Hidalgo Bombers
The 1936 Hidalgo Bombers are still considered the finest team ever to play professional baseball. The team appeared from nowhere and vanished almost as quickly. The were led by one of the most mysterious men ever to own a baseball team, Clark "Doc" Savage, Jr.
Many consider this triple threat -- Savage owned the team, managed it, and started in center field -- to be the purest player in history. In the space of 154 short games Savage destroyed the Babe's home run record, took home a 20 game winning season as a starting pitcher, and brought the World Series title to a country that had never played baseball before.
It's well know among baseball fans that the banning of Savage and his crew by Kenasaw Mountain Landis was politically motivated. The other owners couldn't buy any of the Bombers. Threats against Savage and his team were laughed off -- it's reported those making the threats just disappeared!
The Bombers won 119 games that year. That's a record only the 1998 New York Yankees and 2001 Seattle Mariners could chase. How did the Bombers do so well? In addition to Savage's mighty bat and his baseball cunning, the team possessed 6 other players so great that all were voted as special members of the Hall of Fame. Each after being in baseball for only one season!
The First Baseman, John "Renny" Renwick, carried the heaviest bat in baseball. Some joke that the bat leaning against the Louisville Slugger Museum is his. That bat drove many a run in for Renwick. Batting third for the Bombers, Renwick led the league in triples, doubles, and singles. A feat no one else has ever engineered. According to the Bombers, Renwick stood 6-4 and weighed 250.
One of his opponents, Ty Cobb, remembers Renwick, "His damn hands weighed more than 250! They were the biggest, boniest, ugliest buckets I ever saw. I saw him take a called third from some dumb a** NL umpire in the series and Renwick just glared at the man. Damn, but that umpire turned white! Renny just strode off the field and with one punch the boy knocked a hole through a solid wood door! That's when I decided to retire. Figured it was a game for the young."
Covering second for the Bombers was another peculiar player.
William Harper "Johnny" Littlejohn, would stand near second and seem to be looking in the first-base stands. Rumor was the man couldn't see a lick out of his left eye. That didn't stop him from playing second like an octopus. One of the tallest second basemen I've ever seen, Littlejohn was listed at 6-6, but he had to be 6-10. He looked half-starved, but could run like the wind. He led off for the Bombers and stole more bases in one season than anyone until Luis Aparicio tied his record with the White Sox in '60.
Littlejohn was called "Rocks" by the local press. When he found a rock in the dirt he didn't throw it off the field like most players. He'd carry them in his pocket and study them between innings. But it wasn't only his fondness for stones that identified Littlejohn...his vocabulary was larger than Webster's. Doc would always send Littlejohn out to talk to the writers after a game, and a more humorous sight outside of Abbott and Costello couldn't have been found. Sportswriter Lester Dent remembered Littlejohn, "Doc must have had a strange sense of humor, because Johnny spoke a brand of English no one outside of Harvard and Yale could understand. Let alone a bunch of dumb sportswriters."
"We'd spend half the interview asking Littlejohn to spell one of the 10 dollar words he has just threw at us. It was probably 5 minutes of Littlejohn answering the first question and 25 minutes of us asking him to repeat what he just said. I don't think we got to ask a second question all season. Hell, when we'd look up all those blasted words he always seemed to say the same thing: "We played well."
"Long Tom" Thomas Roberts played third for the entire season with the Bombers. Actually, that was a greater feat than you'd think. Roberts didn't look like a player with the stamina of Cal Ripkin. Actually, he seemed on the verge of death every time he ventured onto the field. Thin and not very tall, Roberts was ghostly white and always could be heard complaining about the mosquitoes on the Polo Grounds. As a matter of fact, Long Tom set up a scary looking contraption on the fence near third for most of the Bombers home games. He called it his "Jersey Canary" killer. Radios would give only static and over half the city would dim every time Roberts plugged in his contraption.
The shortstop for the team was one Theodore Marley Brooks. A slender, waspy, quick handed "dude". Brooks looked as fancy as his name sounded. Possibly the first player to have all his uniforms hand sewn by the finest tailors in New York. Opposing pitchers didn't laugh when Brooks stepped to the plate though. With his trademark black Slugger, Brooks was able to pepper hits to any position on the field. During the Bombers first cross town series with the Dodgers he would have set a record for stealing home in one game -- if it wasn't for the unfortunate porcine incident the ninth inning. As the pitcher went into his windup Brooks tore for home. It would be his 4th steal of home that day. Out of nowhere a pig ran onto the field and slid into home one step ahead of the shortstop. The umpire called interference and sent Brooks back to third.
After the papers dubbed him "Ham", Brooks seemed to take his wrath out on one of the other Bombers. Rumor was that the Bombers catcher, 
Andrew Blodgett "Monk" Mayfair, had taught a pet pig he named Habeas Corpus, to slide. He even dressed the pig up in a Bombers uniform with Brooks' number on his back.
Monk was an apt name for the catcher. At just over 5 feet tall the catcher outweighed everyone except Renwick. He had the build of a gorilla and a chest that had to be thicker than it was wide. Brooks claimed that Mayfair wasn't actually human, but a "missing link." It didn't stop the ladies from swarming to Mayfair. He always seemed to be chatting up a young miss while standing in the on deck circle. He was ready to bat when his turn came though. Mayfair would settle into his stance and stare at the pitcher. He wouldn't move his bat or his feet. He stood at the plate like a statue.
Monk stood so close to the plate that he set another record for the Bombers -- most hit by pitcher. Mayfair took more pitches than the rest of professional baseball combined. No pitcher was able to brush him back. He was beaned so hard in the last game of the series that the owners voted in the off season to make helmets a mandatory part of the game. Mayfair took that pitch to his hard head and simply trotted to first.
Savage broke a baseball barrier years before the women's leagues played. He started his cousin, Patricia Savage, in left field for a series of home stands. Though many called the move a public relations ploy equal to Bill Veek's pinch hitting a Little Person for the St. Louis Browns, Ms Savage was an accomplished fielder. Her fielding average for the 25 games was .990 and she hit a respectable .245 batting eighth for the team. Many of the opposing pitchers wasted pitches "brushing back" Ms Savage. She would hit the dirt, stand and glare at the pitcher, and pound the next pitch. In one celebrated instance Ms Savage was "brushed" to the ground for the 5th time in one game. She stood, pointed to the left field stands and took hurler Rube Waddell's next pitch into the upper deck for her only home run of the season!
