NW Okie's Journey
Have you ever heard of the term "Swat the Knockers?" This is what we found in The Wichita Beacon, dated 15 April 1909, Thursday, page 7: "Swat the Knocker." The Knocker wasn't numerous but he was awfully busy in Wichita. The Knocker didn't appreciate what local magnates had done for Wichita by getting it advanced to a higher league.
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This was the season of the year when the cheap knocker was abroad in the land. He was no more numerous in Wichita than elsewhere, in fact, he was very much outnumbered here, but he pokes his head up every once in a while for all that, and he generally made himself felt unless someone got angry and stepped on him.
The knocker was a man who liked people to think that he knew more about the great national game than anyone else. Of course, he only had to talk for a few minutes until everyone got next to the fact that he never had won any major league pennants, but he didn't know that and hence he kept on talking.
Occasionally, though, one would run across a knocker who was a little bit smoother than the general run of the fraternity. He may be a man who was a pretty good fellow other ways, and for that reason his words may carry more weight than most knocker's remarks do. Wichita had that kind, too. In fact, she had a small representation of each brand and color. Like the poor, they were always with us.
The knocker was always a great fan. He posed as a friend of the game, and only wishes that the home team was made up of better exponents of it. He could tell you a hundred different places where he could make a winner out of it, and a real baseball man can tell him in just about a minute how little he really could do. But the baseball man usually kept his mouth shut and let the knocker howl himself hoarse. Maybe it's the wrong course for the baseball man to pursue, as far as suppressing a nuisance was concerned, but it saved a lot of trouble for the moment. It was easier sometimes to walk away and let a knocker spout, than to take issue with him.
These remarks apply generally to every city that had baseball and, incidentally, to every city that had anything else worth while. The genus hit-'em-a-dab is found in every town, and it was almost as numerous in mid-season as it was in the gents spring time. Even a pennant winner never played quite as good a game as the knocker would had it play.
What few knockers Wichita had were pretty busy just now. They were working overtime, trying to convince people that Jack Holland didn't understand his business, and the Wichita was doomed to trail along so far behind in the Western league race, that the Enid team in the Western association last season would look like a pennant winner by comparison. They shake their heads sagely, and wring their hands mournfully, while they tell how sorry they are that Wichita hadn't a better team. They compare Roberts with Frank Chance, Hughes with Lajoie, Anderson with Hans Wagner, Richter and Westerzel with Bradley and Devlin or Morality and Tannehill, and insist that Pennell, Pettigrew, Middleton and Cole are not as good as Ty Cobb, Donlin, Fred Clarke and big Sam Crawford. They content that the team would be better with Addie Joss, Doc White, Cy Young, Mordical Brown, Orvie Overall and Wild Bill Donovan pitching for it, than it was with Clark, Shaner, Brenan, Bailey, Westcott, Swaim and Andrews working on the slab. They even go so far as to express a preference for John Kling and Billy Sullivan over Art Queisser, though most of them fall in line and consider "Buck" Weaver a fit candidate for a place on their team.
As to Holland - well, the fact that they were doing the talking shows who they would put in his place. Each one of them was just a little bit too modest to suggest the name of him who cold manage a team just right.
Every man had the right to his own opinion - knockers as well as others. It's the everlasting expression of it that grates on the ears of the real fan, and that was what makes a knocker.
Wichita would go into the Western league race two weeks from that day with a team that was made up of men who were comparatively unknown. There wasn't a star in the bunch. There wasn't a star in the bunch, and there wasn't a man in the lot who had started back towards the scrap pile. Everyone was a hustler, and everyone was out to win. It would suit Manager Holland unless someone falls down who looks good now.
It would be such a team only much better of course, as that which won the pennant for Wichita in 1905. That one was doped, even by President Shively himself, to draw the booby prize in the Western association that season. It fooled all of the critics, though.The Topeka experts, with a whole year's experience in the same company, saw it work early in the season.
The Wichita team won the series, but it didn't show the class to hold the pace. It may not have had class, but it won the pennant.
Most of the real fans in Wichita feel that they were justified in having faith in both Jack Holland and Frank Isbell. Two pennant winners out of four, a close third and a closer second for the other two teams, was a pretty good record for Manager Holland, and when he says that he would land in the first division, most of the fans believe he would. They were not worrying about how he was going to get there. They were relying upon his judgment, because he had shown them that he had it and knew how to use it.
Holland and Isbell had been doing things for Wichita since they go hold of the team franchise. Not only did they take a team that was riddled by the higher leagues that last season and put it within less than twenty points of the top, but they were the chief actors in the little game of baseball politics which put Wichita and Topeka in the Western league. They spent their own me=oney and used their own time to work it, and they deserve something better than even the few knocks which have been thrown at them that spring.
Whether he lands in the first division or not, and the real fans were confident that he would, Jack Holland ought to be given credit for what he had done to give Wichita some prominence in baseball. The poorest way to thank him for what he had done, was to tell everyone that he was bound to fall down that year, and that he was not equal to the task of picking a Western league winner. The best way to show appreciation was to get behind him and boost. He didn't ask it, but he was like most other men, and would appreciate the show of a little assurance that the Wichita fans had faith in him, rather than a skeptical shake of a hollow head every time the chance for the Wichita team was discussed.
~ "Buckle-up, Buttercup!"
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