Friday, April 15, 1927: New York City

Sailor Bob Shawkey And The Tiger Lady

Myles Thomas

Published in

1927: The Diary of Myles Thomas

5 min readApr 15, 2016

Yesterday’s game ended in a tie. 9–9.

It was called on account of darkness. It seemed to all of us that there was enough light to go at least another inning but umpire Bill McGowan called it. Meusel for some reason went off. He came back to the dugout and broke a bat against the dugout wall. Meusel’s not a man of many words, in fact he’ll go a week at a time without saying two words, honest. Apparently, his two words for this week are: “Darkness. Bullshit.”

“Sailor Bob” Shawkey started the game and didn’t even make it through the first inning: A walk to Collins, followed by two singles, including one by Cobb, and a triple — it was like watching batting practice — until Miller Huggins decided to bring in our twenty-nine-year-old rookie, Wilcy Moore.

Shawkey’s thirty six, and in his fifteenth season, and my guess is this will be his last. He didn’t look sharp in spring training, and his best days are clearly behind him. But his value to our team is immense, he’s our unofficial pitching coach. He started with the Athletics way back in 1913, and was tutored early by both Connie Mack and the great Indian pitcher, Chief Bender. He’s incredibly crafty. He wears a bright red long-sleeve undershirt under his short-sleeved uniform, and the red flannel flaps in the wind when he pitches, distracting the hitters.

“Sailor Bob” got his name because of his Naval service during the Great War. And just how he “joined” the Navy is the stuff of legend:

Back in Philadelphia just before the Great War, Shawkey, who was married to a school teacher, fell hard for a rather infamous woman, Marie Lakjer. Her name was most aptly pronounced “Look-Here,” but everybody called her the Tiger Lady, in no small part because she liked to wear clothes made of Tiger skins. She was also, to put it gently, quite well known by most of the players in the American League.

When Shawkey first met her in his early 20s, the Tiger Lady was married to a wealthy elderly fellow named Herbert Mason Clapp, but their marriage ended rather suddenly when she put a bullet in Clapp’s head. The Tiger Lady claimed it was in self-defense, but most of the boys I’ve talked to agree with Mr. Clapp, who upon recovery is said to have warned the police, “Beware, she is not afraid of a gun, man, or the devil.”

After the Tiger Lady beat the rap, she and Shawkey got married. Unfortunately, it wasn’t very long before the Tiger Lady wanted to shoot Shawkey, too. But realizing that it would be a little difficult to claim self-defense for shooting two different husbands, the Tiger Lady decided she’d have someone else do it — lucky for her there was at least half a continent willing and able to try and kill Shawkey for her.

The Great War had broken out. And when Shawkey brought home special draft papers for his wife to sign that would have exempted him from military service, because he was the sole provider for his family, the Tiger Lady refused to sign them. “I want him to go to war, the sooner the better,” is the way she put it to a certain ChiSox first baseman during a horizontal discussion they were having one night.

Not willing to wait for the U.S. armed forces to remove Shawkey from her life, the Tiger Lady threw him out of their house and into the street with only his clothes, two deer heads (Shawkey’s a big hunter, and was quite grateful to keep the heads), and his hunting dogs. Shortly thereafter, he found himself on a battleship in the North Sea, surrounded by German U-boats. Hence, “Sailor Bob.”

On board the battleship, Sailor Bob actually witnessed the surrender of the German fleet in November of 1918, which he calls “The greatest sight I ever saw.”

The days and nights at sea changed him. Matured him. He came back to the States and won 20 games in three of the next four seasons, and 18 in the fourth. “Compared to life aboard a battleship,” he likes to say from time to time, “baseball is a life of indolence and ease.”

Just not today.