Sunday, January 14, 2001
Goshen Cemetery holds hidden baseball treasure
By JOHN ERARDI
The Cincinnati Enquirer
In Goshen Cemetery, beneath the gnarly wings of a 100-year-old maple tree, rest Sam Leever and Larry Goetz.
They are separated in death by nine years and in geography by 54 feet, six inches, about the distance a pitcher would land from home plate after his delivery.
That is appropriate, because that reflects their history:
Pitcher and umpire.
One was born in Goshen (Leever), and the other (Goetz) married into it. They were major leaguers - National Leaguers - in different eras. They knew one another, but weren't friends.
There is no known reason for their final resting places being 18 paces apart.
No reason, that is, other than serendipity.
Most longtime Cincinnati baseball fans know the name Larry Goetz. The Cincinnati native umpired in the 1940s and 1950s. Many fans may not know, however, that Goetz was featured in arguably the most famous baseball painting of all time: “Three Umpires” by Norman Rockwell.
Photos and a baseball card of Leever on display at the Goshen historical society.
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Almost nobody outside Goshen (and few even there) remember the name Sam Leever. He pitched in the majors so long ago (1898-1910), it's understandable. But he's the most accomplished pitcher to come out of Greater Cincinnati - Hall of Fame good, although never honored with induction.
His winning percentage (.658, 194-101) is eighth-best of all time and second-best of his era behind only the great Christy Mathewson. His Hall candidacy was a victim of the dead-ball era - a lot of pitchers pre-1920 had low earned run averages (Leever's was 2.47) — and it took time for people to understand how good he was.
By then, it was too late for ol' Sam; only the purists were left to argue his cause. There is zero evidence that Sam was ever bitter about that, though. He pitched because it was a way to make a living, and he loved the competition. But he never traded upon his fame and never considered himself anything special because of what he'd accomplished.
He didn't talk baseball much.
Larry Goetz
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He was 5 feet 11, 175 pounds and rock solid. He was the fourth of eight children reared in a farming family. The Leevers were Pennsylvania Dutch — same as Jacob Myers, who had migrated to southwest Ohio in the 1790s, bought 200 acres along O'Bannon Creek and founded the town of Goshen in 1816.
Leever had piercing blue eyes and thinning brown hair (even in his early big-league baseball pictures). In his older years, he always wore a big straw hat when he was outside working in the garden and only removed it inside the house, thus revealing a bald pate, always astonishing the youngsters who saw it.
He had huge hands and was an excellent and avid trapshooter.
There are still remnants of Leever's life in Goshen. A handful of people remain who personally knew him; many more would like to see him get his due. This is Hall of Fame week; this year's inductees will be announced Tuesday.
What follows is the story of Sam Leever and a 1.5-mile stretch of road known as Old State Route 28.
There's nobody left who knows Leever's whole story. Until now.
Until now.
Driving northeast on Ohio 28, five miles above I-275, just before the Hader Hardware store, you turn left onto Old State Route 28.
The road runs for 1.5 miles until it rolls back to the right and connects again with Ohio 28.
Sam Leever's old white house - located on what used to be 70 acres bought with money he'd saved from baseball (and, oh, what a saver ol' Sam was reputed to be) - is on the right, just before you get to the small bridge over O'Bannon Creek. The house is boarded up.
The bedroom where the great Honus Wagner used to sleep for a week during his annual stay at his buddy Sam's house - “I always knew when spring training was just around the corner because here came Hans,” Sam's wife, Margaret, used to say - is empty.
Gone is the workroom where Sam made the ammunition for his trapshooting hobby. Sam gave new meaning to the phrase “powder room.” He invented a powder he said was better than anything on the market, although there's no evidence anything major came of it. He almost blew himself up in that room one time, when a spark set off the powder and “blew things around the county in cyclone-like fashion.”
Sam's house still has the 35-foot-wide front porch, the one on which the old ballplayers used to sit and visit when they were passing through Goshen on the way to Cincinnati or to spring training in Hot Springs, Ark.
The chicken coop out back is gone, too, the one to which Sam used to send his great-niece, Mary Anne, to collect the hen's eggs.
“Think she'll ever amount to anything?” Sam always asked Margaret, teasingly, in Mary Anne's presence.
Then Sam would smile as he watched through the back window as Mary Anne skittishly traversed the narrow walkway over the ravine to the chicken house. Sam and Margaret never had any children of their own.
A quarter-mile from Sam's house is the school (Sheila E. Green Elementary, as it's known today) on the grounds where Sam learned his ABC's (grades 1-12) and later taught.
Legend - even the written legend, as sportswriters and club owners were fond of concocting back then - had it that Barnie Dreyfuss, the future Pittsburgh Pirates owner, “discovered” Leever one day when Dreyfuss happened by the Goshen school. He saw Leever playing a game called “Anthony Over” with his students. In “Anthony Over,” one person threw a ball over a building, and a person on the other side tried to catch it.
Instead of throwing the ball over the schoolhouse, Sam was curving the ball around it. Indeed, Sam had a great curveball - the best in the major leagues, an unhittable pitch when it did what it was supposed to do - but not that good.
The reality is, Leever had made a name for himself with the Norwood Maroons, one of the great southwestern Ohio clubs of that era, and one of his teammates was Kid Elberfeld, also a future major leaguer — and a good one, too. Tabasco Kid, they called him.
Leever got a late start (25) in pro ball because he wasn't a hard thrower; he didn't overwhelm hitters - or scouts. He refined his control and sharpened his command to make the curveball especially effective. In his baseball and trapshooting pictures, you see the huge hands. Those who shook his hand never forgot it.
He played Sunday ball in Goshen, on the schoolside ballfield that still exists: same layout, though there's a fancy backstop now, chain-like fences, billboard advertisements and aluminum bleachers.
Unlike many other young men, Leever was not desperate to make a living at pro ball. He already had a profession: teacher. He'd been teaching at Goshen School since he graduated high school, having made outstanding grades and gotten certified.
The first decade of the 20th century was a great one for nicknames (The Human Mosquito, The Flying Dutchman, Wagon Tongue and Little All Right). Sometimes nicknames were born out of a player's hometown: The Duke of Tralee, Wabash George, Wahoo Sam and, yes, The Goshen Schoolmaster. Written accounts say Leever was also known as “Deacon,” but if he was, he didn't care for it. Or, at least, his wife didn't care for it: she crossed out “Deacon” as one of Sam's nicknames when she was sent a form called “The Wingler Dope Sheet” eight months after his death.
After he sold his farmhouse, Leever moved into his wife's family's house across from the ballfield. A right-handed hitter who jerked a pitch foul would put the ball in Sam's big garden.
“If Sam was out there working and he got to the ball before we could, he'd keep the ball,” said Bill Glancy, who captained the Goshen varsity baseball and basketball teams as a junior and senior in '44 and '45. “Can you believe that? A former big-league player keeping our baseball because he was mad it went in his garden? We beat him to it most of the time, though.”
Sarah Hill, wife of Alva, who hit the longest home run Glancy ever saw (“a corkscrewing line drive between the first baseman and the bag that landed just inside the line and kept rolling down Goshen Road and didn't come to rest until the bottom of the incline, 600 feet away”) describes Sam as a “good man who became crotchety in his old age.”
There had been signs it would come to that. Sam refused to attend his wife's family's (the Molloys) annual Christmas dinner because he was Republican and didn't want to break bread with “a bunch of Democrats.”
Sam was a regular when it came to watching “Sunday ball” in Goshen, but he didn't share a lot of information with the players unless they were pitchers who showed a lot of promise, such as Ralph Taylor's brother, Marion. Sam kept to himself. But what the youngsters didn't know back then was Sam had been a bit of a character in his days with the Pirates.
In the late summer of 1901, when the Pirates were well on their way to winning the first of three straight NL pennants, they got particularly loose in the field because of their huge lead. Leever was coaching first base when fellow star pitcher/homeboy Jesse Tannehill (Dayton, Ky.) lined a pitch into an outfield gap and tore around first. Leever joined him in a rip-roaring trip around the bases; they pulled into third simultaneously. Leever stomped about, yelling, “Wow! Wow! Wow!” before being ejected.
A half-mile up the road from Sam's former farmhouse is Dwight Ritchie's old place, also on the right-hand side of Old State Route 28. It's boarded up, too. There were once three gas pumps out front, three pool tables in the back and a confectionary and ice-cream store in the middle where ol' Dwightie would invite the kids in when a container of ice cream got near the bottom and he'd hand them each a spoon.
Dwightie's wife, Minnie, ran Friday night poker games there, too. She was a heck of a poker player and saw to it the players had food and their favorite beverages. She never made ol' Dwightie lift a finger. And even though Dwightie was Sam Leever's star trapshooting pupil - the only Goshen resident to win the prized Grand American in Vandalia - Sam never attended any of those poker games.
“Careful with his money,” was a phrase used by the great baseball writer, Hugh Fullerton, in a story about Leever in 1928.
“Tight,” is the word used by his great-niece, Mary Anne.
It is telling that on the night when Honus Wagner tricked his buddy, Leever, into looking out a lower-floor hotel window and then hit him in the back of the head with a bundle of wet towels from two floors up, there was a poker game going on in fellow pitcher Deacon Phillippe's room; it was there from which the towels were launched. Leever had been in his room sleeping when Wagner awakened him.
In one of the few newspaper accounts of the era that went beyond Leever's on-the-field exploits, he is quoted as complaining about a reduction in the Pirates' meal money.
“There is only one thing that will militate against our winning the flag - that is President Dreyfuss' $3-a-day food plan,” Leever said. “You'll see all the boys feeding at the Waldorf or the Astor in New York, the Sinton or the Havlin in Cincinnati, and the other big hotels in the other cities. And the scheme that Dreyfuss had in mind of making the men eat lightly will be defeated.”
Pure Sam, watching his dimes.
A quarter-mile from Dwightie's place, Sam is buried on a slight rise, one asphalt path to the right of the main road into the cemetery. “Old Glory,” atop the 40-foot-high flagpole at the cemetery's entrance, blows stiffly in the breeze.
Wind blowing out. Wouldn't have bothered Sam. He rarely served up gopher balls.
1871-1953 reads his tombstone.
One hundred and fifty yards away, in a dilapidated red barn, a dog wails. Beyond that comes the whirring sound of semi-truck tires on Ohio 28. Closer by, car tires roll along Old State Route 28.
It was a long time ago that Sam Leever lived in Goshen. All that's left are the boarded-up farmhouse, a ballfield, and a pitcher and an umpire buried 54 feet, six inches apart beneath the gnarly wings of an 100-year-old maple tree.
Special thanks to: Rick Rhoades, Bill and Galen Glancy, Mary Anne and Jack Houston, Ralph Taylor, Sarah and Alva Hill, Bill Smith, Carl Johnson, Jim Poe, and Alvin Hall. Other sources: “The Sad Plight of Sam Leever,” Liberty magazine, July 28, 1928; Honus Wagner, by Dennis and Jeanne Burke DeValeria; Glory of Their Times, by Lawrence Ritter; and the Baseball Hall of Fame file.
Leever should be in the Hall
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Goshen Cemetery holds hidden baseball treasure
