Merlke's Boner - 105 Years Later

For those not familiar with baseball history, Merkle's Boner refers to the most infamous error ever committed not just in a baseball game but arguably in any major sporting event. Keith Olbermann took time on his TV show this week to mark the anniversary with a helpful lesson on what happened and why this muff took on a life of its own (hat tip Rob Neyer)




A couple of points Olbermann doesn't bring out that are worth considering:

There were only two umpires working this game. In fact, for most regular season games it would be normal to only have a home plate umpire. Despite all the controversy surrounding this incident, multiple umpires would not be used in regular season games on a normal basis until 1920.

Merkle's mistake was magnified in large part because the stakes were so high. In those days, you didn't have multiple layers of playoffs and a wild-card system that allowed the fourth and fifth worst teams in the league a shot at the championship at the end of the regular season. If you didn't finish first in the league you went home. Thus, the pressure was much greater on players then than it is today.

It's a little bit of a stretch, though, to say that this one play was somehow responsible for keeping the Cubs from winning another World Series. Johnny Evers was simply enforcing the rules of the day no matter how much they might not make sense to our modern sensibilities. The Cubs appeared in seven more World Series after 1908 so it's a little bit of a stretch to say that somehow this play and how the team handled it are somehow responsible for the last century-plus of failure.

Otherwise this is a terrific lesson in baseball history. It's also a tragic story of how one man suffered the wrath of fans for far too long. Mistakes happen every day. Sometimes the stakes are higher than others. But that doesn't mean we need to make the person responsible for the mistake a pariah.