Vance Wins another Braves Outing; Improves to 3-1

(This is the fifth in a series that celebrates the 100th anniversary of Dazzy Vance’s great 1924 season with the Brooklyn Robins/Dodgers.)

By Glen Sparks

About 20,000 fans filed into Ebbets Field on Sunday, May 4. The men wore suits and bowler hats, and smoked cigars. The ladies wore dresses. Some may have brought along a parasol.

From the main entrance, fans stepped into an 80-foot enclosed circle made of Italian marble.The famous Ebbets Field rotunda also boasted floor tiles that looked like baseball stitching and a chandelier with 12 baseball-bar arms that held 12 baseball-shaped lights. Leaving the rotunda, fans looked out at home plate and saw a lush green diamond.

Vance stood atop the Ebbets Field mound. He was big man at 6-feet-2-inches, 210 pounds and had a rather bulbous nose. His cap hid a shock of thick red hair. He had fair skin.

Like many pitchers from that day, Vance boasted a big leg kick and a long wind-up. As a play-by-play man might say, he kicked and fired. Dazzy, as reported in a 2007 biography, described his pitching style thusly: “I, for one, can’t slow ‘em.” During his early days, he continued, “I noticed the slow ones got picked a lot.”

The Boston Braves were in town. Just a few days earlier, on April 30 at Braves Field, Vance and the  Dodgers won, 6-4, in 11 innings.

Boston took a 2-0 lead in the third inning of the rematch on RBI hits from Stuffy McInnis and ”the ever-adept” Casey Stengel. Brooklyn “wrought vengeance aplenty” by scoring four runs in the fourth. Zack Wheat got things going with a lead-off single against Boston starter Joe Genewich, a 27-year-old right-hander from Elmira, New York. Jack Fournier grounded out before Genewich beaned Milt Stock. Tommy Griffth and Andy High followed with back-to-back RBI singles. Hank DeBerry, Vance’s personal catcher, tripled home two more runs.

The Dodgers scored a solo run in the fifth. Jimmy Johnston and Wheat began the rally by rapping out base hits. Fournier hit into a double play that brought home Johnston. One inning later, a two-run single from Bernie Neis gave Brooklyn a 7-2 lead. Boston closed out the scoring in the seventh. Johnny Cooney and Bill Cunningham started the rally with base hits. McInnis also singled, and Cooney scampered home.

Dazzy scattered 10 hits in gaining his third win against one loss and pitched his fourth straight complete game. He gave up the three earned runs and upped his ERA slightly, from 1.82 to 2.09. Vance struck out eight Braves. Marshall Hunt from the New York Daily News wrote about “the iron arm of Mr. Dazzy Vance” that was “wound and unwound with an artistic motion satisfying the most critical.”  Yes, Vance allowed 10 hits, but, Hunt wrote, he so painstakingly apportioned these throughout the pastime.” The Boston Globe praised Dazzy, “exponent of the smoke ball.”

Brooklyn was now 8-8 on the season, in fourth place.

(Note: The unattributed quotes in this post were taken from Marshall Hunt’s May 5 article in the New York Daily News.)

Leave a comment