RABBIT

The Magnificent Menace of Walter Maranville

Note: Due to a technical issue (I forgot to click the last publish button), this column for last Friday did not get published until now. My apologies. So today you get two featured posts.

Nobody ever confused Walter James Vincent Maranville with a man who took himself too seriously. Standing five-feet-five and built like a jockey, he terrorized National League infields for 23 seasons not through intimidation but through sheer, relentless, barely-contained chaos. He was the greatest defensive shortstop of his generation, a Hall of Famer who accumulated 44.1 career WAR, and the single most entertaining human being any ballpark in America had ever seen.

He was also absolutely impossible to manage.

Joe McCarthy, who would win seven World Series as a manager and had seen every variety of difficult ballplayer the game could produce, put it plainly: "When I first heard about him, about all the stunts he pulled, I said to myself -- for a fellow to do all those crazy things and still keep his job, he had to be a damned good ball player."

McCarthy was right. Rabbit Maranville was both those things simultaneously, for twenty-three years, without apparent contradiction.

"When I first heard about him, about all the stunts he pulled, I said to myself – for a fellow to do all those crazy things and still keep his job, he had to be a damned good ball player." -- Joe McCarthy

How He Got the Name
Springfield, Massachusetts produced Walter Maranville in 1891, the son of a policeman – which, in retrospect, may explain the lifetime of cheerful lawbreaking that followed. The nickname arrived early and stuck. Some said it was the ears, which were large and prominently positioned. Some said it was the speed. His sister reportedly claimed he never stayed in one place, hopping about constantly like a rabbit. The truth is probably all three.

On a baseball field, the nickname earned a fourth meaning. His style of fielding ground balls -- quick, low, bouncing on the balls of his feet as he ranged left and right -- looked less like the controlled movement of a trained athlete and more like a small animal that had gotten into something it probably shouldn't have.

He was twenty years old when the Boston Braves owner John Montgomery Ward saw him play one game in the minor leagues and bought him on the spot. Ward was himself a Hall of Fame shortstop. He knew what he was looking at.

A Born Disruptor
The legend of Rabbit Maranville did not grow slowly. It arrived fully formed sometime around his third or fourth major league season and never stopped expanding. His pranks were not the minor mischief of a restless young ballplayer. They were elaborate, committed, and usually public.

Hotel stays were particularly dangerous for anyone in his orbit. He developed a routine of stepping out onto hotel ledges to terrify passersby, of jumping fully clothed into hotel pools, and of detonating firecrackers in hallways to send teammates scrambling in their undershirts. Sleep, for the men around him, was a negotiated commodity.

The goldfish story belongs in a category of its own. During his time managing the Montreal Royals in the minor leagues, Maranville reportedly jumped into a hotel fountain fully clothed and surfaced with a goldfish clamped between his teeth. Nobody present appears to have questioned this. It seems to have simply been accepted as a Rabbit Maranville situation.

On the streets, the act continued. One of his favorite gambits involved enlisting teammate Jack Scott in a scheme where Scott would chase him through Times Square shouting "Stop, thief!" Pedestrians scattered. Rabbit howled. Before the charade ended, several New Yorkers had joined Scott in the chase, genuinely believing they were pursuing a fleeing criminal. Jack Scott, presumably, questioned his career choices.

The Hotel Room Incident
The Times Square caper was mild by the standards of what came next. One evening in a hotel room, Maranville and two accomplices staged what sounded, to the teammates in adjacent rooms, like a murder in progress. Screams. Breaking glass. Gunshots. And through it all, the unmistakable voice of Rabbit Maranville moaning, "Eddie, you're killing me!"

When the door was finally broken down -- teammates convinced they were about to find a body -- Maranville and his two friends strolled past them without a word, greeting the horrified onlookers with a cheerful "Hiya boys" before disappearing down the hall.

Nobody was hurt. Nobody was apologized to. This appears to have been considered a successful evening.

The Vaudeville Leg
After the 1914 World Series, Maranville and several teammates formed a vaudeville act and took it on the road. The act featured songs, anecdotes, and live reenactments of plays from the Series. Fans turned out in considerable numbers to watch the heroes of the "Miracle Braves" recreate their championship.

In Lewiston, Maine, Maranville took the stage and announced to the audience: "I will now demonstrate how I stole second base off Bullet Joe Bush in the Series."

He sprinted off a mythical first base and executed a picture-perfect slide. He had misjudged the distance. He landed on a drum in the orchestra pit.

He broke his leg.

This injury is worth dwelling on for a moment. Maranville had just played 156 games at shortstop, handling 1,046 chances, generating 5.1 WAR, and helping sweep the Philadelphia Athletics. His reward was a broken leg sustained while demonstrating a stolen base to the citizens of Lewiston, Maine, while a full orchestra watched from below.

The act did not survive the off-season.

The On-Field Theater
The pranks were not limited to hotel rooms and vaudeville stages. Maranville brought the show to the ballpark itself, and the fans loved every moment of it.

He would pull the bill of his cap over one ear -- baseball's oldest comic gesture -- and jump into the arms of his largest teammate for no particular reason. When umpires made calls he disagreed with, he would fish a pair of glasses out of his pocket and present them to the man behind the plate with great solemnity. When a pitcher or batter took an especially long time getting ready, Maranville would stand in the coaching box and mime every exaggerated movement back at them, note-perfect pantomime that the crowd in the bleachers could see clearly.

Against Dazzy Vance -- the Brooklyn pitcher whose fastball terrified right-handed hitters throughout the 1920s -- Maranville once strode to the plate carrying a tennis racquet. Vance threw fastballs. Maranville waved the racquet at them theatrically. The umpire presumably considered early retirement.

The breadbasket catch was the signature. On routine infield flies, rather than squeezing the ball conventionally, Maranville would drift underneath and gather it at his belt buckle, both hands cupped together like a man catching rain. It looked like a circus trick. It worked almost every time. Fans who saw it never quite forgot it, and when Willie Mays began doing something similar decades later, old men in the stands recognized the lineage immediately.

His most committed on-field stunt may have been attempting to steal second base by sliding directly through an umpire's legs rather than around him. It is not entirely clear whether he made it to the bag. It is completely clear that the umpire did not enjoy the experience.

Player-Manager, Chicago, 1925
In 1925 the Chicago Cubs handed Maranville the player-manager job. He was thirty-two years old and had never in his life demonstrated the slightest interest in going to bed at a reasonable hour.

His one recorded clubhouse rule: no player was permitted to go to bed before the manager did. Since the manager had no intention of going to bed, the Cubs wandered through the 1925 season in a permanent state of productive exhaustion.

On overnight Pullman car trips, Maranville would walk the aisle after midnight, dumping water on sleeping players' heads. "No sleeping under Maranville management," he announced, "especially at night."

The experiment lasted 53 games. The Cubs went 23-30. They finished last.

Maranville received the news with characteristic flair. He was found shortly afterward outside Ebbets Field in Brooklyn, dressed as a newsboy, hawking imaginary papers and shouting the headline: "Read all about it! Maranville fired!"

A lesser man might have been embarrassed. Rabbit considered it content.

The Redemption Nobody Expected
The antics had a shadow behind them that the newspaper accounts did not always acknowledge. Maranville drank heavily throughout his playing career, and by 1926 the drinking had caught up with him. The Cubs waived him to Brooklyn. Brooklyn released him mid-season. The Cardinals signed him and sent him straight back to the minor leagues.

He landed in Rochester, Illinois, managing in the International League, further from the major leagues than he had been since 1911. He was thirty-five years old.

"Going back to the bushes was the best thing for me," he said years later. "I knew that was one place I didn't want to finish my career. Either I had to lay off the booze and get serious with the game or it would be the end of me."

On May 24, 1927, Walter Maranville stopped drinking.

Branch Rickey, the Cardinals' general manager, noted the change immediately. "Walter is a changed man," Rickey said later that season. "It is apparent that he has seen the light. His change in attitude is remarkable." The Cardinals called him back up. He played nine games for them in September, then spent all of 1928 on their roster, and in the 1928 World Series batted .308 -- the best average on the club.

He returned to Boston in 1929 and posted 2.8 WAR in 146 games at age thirty-seven. Then 1.1 WAR in 1930. Then 1.2 in 1931. The reformed Rabbit was still playing meaningful baseball in his late thirties on nothing but glove work and hard-won sobriety.

When asked about the transformation, he was characteristically direct. "There is much less drinking in baseball than before," he said in 1928. "Because I quit."

The Breadbasket and the Bone
The 1934 spring training game provided a moment that captures everything essential about the man. Maranville was forty-one years old, long past his prime, when he broke his left fibula and tibia in a collision at home plate during an exhibition game against the Yankees. Boston was down by a run. Rabbit tried to score anyway. The catcher was blocking the plate. The collision was violent.

When the dust cleared, Maranville lay in the dirt, a bone jutting through the skin of his ankle. The umpire called him out.

"You see where that foot is, don't you?" Rabbit reportedly said, pointing to his destroyed leg resting on the edge of the plate.

Then he passed out.

He missed the entire 1934 season. He came back in 1935 and played 23 games before the leg finally convinced him to stop. He was forty-three years old.

The 1914 Miracle
No account of Rabbit Maranville can skip July 4, 1914. The Boston Braves sat in last place in the National League, games behind everyone and apparently going nowhere. What followed is one of the great sustained runs in baseball history.

Manager George Stallings had assessed Maranville's value precisely. "Maranville is the greatest player to enter baseball since Ty Cobb arrived," Stallings said, a statement that requires context but was not entirely hyperbole coming from a man who watched him play every day. "He came into the league under a handicap -- his build. He was too small to be a big leaguer in the opinion of critics. I told him he was just what I wanted: a small fellow for short."

From that last-place position on July 4, the Braves charged through the second half of the season, overtook the first-place Giants, and entered the World Series against the heavily favored Philadelphia Athletics -- winners of three of the previous four championships under Connie Mack.

Boston swept Philadelphia in four games. Maranville batted .308 in the Series and was the anchor of an infield that, as he recalled years later, felt like a death sentence for opposing hitters. "It was just Death Valley, whoever hit a ball down our way," he said. "Evers with his brains taught me more baseball than I ever dreamed about. He was psychic. He could sense where a player was going to hit if the pitcher threw the ball where he was supposed to."

That partnership -- Maranville to Evers -- turned more double plays in 1914 than Tinker to Evers to Chance ever had in any single season. Nobody wrote a poem about it. The baseball was better anyway.

The Numbers, Honestly Assessed
Maranville's career offensive line does not read like a Hall of Famer's at first glance. Over 23 seasons and 2,670 games, he hit .258 with a .318 on-base percentage, .340 slugging, and an OPS+ of 82. He hit 28 career home runs – 22 of them inside the park, which says something about his speed and something more about his era. His best offensive stretch came during his Pittsburgh years, when he posted .294 in 1921 and .295 in 1922.

The WAR tells the real story. His 44.1 career total is driven almost entirely by defense. His Range Factor per nine innings at shortstop averaged 5.93 against a league norm of 5.64, consistently, across 19 seasons. He leads all shortstops in career putouts (5,139) and career assists (8,967) – records that still stand. He led the National League in putouts at shortstop in six seasons and in double plays five times.

His Pittsburgh years also saw a shift to second base, which he handled without complaint and with similar defensive efficiency. By 1929, back in Boston at thirty-seven years old, he was still generating 2.8 WAR. The glove aged better than the bat, but neither quit.

What He Left Behind
Walter Maranville died of a heart attack on January 6, 1954, at his home in Woodside, Queens. He was sixty-two years old. He did not live to see his Hall of Fame induction, which came that same year along with Bill Terry and Bill Dickey.

The last years of his life were spent running sandlot baseball programs for the New York Journal-American, teaching kids the game and, by all accounts, warning them emphatically against living the way he had. He was apparently very good at both -- the teaching and the cautionary tale.

He had, in his final years, tried to write his autobiography. He did not finish it. SABR eventually recovered the manuscript from a memorabilia dealer and published it as Run, Rabbit, Run, which remains the most direct record of how he saw his own life. His own summation, written in 1936, holds up as well as anything:

"For a quarter of a century I've been playing baseball for pay. It has been pretty good pay, most of the time. The work has been hard, but what of it? It's been risky. I've broken both my legs. I've sprained everything I've got between my ankles and my disposition. I've dislocated my joints and fractured my pride. I've spent more time in hospitals than some fellows ever spend in church."

He played 23 seasons in the major leagues, appeared in 2,670 games, and never once gave the impression that he found any of it particularly solemn.

The best baseball players make the difficult look effortless. Maranville went one further. He made the difficult look like the funniest thing anyone had ever seen.

Nobody slept. Nobody complained. And the grounders all got thrown out.

Career: .258 BA / .318 OBP / .340 SLG / 82 OPS+ / 44.1 WAR / 2,605 H | Hall of Fame, 1954 Career records: Most career putouts (5,139) and assists (8,967) by a shortstop