Harvard Eddie Grant's Curse Lifted

[Don Dresden]

"Harvard Eddie" Grant was a utility infielder for the then-New York Giants. He answered the call to serve his country, and became the first major leaguer to give his life in WWI. To honor his service and his sacrifice, in 1921 the Giants placed a monument in dead center field of their Polo Grounds home. The Giants won the World Series that season, and again the following one.

But when the team left New York for Than Franthithco after the 1957 season the plaque was stolen. (It was found many years later in the attic of a New Jersey home that once belonged to a cop.) Until tonight, the Giants had not won a World Series since it disappeared.

The mysterious disappearance of the plaque isn't what angered the baseball muses. But did they subsequently punish the Giants for their disinterest in locating the missing original plaque, or in authorizing a replacement?

Baseball historians think so. ...

Through the San Francisco years, the Giants were frequently approached by various groups about installing a makeup memorial, but were repeatedly rejected by an ownership that considered Grant part of the New York Giants' past. The last such spurned overture was made by the Great War Society in December 2001.

Ten months later, the Giants lost another World Series, to the Angels.

On Memorial Day 2006, Giants ownership finally gave in and mounted a replica plaque to Grant at AT&T Park, a club official at the time telling the author Bradley, "Baseball fans are so superstitious, and players are too, so you have to take this stuff seriously. And if by putting up a plaque we can break some sort of curse, who's to say it's not the right thing to do?"

...The replica is a faithful reproduction mounted near AT&T Park's Lefty O'Doul entrance. O'Doul was a career .349 hitter who won a pair of National League batting titles -- he nearly hit .400 in 1929, when he finished at .398. Meaning, he and Grant had nothing in common.

Grant may have been baseball's first renaissance man. He was Harvard-educated and grammatically-correct, known to get on teammates' nerves by yelling on pop flies, "I have it," rather than the traditional but ungrammatical, "I got it."

As a ballplayer, Grant was an accessory. In a 10-year career, he never hit higher than .277, had good speed but only moderate extra-base pop. He had his greatest success early in his career with the Athletics [sic, Phillies] and was really only a blip on the Giants' radar, playing 202 games for them in three seasons.

But he wore the hero's mantle well. He volunteered for the military in 1917, at 34 being well beyond draft age, and distinguished himself as a brave battlefield leader before falling.

So the N.Y. Giants were honoring the man, not the ballplayer, with that plaque. After many decades, the Giants recognized that Eddie Grant towered above the limitations of being "part of New York Giants history," and they did right.

Whether it serves them right, we'll soon know.

http://mlb.mlb.com/news/article.jsp?ymd=...Id=rss_mlb


Eddie Grant with the Giants in 1913


Most likely, Braves manager Dave Bancroft and Giants interim manager Hughie Jennings


Original plaque in center field of the Polo Grounds


Plaque visible under the 483 sign, as Willie Mays makes "The Catch" in Game 1 of the 1954 series.


Eddie Grant with the Reds

From the memorial's dedication in 1921 until the Giants abandoned New York and the Polo Grounds in 1957, a solemn wreath-laying ceremony was held at the Grant monument every year, usually between games of the then customary Memorial Day doubleheader.

At the conclusion of the final game played at the Polo Grounds on September 29, 1957, souvenir hunters mobbed the field and the New York Times reported that three teenagers were seen prying the bronze plaque off the monument. Rumors that the police ultimately recovered the plaque were never verified, and its whereabouts remained a mystery for over forty years.

In late July 1999, the Eddie Grant Memorial plaque was discovered in the attic of a Ho-Ho-Kus, New Jersey home formerly owned by Lena and Gaetano Bucca. The new home owners, Brian and Deborah Lamb, had discovered the plaque carefully wrapped in a blanket and hidden under a trap door in the attic. Brian Lamb contacted Baseball Reliquary Board member, Wendy Brougalman, a former business associate, with news of the discovery.

At this point, Albert Kilchesty, the Reliquary's Archivist and Historian, became instrumental in negotiating the plaque's acquisition, and in attempting to solve some of the mysteries of the large item's disappearance. In his field notes of August 1999, Kilchesty writes, "The Lambs purchased the home from the Bucca family after the death of Lena Bucca in 1998. Gaetano Bucca, a former New York City police officer, died in 1974. Several calls to the NYPD Department of Records revealed that Gaetano Bucca, who retired from the force in January 1958 and subsequently moved with his family to New Jersey, served in the city's 32nd precinct, an area of jurisdiction encompassing the Coogan's Bluff/Polo Grounds vicinity.

"Additional police records note that subsequent to receiving a gunshot wound during a routine investigation of a domestic disturbance in 1955, Mr. Bucca was assigned to light foot patrols in and around the Polo Grounds. 'Light Foot Patrol' duty at that time meant just that, a foot receiving light duty near the environs of a bar stool. The Eddie Grant Memorial plaque disappeared after the final New York Giants game on September 29, 1957. It is assumed that the affable Mr. Bucca, with the aid of a few well-lubricated colleagues, had arranged to take the plaque with the intention of delivering it for safekeeping to the Eddie Grant American Legion Post 1225 in the Bronx. The plaque never made it there. How and why it ended up in Mr. Bucca's attic is totally baffling. Benjamin Bucca, Lena and Gaetano's only surviving son and a well-respected probate attorney, had no knowledge at all of the 100-pound plaque situated just above his head in his former bedroom. 'You know, I never felt comfortable in that bedroom. Now I know why! That thing could've fallen on my head in the middle of the night and flattened me. My Pop was always a bit of a mystery, but this . . . This is . . . What the hell was he thinking about?'"

http://www.baseballreliquary.org/EddieGrantPlaque.htm


Replacement installed in SF in 2006.


Grant's grave at the Meuse-Argonne American Cemetery in Lorraine, France.

[Yancy Derringer]

Plaque visible under the 483 sign, as Willie Mays makes "The Catch" in Game 1 of the 1954 series.

See the bald guy looking out the window from the clubhouse? It's Giant backup catcher Joe Garagiola. Now why was the backup catcher in the clubhouse in the middle of the game and not the dugout or the bullpen? What could he possibly be doing in dead center field with a perfect view of the opposing team's catcher and his signs? Yes, he was STEALING SIGNS!

The only way a team of losers like the Giants could win was by CHEATING! Rhodes lit up Lemon and Wynn because he knew what was coming. Whether 1954 or right up to BARROID BONDS, the Giants can only win by CHEATING.

If the vaGinants won anything yesterday it probably was by cheating. Fifty years from now we will learn the whole story.

Oh look, it's Juan Marichal beating Johnny Roseboro on the head with a bat.


Say hey, it's Willie Mays drinking his red juice amphetamine concoction. There's Orlando Cepeda being convicted of drug smuggling in Puerto Rico.

Now here's Hank Thompson the car thief, robber and murderer. There's Rod Beck overdosing on cocaine. Gaylord Perry and his greaseball.

Look at Barroid Bonds modeling his new wardrobe for when he's convicted of perjury next spring.


No surprise it took a classless organization 50 years to remember Eddie Grant. The SF Giants might finally have won a world series, but they still suck.

[Winston Smith]

No surprise it took a classless organization 50 years to remember Eddie Grant. The SF Giants might finally have won a world series, but they still suck.

The only thing that sucks worse than the Giants are their battery-throwing fans. I was tempted to fire up the DL Truth blimp and bombard the squalid throng with retributive Evereadys at the parade today.

[Don Dresden]

Look at Barroid Bonds modeling his new wardrobe for when he's convicted of perjury next spring.

Barroid and his enlarged head (and atrophied and dysfunctional genitalia) were convicted of obstruction, but not perjury.

What's the over-and-under on sentencing? More or less time than Dixie got?

[Armando Ramos]

What's the over-and-under on sentencing? More or less time than Dixie got?

Let's see if they retry him on the other counts. One of those was 11-1 to convict, so you have to figure they will retry him. If it's just obstruction I'd say "under," but with a perjury conviction I'd say "over."

The message here seems to be that when the feds come knockin', quit talkin'. They didn't get him for lying, they got him for being "evasive." So all the steroid stuff means nothing, it's all about giving some doubletalk answer. Casey Stengel might have done 20 years.

[Ben Johnson]

Kind of glad I'm not a lawyer but why do juries like to find otherwise innocent people guilty of obstruction? Makes no frigging sense.

[Herbert Spencer]

Kind of glad I'm not a lawyer but why do juries like to find otherwise innocent people guilty of obstruction? Makes no frigging sense.

Most juries have no clue what is going on. Not being criminals or lawyers, they don't understand the legal system, don't understand what is happening, and don't understand the instructions given to them by the judge.

The natural inclination of sociable people is to compromise in order to reach a consensus. The least onerous sounding charge becomes the halfway point at which the "guilty as sin" votes meet the "innocent" votes.

Prosecutors typically over-charge defendants, probably because they are well aware of the natural tendency of jurors to reach consensus at lower levels than the original charge. Jurors see 97 counts of bad actions and hear hours of testimony about what a prick the defendant is, and figure the guy must have done something, even if they can't get a handle on what it is exactly.

Likewise, this is why you get people copping to ridiculous things to avoid going to trial on more serious charges. If Martha Stewart can go to jail just for denying she did anything wrong, anyone can go to jail for anything, whether or not it actually was illegal. Ask Dixie.

[Armando Ramos]

Most juries have no clue what is going on. Not being criminals or lawyers, they don't understand the legal system, don't understand what is happening, and don't understand the instructions given to them by the judge.

You might remember reading about what is probably the most famous baseball-related trial of all--that of the Black Sox who threw the 1919 World Series.

The trial judge instructed the jury that to return a guilty verdict they had to find that the players conspired "to defraud the public and others, and not merely throw ballgames." Two hours later the players were acquitted, only to be banned from baseball for life the next day by Commissioner Landis.
http://www.supremecourt.ohio.gov/SCO/jus...061803.asp

You have to wonder how such a trial might have turned out today. Each of the eight players would have been indicted on hundreds of counts of mail fraud, obstruction, RICO violations, spitting on the sidewalk and anything else the prosecutors could think up. There would be a footrace to see who could get immunity for testifying against the others. And the jury, instead of pondering how they could get their hometown heroes a walk, would be eagerly awaiting the chance to get a bunch of millionaires tossed into jail with perverts, then selling their story to the Enquirer.

[Martin Eisenstadt]

Two hours later the players were acquitted, only to be banned from baseball for life the next day by Commissioner Landis...You have to wonder how such a trial might have turned out today.

A trial would be a circus today, but Pete Rose would bet that the lifetime banishment would be the same.