “Alkali Pete.” Per Wikipedia, he earned the nickname from returning to camp during an offseason hunting trip coated in dust, much like the character in those films, and eventually “Alkali” was dropped, and so Alexander became at first Pete and then Old Pete as the years rolled by. (As I type this I wonder if the “alkali” part was inspired by Alexander’s penchant for alcoholism.)

For reasons I can’t fathom, locals in and around St. Paul, Nebraska, knew him as “Dode” Alexander.