Welcome back to Routine Moments in Baseball History, a running weekday feature that looks back at plays that have been ignored by the history books because history books only talk about things that are important or interesting. Today's installment is "Flint Rhem Is Hungover Again."Eighty years ago today Flint Rhem pitched a mess of a game against the New York Giants. The Boston Brave couldn't get out of the fifth inning, he gave up ten hits and three runs, and though reliever Bob Smith came on and got the Braves out of a jam, the visitors ended up losing at New York's Polo Grounds. There are all kinds of reasons Rhem (nicknamed "Shad") might have underperformed, but the most likely one was that when he took the mound he was still sweating out the fumes from the night before.
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"While [Rhem] put together 12 seasons in the majors, and had a 20-win season in 1926," wrote Nancy Snell Griffith in a biography of the pitcher for the Society for American Baseball Research, "most of the stories told about him revolve around alcohol." Back when he played, baseball men had a vaguely disreputable air about them—they spent their summers on noisy trains and in ballparks and in bars, they'd get traded and demoted and sold without the freedom that free agency now offers players. There were no cameraphones on which fans could record them getting falling-down drunk in speakeasies, and no gossip blogs that would report on such antics. As a result, men like Rhem could spend their days in ballparks (which were seedier and dirtier than today's gleaming stadiums) and their nights in some corner having whiskey poured down their throats without a care in the world.Rhem broke into the majors with the St. Louis Cardinals in 1924, when he was 23 years old. He was big and tall and athletic—legend has it he could fit five baseballs in one hand—and hailed from a nothing of a town called Rhems in South Carolina that was named after one of his ancestors. He went to college for engineering, possibly in response to pressure from his parents, but his real passion was for pitching. He played for the Clemson University team and for various small South Carolina squads, keeping track of his statistics himself and once writing a letter to the owner of the Detroit Tigers to offer his services. Sportswriters gushed about his promise, and he seemed to be cashing in on that ability in 1926, the year he won 20 games and the Cardinals beat the New York Yankees in the World Series. Rhem started Game Four and gave up a pair of homers to Babe Ruth; in Game Seven he and Grover Alexander were supposedly drinking in the bullpen while their team clinched the title.Rhem spent another decade in the majors, but it was all downhill from there. There was the time he was offered a bonus if he quit drinking but ended up relapsing, the time he claimed to have been kidnapped by gangsters who forced him to drink liquor, the time he was sent back down to the minors for a year, the frequent demands he made for more money from the team that were routinely refused. In 1932 he was gone from St. Louis, though he'd return twice as he bounced between the Cardinals, the Braves, and the Philadelphia Phillies. Ballplayers and drunks age quickly, and Rhem belonged to both fraternities—by August 11, 1934, he was on his way out of the bigs, a nice man by all accounts but shaky, worn down, the kind of guy you like but feel vaguely sorry for.History does not record whether Rhem looked like he had just rolled out of a bar, whether he was visibly wilting in the fifth, when all of a sudden he couldn't get an out. That's not the sort of thing that shows up in box scores. Neither can we say how he handled getting taken out of the game, whether he was apologetic like some alcoholics are, muttering "sorry" to the boys in the dugout while he watched a game he was suddenly no longer a part of, or whether he simply slunk back to the shade of the bench and took refuge under his hat and began counting the outs until the game was over and he could go find some welcoming New York barstool.That year was the last season he was a baseball player of any consequence—he'd pitch fewer than 100 innings for the Braves and Cardinals in the next two years, then get tossed back to the minors. He tried to get back to the majors a few times, but it didn't work; his epitaph was already written. In her short biography of him, Griffith quotes a history of the the Phillies that has shortstop Dick Bartell saying what everyone thought of Rhem: "If he'd ever stayed sober, what a pitcher he could have been."This has been Routine Moments in Baseball History. Follow Harry Cheadle on Twitter.