“The newly-crowned Monarch of all the Goats there are”:

Ernest Hemingway’s “Heinie Zim”

William Cole, University of Georgia

In Ernest Hemingway’s short story “The Three-Day Blow,” published in 1925, Nick Adams and his friend Bill conduct a long and desultory conversation while raiding Bill’s father’s supply of whiskey. They discuss the day’s baseball results, which leads them into a discussion of a player named “Heinie Zim.”[1] [mention handout] At first glance, this reference to an actual baseball player of the teens, Henry “Heinie” Zimmerman, may seem to be only a piece of realistic trivia coloring the characters’ adolescent small talk. However, Zimmerman’s presence is important to the story and to Hemingway’s writing as a whole, though not for the reasons critics have assumed. A thematic rather than a factual marker, Zimmerman and his checkered history help reinforce Nick’s sense of disillusionment and moral emptiness.

Not one of Hemingway’s most famous stories, “The Three-Day Blow” (along with its companion-piece “The End of Something”) became a bone of contention among Hemingway scholars because it features Hemingway’s recurring protagonist, Nick Adams. In editing the collection The Nick Adams Stories (1972), Philip Young made the controversial decision to treat these stories as coming after Adams’s experiences in World War I. In this he largely appealed to biographical information about Hemingway which indicates that real analogues for the events described took place in the late summer/early fall of 1919.[2]

In the ensuing debate, the baseball discussion in “The Three-Day Blow” was frequently referred to. The specificity of the references to actual events and players seemed to promise the possibility of definitively fixing the date of the story’s fictional events and even of using it as a benchmark for dating other Nick Adams stories. However, different critics came up with different dates, ranging from 1916 to 1919.[3] In part, this disagreement was due to incomplete research on the part of the scholars, but even after examining all of the relevant evidence, one comes no closer to dating “The Three-Day Blow.”

Simply put, there is no date in baseball history to which Nick and Bill’s conversation can refer. Hemingway has, intentionally or not, conflated several events. The reference to “Heinie Zim” establishes fairly clear parameters. Henry “Heinie” Zimmerman was traded from the Chicago Cubs to the New York Giants on August 28, 1916,[4] and it is clear from the story that this trade has already taken place (Bill says that Giants manager John McGraw “makes them discontented so they have to trade them to him” and Nick responds, “Like Heinie Zim” [CSS 86]). It is not clear from the comments, however, how recently the trade took place, so the only upper limit is the fact that Zimmerman played his last season in 1919.

Within those parameters, further specificity is promised by Bill’s report that the Cardinals “dropped a double-header to the Giants” and Nick’s reply, “That ought to cinch it for them” (CSS 86). This exchange clearly implies that the Giants have just clinched the National League pennant, if not mathematically then virtually. The Giants were a dominant team in this era, but within the time frame established by the Zimmerman reference, they won only one pennant—in 1917. In 1916, despite a record-setting, 26-game winning streak late in the season (which began shortly after the acquisition of Zimmerman and to which he made considerable contributions), they finished only fourth. In 1918 and 1919 they finished second to the Cubs and Cincinnati Reds, respectively. In these seasons the Giants were not in first place at any point late in the season (August through October),[5] so the possibility that Nick is handing out the championship prematurely does not seem to be involved.

The complication is that the Giants did not sweep a double-header from St. Louis at any time in the late stages of the 1917 season.[6] They did officially clinch the league championship by beating the Cardinals on Monday, September 24, but only in a single game. Even this date does not correspond to the information revealed elsewhere, that the story takes place on a Thursday (CSS 92). The Giants swept a number of late-season double-headers against the Cardinals in the other years, but never at a point that would justify Nick’s comment.[7] It could be that Hemingway simply confused the pennant clinching win with one of these double-headers. The Giants’ double-header sweep of the Cardinals on Monday, August 25, 1916, would have been memorable since it broke the major-league record for consecutive wins, while another sweep on Wednesday, August 20, 1919, belongs to the period in Hemingway’s life to which these events correspond and also fits the information regarding the day of the week. Whatever the explanation, though, Hemingway was clearly not meticulously setting his story on a verifiable date.

Other evidence in the story is also equivocal. When Nick says he would “like to see the World Series,” Bill responds, “Well, they’re always in New York or Philadelphia now.... That doesn’t do us any good” (CSS 87). As Stuart Burns and Joseph Hannum both argue, this statement makes the most sense in a 1916 context (Burns 135; Hannum 267-68), since from 1911 to 1916, the only other city to host a World Series game was Boston, equally inconvenient for the two midwestern youths.[8]

Any later dating poses the problem that according to the contemporary story “The Battler,” Nick is from Chicago (CSS 100). This fact would explain his naming Zimmerman as an example of the kind of player McGraw was stealing from other teams, but if the story takes place later than 1916, Nick should presumably be excited about his home-town teams’ upcoming appearances in the Series (the White Sox in 1917 and 1919 and the Cubs in 1918). However, Nick’s interest in this story lies with the St. Louis Cardinals. He begins the baseball conversation by asking, “What did the Cards do?”, and he later says, “I wonder if the Cards will ever win a pennant?” (Bill’s response, “Not in our lifetime” [CSS 87] is technically correct. The Cardinals would not win the pennant until 1926, after the story was published). Biographical data about Hemingway partially explains this inconsistency. Bill Smith, Hemingway’s best friend in the summer of 1919 and the model for the fictional Bill, was from St. Louis and, by his own account, “a big Cardinal rooter” (St. John [Part II] 11). If Nick has adopted his friend’s loyalties, it might explain his lack of interest in Chicago teams. However, the comment itself cannot be a biographical interpolation since by 1919 the Philadelphia/New York stranglehold on World Series games had been broken. Again, Hemingway seems to be rather loosely incorporating recalled facts (like the location of World Series games) rather than carefully reconstructing an historical moment.

These factual inconsistencies, however, do not mean that the Zimmerman reference is just a clumsily handled ornamental detail. The baseball conversation plays an important thematic role that is more interesting and more important than its role as a date stamp. In the course of a few years, Zimmerman fell from baseball hero, to World Series goat, to permanent exile. And it is to the two key steps in this, his scapegoating for the Giants’ loss in the 1917 World Series and his eventual ban from baseball for corruption in 1921, that the story refers. Zimmerman’s fall is symptomatic of a general loss of innocence for the national pastime at precisely this point in history. While these events are alluded to obliquely, knowledge of them indelibly colors the tone of the story.

After Nick mentions Zimmerman, Bill begins criticizing the third baseman:

“That bonehead will do him a lot of good.”

Bill stood up.

“He can hit,” Nick offered. The heat from the fire was baking his legs.

“He’s a sweet fielder, too,”[9] Bill said. “But he loses ball games.”

“Maybe that’s what McGraw wants him for,” Nick suggested. (CSS 86)

The appellation “bonehead” and the remark that “he loses ball games” echo the blame that Zimmerman received for the Giants’ loss in the sixth and decisive game of the 1917 World Series. Chicago and New York had split the first four games, each winning two games at home. An eighth-inning Zimmerman error contributed to Chicago’s come-from-behind win in game five, but it was the sixth game which established Zimmerman’s infamy. In the fourth inning of a 0-0 tie, Zimmerman made a throwing error which put Chicago’s Eddie Collins on second base. Two batters later, Collins was caught in a run-down between third and home, but with no one covering the plate, Collins ran home and scored with Zimmerman chasing him all the way. The White Sox went on to score two more runs in the inning and to win the game 4-2. Grantland Rice of the New York Tribune hailed Zimmerman as “the newly-crowned Monarch of all the Goats there are” (1), while the New York Times lamented, “instead of crowning a new baseball hero, Manhattan placed a clown’s cap on the head of Heinie Zimmerman of the Bronx” (“White Sox Take World Series” 1).

Interestingly, Zimmerman’s guilt here seems to have been exaggerated by the home-town press. The report of the game in the Chicago Daily Tribune, which could afford to be more dispassionate, states, “It was more the fault of Rariden [the catcher] or Holke [the first baseman] for not covering the plate than it was Heine’s [sic] blunder” (Sanborn 18). These players being out of position, as well as an earlier error by Giants outfielder Dave Robertson, contributed as much or more to the loss than any action of Zimmerman’s.[10] Regardless of the justice of it, however, Zimmerman became something of the Billy Buckner of the teens, forever fused with the image of cursed futility.

Nick also raises the specter of corruption (“Maybe that’s what McGraw wants him for” and “There’s always more to it than we know about.”). These comments have been mistakenly identified as a specifically referring to the fixing of the 1919 World Series (the “Black Sox” scandal) and, thus, claimed as evidence for a post-war dating of the story (Johnston). There is no need to make that particular connection, though, since Zimmerman himself was banned from baseball for attempting to fix games. On September 11, 1919, in the middle of a series against the Cubs, Zimmerman was replaced in the Giants lineup by Frank Frisch and simply never played again.[11] The following year, in the course of the investigation into the Black Sox scandal, McGraw testified that Zimmerman had been dropped for having offered $500 to Giants center fielder Benny Kauff to throw a game. He and teammate Hal Chase were later accused of making similar bribes to other players. Zimmerman maintained his innocence, but was banned from baseball for life in 1921 (Santa Maria and Costello 22). Although the charges against him were not formally "proven," subsequent commentators have considered the evidence sufficiently damning.

From the standpoint of strict realism, these comments are problematic. They are phrased as expectations rather than accomplished facts (“will do him a lot of good” and “Maybe that’s what he wants him for”), but there is no reason why the boys should have been able to predict them. Bill would have to have “pretty good dope” (86) indeed to foresee Zimmerman’s infamous gaffe in Game 6. Nick’s implication of corruption is more plausible, for it was an endemic problem in the late teens and twenties, but the specific details of Zimmerman’s involvement did not come out until after he was already out of baseball. Again, whatever the explanation for Hemingway’s creating these problems of chronology, one must conclude that an objectively verifiable and historically consistent context for the story was not his main goal.

The function of these references seems not to be to establish the characters as baseball insiders, but rather to awaken the reader’s knowledge of these events in order to color the emotional impact of the story. These defining moments of Zimmerman’s career illustrate the negative aspects of the baseball world at this time and become indicators of the moral atmosphere surrounding Nick. First, there is the uncompromising demand for success (still alive and well in professional sports) that results in the unjust scapegoating of Zimmerman for the 1917 Series loss. Bill’s dismissal of Zimmerman as a “bonehead” who “loses ball games” can be seen as a single instance of a societal obsession with “winners.” As Nick’s friend and confidant, Bill exerts considerable influence on Nick; here, he acts as the judging voice of society, ready to make a goat out of Nick should he misstep. In this, Nick is being brought up as a typical Hemingway hero, whose life is defined by loss and failure rather than fulfillment and success.

Second, and even more powerfully, the allusion to Zimmerman’s final disgrace suggests a broader atmosphere of moral bankruptcy. While it was the Black Sox scandal that horrified the country and finally focused scrutiny on baseball’s integrity, isolated cases such as Zimmerman’s were widespread. Zimmerman was only one of 38 players involved in scandals between 1917 and 1927, and one of 19 active players actually banned for life.[12] Nor was this problem confined to a few bad apples. Bill James has dubbed this period “A Decade Wrapped in Greed” and argues that the proliferation of dishonest play in the teens was a result of widespread materialism within the game at a time when the game itself was at a crisis: "baseball in the teens was collapsing, leaving the players (their appetites whetted by a brief, unilateral prosperity) and owners fighting over the pieces of a shrinking pie" (James 111). These scandals were shocking not because of their rarity, but because they occurred within a realm that was supposed to have exceptional status. The scandals reminded Americans, as they remind Nick, that there is no real innocence, no simple games. The apparent ease with which Nick suggests the fixing of Giants games is a marker of jaded he has already become. Fallen ideals and tainted traditions are again common Hemingway themes, so in this respect, too, “The Three-Day Blow” fits within the framework of his other fiction.

The evidence I have presented suggests a need for revising our ideas of Hemingway’s writing, particularly in the Nick Adams stories. Discussions of these stories have often taken for granted that Hemingway a complete and internally coherent conception of Nick’s life story. The factual inconsistencies in “The Three-Day Blow” suggest the opposite; Hemingway appears either careless or unconcerned about the strict reality of the details. And if he was not consistent within a single story, it seems even less likely that he would either create or adhere to a rigorous plan for a number of stories written over the span of his whole career.

However, while Hemingway may have been sloppy with his facts, he was a craftsman when it came to the effects of his fiction. Thus, even the smallest detail, like the day’s baseball results, can be rich in meaning -- if we know how to read them.

NOTES

[1] All citations from “The Three-Day Blow” are taken from text of The Complete Short Stories. They are referenced in the text with the abbreviation CSS. The baseball conversation occurs on CSS 86-87.

[2] Young argues that Nick's apparent adolescence is an after-effect of his war experiences, using Hemingway's own life to support this theory:

the events that gave rise to the next three stories ["The End of Something," "The Three-Day Blow" and the previously unpublished "Summer People"] took place in the post-war summer of 1919, through half of which he [Hemingway] was in fact still the teen-ager that Nick seems. Indeed half a year later, Marcelline observed, her brother was "more like a boy of sixteen than a man approaching his twenty-first birthday." ("Big World" 14)

With his premise that Hemingway wrote "out of experience -- seeing himself, at each stage of the narrative, as Nick," Young concludes that these stories, though they never mention the war, must depict Nick after his return.

Bernard Rodgers, Stuart Burns, and Joseph Flora (12-13) have all criticized Young's equation of Nick's and Hemingway's experiences, using the placement of these stories as specific test-cases.

[3] Burns and Howard Hannum both argue that the conversation refers to the 1916 season. Kevin Johnston dates it to 1919. George Monteiro argues most convincingly for 1917, but even he hedges, stating that "[i]t is entirely possible that to enhance the 'reality' of his story Hemingway decided to conflate into a single conversational exchange those events dispersed over three or four historical years" (210). Flora also uses the baseball data to support a 1917 date for the story (60-61).

[4]Zimmerman and Mickey Doolan were traded for Larry Doyle, Herb Hunter and Merwin Jacobson (Baseball Encyclopedia 2579). Zimmerman had begun his career as a utility infielder with the Cubs in 1907. He saw progressively more playing time from 1908-10, and in 1911 won the full-time second base job. He moved to third base in 1912, which was his primary position for the remainder of his career.

Although not a superstar-caliber player, Zimmerman did merit Nick's comment, "He can hit" (CSS 86). In 1912 he lead the league in batting average (.372), slugging percentage (.571), hits (207), doubles (41), home runs (14), and RBI (103). He also led the league in RBI in 1916 (83) and 1917 (102) (all statistics from Baseball Encyclopedia 1648-49). His leading the league in average, RBI and home runs qualifies Zimmerman for the Triple Crown, with which he is sometimes credited (Baseball Encyclopedia 24); however, Michael Santa Maria and James Costello, in their summary of Zimmerman's career, report that the RBI total is in error and should be 99, which would only have been third in the league (19).

[5]The Giants spent 51 days in first place in 1918, but none after June 5. In 1919 they spent 76 days in first, but none after July 31 (Baseball Encyclopedia 530-31). Although they were not mathematically eliminated in the 1919 season until September 16 (by losing to the Reds), a headline in the New York Tribune proclaimed their pennant hopes "Shattered" a month earlier, after they had lost four out of six games to the Reds and fallen 6 1/2 games behind (16 Aug. 1919, 10).

[6]According to the daily sports pages of the New York Tribune, the Giants played three series against the Cardinals after August 1, 1917: a four game series in St. Louis with no double-headers, August 8-11 (which the Giants won 3-1); a four game series in New York, August 16-18 (which they split 2-2, including splitting a double-header on the final day); and a three-game series in St. Louis, September 24-26, in which the Giants won the first game to clinch the pennant and then fielded rookies in the final two games, losing both.

[7]The New York Tribune reported the following double-header sweeps of the Cardinals after August 1 of the respective years: September 23 and September 25, 1916 (in New York), after which the Giants were still in fourth place; August 26, 1918 (in St. Louis), after which the Giants were in second place, 10 1/2 games behind the Cubs; and August 20, 1919 (in New York), after which the Giants were 6 1/2 games behind the Reds.

[8]The World Series sites in the teens were:

1910, Philadelphia (AL) and Chicago (NL)

1911, Philadelphia (AL) and New York (NL)

1912, Boston (AL) and New York (NL)

1913, Philadelphia (AL) and New York (NL)

1914, Philadelphia (AL) and Boston (NL)

1915, Boston (AL) and Philadelphia (NL)

1916, Boston (AL) and Brooklyn (NL)

1917, Chicago (AL) and New York (NL)

1918, Boston (AL) and Chicago (NL)

1919, Chicago (AL) and Cincinnati (NL)

(Baseball Encyclopedia 2691-700)

[9] The quality of Zimmerman’s fielding is open to debate. According to Santa Maria and Costello, "[h]is fielding was below that of an average third baseman" (19). He did break into the majors as a utility infielder and spent one season (1911) as the Cubs’ regular second baseman, suggesting his defensive skills were at least adequate. It is difficult to know how his fielding was considered at the time, and third base was considered more of a defensive position in the teens than it is today, so that even an average fielder may have been considered "sweet" at the time.

[10]This assessment is supported by Santa Maria and Costello's account of the events:

The teams returned to the Polo Grounds for game six. In the top of the fourth, with a scoreless tie in progress, Zimmerman made his way into baseball immortality. He helped set it up when he took Eddie Collins' lead-off grounder and threw the ball into the seats behind first base, with Collins advancing to second. The next batter, Joe Jackson, hit a fly ball to right field, but Robertson dropped it putting runners on first and third. . . .

Happy Felsch stepped to the plate and bounced one back to the mound. Rube Benton, the Giants' pitcher, caught Collins halfway between third and home. Benton ran Collins back toward third and tossed the ball to Zimmerman. In the meantime, Bill Rariden, the Giants' catcher, moved up the line for the rundown -- way up the line. When Collins turned back towards home, he probably could not believe what he saw. No one was covering home. Collins dashed past Rariden for the plate, and Zimmerman, stuck with the ball, chased him all the way, a few steps behind.

With Zimmerman in pursuit of Collins, the other two runners advanced to third and second. Chick Gandil followed with a single to score both runners and give the White Sox the margin of victory in a 4-2 win. (Santa Maria and Costello 20)

It may be that the New York papers were tacitly reacting to the fact that Zimmerman also had a miserable series offensively, going only 3 for 25 at the plate, a .120 average (Baseball Encyclopedia 1649).

[11]Based on an examination of daily box scores in the New York Tribune.

[12]Bill James, "Twenty Two Men Out," 134-39. James defines "involved in scandals" as: "either they were banned, officially or unofficially, or serious charges were made against them" (134).