The
Gashouse Gang was a nickname applied to the
St. Louis CardinalsThe St. Louis Cardinals are a professional baseball team based in St. Louis, Missouri. They are members of the Central Division in the National League of Major League Baseball...
Major League BaseballMajor League Baseball is the highest level of play in North American professional baseball. Specifically, Major League Baseball refers to the organization that operates the National League and the American League, by means of a joint organizational structure that has developed gradually between...
team of .
The Cardinals, by most accounts, earned this nickname from the team's generally very shabby appearance and rough-and-tumble tactics. An opponent once stated that the Cardinals players usually went into the field in unwashed, dirty and smelly uniforms, which alone spread horror among their rivals. According to one account, scrappy
shortstopShortstop, abbreviated SS, is the baseball fielding position between second and third base. Shortstop is often regarded as the most dynamic defensive position in baseball, because there are more right-handed hitters in baseball than left-handed hitters, and most hitters have a tendency to pull the...
Leo DurocherLeo Ernest Durocher , nicknamed Leo the Lip, was an American infielder and manager in Major League Baseball. Upon his retirement, he ranked fifth all-time among managers with 2,009 career victories, second only to John McGraw in National League history. Durocher still ranks tenth in career wins by...
coined the term.
The
Gashouse Gang was a nickname applied to the
St. Louis CardinalsThe St. Louis Cardinals are a professional baseball team based in St. Louis, Missouri. They are members of the Central Division in the National League of Major League Baseball...
Major League BaseballMajor League Baseball is the highest level of play in North American professional baseball. Specifically, Major League Baseball refers to the organization that operates the National League and the American League, by means of a joint organizational structure that has developed gradually between...
team of .
The Cardinals, by most accounts, earned this nickname from the team's generally very shabby appearance and rough-and-tumble tactics. An opponent once stated that the Cardinals players usually went into the field in unwashed, dirty and smelly uniforms, which alone spread horror among their rivals. According to one account, scrappy
shortstopShortstop, abbreviated SS, is the baseball fielding position between second and third base. Shortstop is often regarded as the most dynamic defensive position in baseball, because there are more right-handed hitters in baseball than left-handed hitters, and most hitters have a tendency to pull the...
Leo DurocherLeo Ernest Durocher , nicknamed Leo the Lip, was an American infielder and manager in Major League Baseball. Upon his retirement, he ranked fifth all-time among managers with 2,009 career victories, second only to John McGraw in National League history. Durocher still ranks tenth in career wins by...
coined the term. He and his teammates were speaking derisively of the
American LeagueThe American League of Professional Baseball Clubs, or simply the American League , is one of two leagues that make up Major League Baseball in the United States and Canada. It developed from the Western League, a minor league based in the Great Lakes states, that eventually aspired to major league...
and the consensus was that the Redbirds – should they prevail in the
National LeagueThe National League of Professional Baseball Clubs, known simply as the National League , is the older of two leagues constituting Major League Baseball, and the world's oldest extant professional team sports league...
race – would handle whoever won the AL pennant. "Why, they wouldn't even let us in that league over there," Durocher, who had played for the
New York YankeesThe New York Yankees are a professional baseball team based in the borough of the Bronx, in New York City, New York and are a member of Major League Baseball's American League East Division...
, observed. "They think we're just a bunch of gashousers." The phrase "gas house" referred to plants that manufactured town gas for lighting and cooking from coal, which were common fixtures in US cities prior to the widespread use of
natural gasNatural gas is a gas consisting primarily of methane. It is found associated with fossil fuels, in coal beds, as methane clathrates, and is created by methanogenic organisms in marshes, bogs, and landfills...
. The plants were noted for their foul smell and were typically located near railroad yards in the poorest neighborhood in the city. Many of the players on the Cardinal roster, including the
Dean brothersJerome Hanna "Dizzy" Dean was an American pitcher in Major League Baseball, and was the last National League pitcher to win 30 games in one season. He was elected to the Baseball Hall of Fame in 1953....
,
Pepper MartinJohnny Leonard Roosevelt “Pepper” Martin was a Major League Baseball player. Martin, who was also known as the “Wild Horse of the Osage”, was a third baseman and outfielder for the St. Louis Cardinals'“Gashouse Gang” during the 1930s.Martin spent seven years in the Cardinals farm system...
,
Spud DavisVirgil Lawrence "Spud" Davis was an American catcher in Major League Baseball for the St. Louis Cardinals, Philadelphia Phillies, Cincinnati Reds, and Pittsburgh Pirates. He also served as the manager of the Pirates in 1946. Davis was born in Birmingham, Alabama, he also died there, at age 79, and...
, and
Burgess WhiteheadBurgess Urquhart "Whitey" Whitehead was a Major League Baseball player. He made his Major League debut with the St. Louis Cardinals in 1933, playing primarily second base. He was with the Cardinals until 1935, then played with the New York Giants , and Pittsburgh Pirates...
, were
SouthernersSoutherners may refer to:* Southerners Sports Club , an informal, non-commercial Bangkok-based club of expats and Thais.* Southerners, are a group of Mexican American street gangs with origins in the oldest barrios of Southern California....
or Southwesterners from working class backgrounds. Led by playing
managerIn baseball, the head coach of a team is called the manager ; this individual controls matters of team strategy on the field and team leadership. Managers are typically assisted by between one and six assistant coaches, whose responsibilities are specialized...
Frankie FrischFrancis "Frankie" Frisch , nicknamed the Fordham Flash, or The Old Flash, was an German-American Major League Baseball player of the early twentieth century.Frisch was a switch-hitter who threw right-handed...
and the hard-nosed Durocher, as well as stars like
Joe MedwickJoseph Michael Medwick , nicknamed "Ducky", was an American player in Major League Baseball. A left fielder for the St. Louis Cardinals during the "Gashouse Gang" era of the 1930s, he also played for the Brooklyn Dodgers , New York Giants , and Boston Braves...
,
Ripper CollinsJames Anthony "Ripper" Collins was a Major League Baseball player from 1931 to 1941 for the St. Louis Cardinals, Chicago Cubs, and Pittsburgh Pirates...
, Pepper Martin, and the Dean brothers, the 1934 Cardinals won 95 games, the NL pennant, and the
World SeriesThe 1934 World Series matched the St. Louis Cardinals against the Detroit Tigers, with the Cardinals' "Gashouse Gang" winning in seven games for their third championship in nine years....
in seven games over the
Detroit TigersThe Detroit Tigers are a Major League Baseball team based in Detroit, Michigan. One of the American League's eight charter franchises, the club was founded in Detroit in . The Tigers have won four World Series championships and have won the American League pennant 10 times...
.
The team featured five regulars who hit at least .300, a 30-game winner in Dizzy Dean (the last National League pitcher to win 30 games in a single season, and the last pitcher in Major League Baseball to do so until
Denny McLainDennis Dale "Denny" McLain is a former American professional baseball player, and the last major league pitcher to win 30 or more games during a season --a feat accomplished by only 13 players in the 20th Century....
accomplished the feat for the Detroit Tigers), and four All-Stars, including player-manager Frisch. Not among the All-Stars was Collins, the
first basemanFirst base, or 1B, is the first of four stations on a baseball diamond which must be touched in succession by a baserunner in order to score a run for that player's team. A first baseman is the player on the team playing defense who fields the area nearest first base, and is responsible for the...
who led the team in sixteen offensive catergories with stats like a .333
batting averageBatting average is a statistic in both cricket and baseball measuring the performance of cricket batsmen and baseball hitters, respectively. The two statistics are related, in that baseball averages are directly descended from the concept of cricket averages....
, a .615
slugging percentageIn baseball statistics, slugging percentage is a popular measure of the power of a hitter. It is calculated as total bases divided by at bats:...
, 35 home runs, and 128 runs batted in.
In the World Series, the Cards and Tigers split the first two games in
DetroitDetroit is the largest city in the U.S. state of Michigan and the seat of Wayne County. Detroit is a major port city on the Detroit River, in the Midwest region of the United States. Located north of Windsor, Ontario, Detroit is the only major U.S. city that looks south to Canada. It was founded...
, and the Tigers took two of the next three in
St. LouisSt. Louis is an independent city in the U.S. state of Missouri. With an estimated population of 354,361 in 2008, it is the principal municipality of Greater St. Louis, population 2,866,517, the largest urban area in Missouri and sixteenth largest in the United States...
. St. Louis proceeded to win the next two, including an 11-0 embarrassment of the Tigers in Detroit to win the Series. The stars for the Cards were Medwick, who had a .379 batting average with one of St. Louis' two home runs and a series-high five RBI, and the Dean Brothers, who combined for all four of the teams wins with 28 strikeouts and a minuscule 1.43
earned run averageIn baseball statistics, earned run average is the mean of earned runs given up by a pitcher per nine innings pitched. The ERA tells the average number of runs a pitcher would surrender over the course of a full game had he been kept in for the full nine innings...
.
Popular culture
One of the teams in the 1946
Warner Bros.Warner Bros. Entertainment, Inc. Warner Bros. Entertainment, Inc. Warner Bros. Entertainment, Inc. (also known as Warner Bros. Pictures, or simply Warner Bros.—the shortened form of the former official, sometimes still used, formal corporate name: Warner Brothers
cartoon Baseball BugsBaseball Bugs is a Warner Brothers Looney Tunes theatrical cartoon short released on February 2, 1946 starring Bugs Bunny. It had a similar theme to MGM's 1944 Batty Baseball, which was directed by former WB cartoon director Tex Avery.-Crew:...
was called the "Gashouse Gorillas".
Country-bluegrass band Old Crow Medicine Show refers to them in the song "Caroline" on their 2008 album "Tennessee Pusher".
External links