Bearing in mind that everyone has easy access to baseball bats, serious violence is rare in Major League Baseball. Breaches of the peace such as 23 August’s cleared benches at Minute Maid Park are usually theatrical, the emphasis more on posturing than punching.
Still, there are exceptions, the kind of confrontations that might interest the police, rather than the compilers of SportsCenter highlights, if they happened anywhere else but a sports field. Rougned Odor lamping José Bautista in 2016, for example, and the infamous Giants-Dodgers fracas in 1965 that led to John Roseboro suing Juan Marichal for injuries sustained when he was whacked above the left eye.
No one loved slugging in and out of the batter’s box more than Art Shires of the Chicago White Sox, who beat up his manager, pursued an off-season boxing career and was implicated in the deaths of two people.
Shires was a tempestuous character even by the standards of Prohibition-era Chicago, but teams readily pardon the sins of special talents. Signed by the White Sox in the summer of 1928 from Waco of the Texas League, the 21-year-old initially refused to report to the team because he preferred a more lucrative move to Cleveland.
After four hits on his major league debut he gave himself the nickname Art The Great, opining that the American League was nothing special and he would hit .400 that season. He wasn’t far wrong, notching .341 in 33 games and being named team captain.
Heading back to his hometown of Waxahachie, Texas, after the season, he is said to have hired a band, arranged for a display of signs hailing “The Great Shires” and staged his own homecoming parade down Main Street. But he was soon to face the consequences of a serious incident earlier in the year.
During a game in Louisiana in May, 1928, Shires threw a ball into the segregated stands towards a section where a group of fans were heckling him. It hit a 53-year-old named Walter Lawson in the head, causing a spinal cord injury, and he died seven months later. Shires denied deliberate wrongdoing and a grand jury decided he should not face criminal charges – perhaps not a surprise, given that Shires was white and Lawson was black. Lawson’s wife sued Shires for $25,411; the case was settled for $500.
A day after being cleared by the grand jury in 1929, as Mike Lynch writes in a Society for American Baseball Research biography, Shires “arrived at the team’s spring training hotel long after curfew and so drunk that he walked right past White Sox manager Lena Blackburne without recognizing him, went out into the courtyard and began howling at the moon.” He was stripped of the captaincy and banished to the bench.
Shires, who also revelled in the soubriquet “What-a-man” and was a notoriously flashy dresser with a collection of sparkling canes, drew Blackburne’s wrath again in May for donning a comical red felt hat during batting practice. A seething Blackburne ordered the first baseman to take off the hat – and his uniform.
Shires “invited his manager to follow him and attempt to knock the hat off his head,” Ronald T Waldo wrote in Baseball’s Roaring Twenties. “The battle lasted for a few minutes before some players broke it up, with Blackburne sporting a black eye for his troubles.”
Shires was fined and dropped but the struggling team needed his bat. Restored to the line-up, he hit .312 over a 100 appearances but came to blows with Blackburne again that September in a Philadelphia hotel room. “A fight ensued between the two men after the drunken Shires spied Chicago’s manager and tossed an empty bottle in his direction,” Waldo wrote.
“Art quickly gained the upper hand in the scuffle, and [outfielder Doug] Taitt ran out of the room to elicit the assistance of team secretary Lou Barbour. As Barbour attempted to rescue his colleague, someone, purported to be Shires, bit the team secretary’s index finger.”
Blackburne vowed that Shires, who claimed to have merely been drinking ginger ale, was finished. The player, meanwhile, “did what only Art Shires had the audacity to do,” Lynch wrote. “He held out for more money, demanding $25,000 while insisting that he was as big a ‘drawing card’ as anyone in the American League with the exception of Babe Ruth.”
Charles Comiskey, the White Sox owner, fired Blackburne and gave the man the press had anointed “the bad boy of baseball” a new contract worth $7,500 (the equivalent of about $130,000 today, and about a 10th of Ruth’s salary in 1930). But Shires had a new money-making scheme for the winter. As a trash-talking self-promoter who was handy with his fists, his next step was obvious.
He fell in with a man connected to “Doc” Kearns, the manager of the former world heavyweight champion, Jack Dempsey, and took up boxing. He knocked out his first opponent, “Dangerous” Dan Daly – who claimed to be a friend of Blackburne out for revenge – in only 21 seconds. “Dan Daly” turned out to be a youngster from Ohio named Jim Gerry who told the press he was ordered to “take a dive or else”.
George “The Beast” Trafton – a 230lbs future Hall-of-Fame center with the Chicago Bears – was a stiffer test. Shires (6ft 1in and roughly 190lbs) lost the decision after being repeatedly knocked to the canvas in front of 5,000 fans in Chicago in December, 1929. “Licking Shires was easier than getting kicked around a football field,” Trafton said.
Shires was investigated by boxing authorities for alleged match-fixing after the Daly farce but carried on undaunted and offered the Chicago Cubs star Hack Wilson $10,000 to face him, though Wilson was dubious.
“While Wilson seemed content to forget about stepping in the ring, Shires continued in pursuit of boxing glory,” Bill Francis wrote for the National Baseball Hall of Fame. “After knocking out Bad Bill Bailey in 82 seconds in Buffalo on 26 December, Shires took on Al Spohrer of the Boston Braves and came away with a fourth-round technical knockout of the backstop before a capacity crowd of 18,000 at the Boston Garden on 10 January 1930.”
The mooted Shires-Wilson bout was a fight too far for the MLB commissioner, Kenesaw Mountain Landis, who banned all players from boxing. After what was described as a three-minute meeting with Shires in January 1930, Landis declared: “Hereafter any person connected with any club in this organization who engages in professional boxing will be regarded by this office as having permanently retired from baseball. The two activities do not mix.”
Shires lost a reported $50,000 in potential earnings. “Every ballplayer in the country was breaking into print with a demand that I give them a date,” he asserted. “It was becoming a regular epidemic, so I guess Landis figured he’d better stop the thing before it got beyond control.” Lynch, though, observes that Shires was photographed shaking Al Capone’s hand before a game at Comiskey Park. Given boxing’s association with organized crime and coming only a decade after the Black Sox scandal, the ban may have been motivated by a desire to avoid mob links and accusations of fixing.
Shires struggled early in 1930 but hit .369 after being traded to the Washington Senators, crediting his form to a teammate’s understanding of his alcoholism. “Gin is not good for an athlete,” he reflected. “Walter Johnson told me so. Did Lena Blackburne tell me so when I was with the White Sox? No. He just told me I couldn’t drink it. He didn’t appeal to my reason.”
He headed to Hollywood in the close season, signed up to appear in a couple of short films, got married and was arrested for drunkenness and carrying a set of brass knuckles. Dispatched to the then minor-league Milwaukee Brewers, Shires returned to the majors with the Boston Braves in 1932 but a knee injury ended his top-level career and he spent the next few years playing and managing in the minors.
A quixotic plan to challenge for the world heavyweight boxing title was scuppered when an out-of-shape Shires lost a fight in 1935. Almost penniless, he worked as a wrestler and wrestling referee. His wife divorced him, stating he had physically abused her.
Shires ran a shrimp restaurant in Dallas in the mid-40s and made an ill-fated bid for election to the Texas legislature on a platform of “fighting the battle of the little man”. In 1948 he was charged with murdering his long-time friend, Hi Erwin, a former baseball player, after a fight that is said to have erupted after Shires visited Erwin’s shop to give him a steak.
“He hit me across the face with a telephone receiver and I knocked him down without thinking,” Shires said. “I had to rough him up a good deal because he grabbed a knife and started whittling on my legs.” The charge was reduced to simple assault after a court determined that Erwin primarily died of pneumonia and cirrhosis.
Shires died from lung cancer in 1967, aged 60, in Italy, Texas, the same small town where he was born. He was, a newspaper obituary noted, “a hard-hitting athlete on and off the baseball field.”
