The MLB London Series has produced various viral moments, but one historical moment ahead of Sunday's game between the Philadelphia Phillies and New York Mets may have them all beat.
Actor Rob McElhenney, best known for It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia, was poised to throw the first pitch before the game on Sunday. He stepped out onto the field at London Stadium sporting a Phillies jersey, ready to throw the pitch to former Phillies World Series champion Chase Utley. However, McElhenney's wife Kaitlin Olson ran onto the field and changed the course of the pitch.
Apparently McElhenney couldn't decide between throwing the first pitch to Utley or Phillies star Bryce Harper, so he decided to include them both.
Olson rolled the ball to McElhenney, who was playing as shortstop, who then threw to the former second baseman Utley, who then threw to Harper at first base. McElhenney invented the first "double play" before a game.
Check out the awesome moment here.
Rob McElhenney just couldn't choose between Bryce Harper and Chase Utley to catch his first pitch ... so he turned a double play with them instead 😂#LondonSeriespic.twitter.com/F3zcFAQyWn
LONDON –– Fifteen years to the day from the publication of what became an iconic SI cover, Bryce Harper met up with me again, just as we did in Las Vegas when he was a 16-year-old kid with major league bat speed. This time we were 5,200 miles away from his hometown, or one-fifth the circumference of the earth, on a converted soccer pitch in London. We stood alone in a hallway between the Philadelphia Phillies’ dugout and their clubhouse.
Like a Broadway show or a rock band tour, Harper and the Phillies had just brought their tried-and-true act across the pond, as if it is similarly scripted. There is a familiar songbook feel to the Phillies, the best team in baseball. They beat the New York Mets, 7–2, with great starting pitching, a ridiculously deep shutdown bullpen and the usual basketful of runs that required a second hand to count. There is no stopping this team—not even traversing 18 time zones in 17 days, as the Phillies will have done by the time they land in Boston around 10 p.m. Sunday.
Harper is their headliner, the leader the team draws its ferocity and confidence from. He also showed in the opener of the London Series that he gives more than that. Harper has the “it” factor when it comes to big moments, a trait he had even at 16 when everybody in amateur baseball knew his name.
About three hours before the game, Harper dragged himself into the Phillies’ clubhouse as if he had just awoken, head bowed, headphones on, vintage cream-colored World Series baseball cap pulled low. He was wearing a plaid shacket, gray chinos and white sneakers.
“Tired,” he told me. “Just tired. When you cross however many time zones we have, it catches up to you.”
And then the lights went on.
When they did, baseball’s Mick Jagger took the stage full of intent. It was showtime. He brought to the plate a custom-painted bat with the Philly Phanatic wearing one of those bearskin hats worn by the guards at Buckingham Palace. With his apropos prop, Harper’s first three at-bats in the U.K. went like this:
Double hit 103.2 mph. Home run hit 107.2 mph. Single hit 109.8 mph.
It was only the ninth time in his career Harper crushed three hits that hard in the same game. London calling? Harper answered. That’s showmanship.
The hits weren’t even the best part. Upon his homer in the fourth inning off Mets lefthander Sean Manaea, Harper threw himself into a Premier League-quality, goal-celebrating slide on his knees as he neared the Philadelphia dugout, his hands thrown up in jubilation, and shouted, “I love soccer!” On a baseball field literally placed atop the natural home turf of West Ham United, Harper found the perfect way to connect the U.S. with the U.K.: the slide heard ‘round the world.
He told me he was on the training table before the game, awakening his body, when his mind conjured this gloriously fun piece of showmanship. Of course, he still had to hit a baseball bloody hard and far for the full house to get a chance to see it, which of course he did.
Fifteen years ago when I wrote about Harper, I was astonished by his bat speed and blown away by his confidence, sense of purpose and bond with his family that were beyond his years. Baseball is a highly skilled game that can grind down even the most talented players with the frequent storms of failure that do not discriminate. True greatness is not guaranteed, but what I did know was that if any 16-year-old kid had the granite-like foundation to weather the storms of failure and expectations, it was this one.
He has not disappointed. The home run was career home run number 321 for Harper. Not turning 32 until October, Harper with two more walks will join Mickey Mantle and Barry Bonds as the only players with 300 homers, 100 stolen bases and 1,000 walks through age 31, the imprimaturs of power, speed and patience. He has been even better in the postseason, rising to a .613 slugging percentage and .996 OPS. He has two MVP awards.
But what he does not have is a World Series championship, his six postseason appearances ending at best with one pennant. That is why as we stood there in the runway in London Stadium, Harper gushed not about his celebratory slide but about what makes this Philadelphia team special.
“I just don't feel like we have any emotion, like, towards good or bad,” he says. “Yeah, I think we’re good. We've got a lot of young veterans. But I think we do a really good job of understanding what we can do on a daily basis. It's just fun. I mean, it really is. We just have a good time, man.
“Like I say—and I say it all the time—but we hate to lose more than we like to win.”
The Phillies rarely lose. They are 45–19. Thirty-five previous teams in the World Series era won at least 45 of their first 64 games. Twenty-seven of them won a pennant (77%), with 13 of them winning it all (37%).
The modern expanded postseason is a minefield, as the Phillies discovered last year when an Arizona team with six fewer wins bounced them from the tournament. But this Phillies team, which is relatively young, deep, fearless and coalesced, has a vibe similar to that of the most recent National League team to start 45–19 on its way to winning it all: the 1986 New York Mets.
“We can be down in a game or ahead in a game,” Harper says, “and it's just like, ‘Alright, keep going consistently.’ You know, that's the key. It's a long season, of course. But I think we have a really good demeanor for that. It doesn't matter what you do right now. I mean, obviously it does, but you gotta keep going. It’s like, ‘You just gotta keep going.’ That’s it. That’s what we do.”
Harper and the Phillies boast plenty of playoff experience from the last few years and are primed to win their first division title since 2011. / Kyle Ross-USA TODAY Sports
One hundred fifty years ago, in August of 1874, 22 players from the Boston Braves and Philadelphia A’s crossed the Atlantic in the first attempt to introduce baseball to England. The ballplayers wound up being asked to play cricket more than baseball. They played 14 dates in England, seven of them in London.
A newspaper in Tauton was not impressed with this game of baseball, especially when the skill of pitching was compared to cricket: “The variety of English bowling contrasts favourably with the apparent monotony of the pitching at base-ball … The constant employment of the same action by all bowlers strikes an English eye as wearisome.”
One hundred years ago, on Oct. 25, 1924, the Times of London carried a letter to the editor postmarked from Windlesham, Crowborough. The writer was a rare local fan of baseball, writing in perfect prose, “Here is a splendid game, which calls for a fine eye, activity, bodily fitness and judgment in the highest degree … It takes only two or three hours in the playing …”
It was signed, Arthur Conan Doyle. Yes, the famous author of the Sherlock Holmes series admired the American pastime.
One hundred years later, though, baseball still has not made strong inroads in English culture. There is only one dedicated baseball complex in the country. But if the goal of these international games is simply to expose the greatness of the game to the unfamiliar, then the opener of the latest London Series was a smash hit.
Fifteen years to the day after his introduction to a national audience courtesy of the SI cover, Harper made his in-person introduction to an international audience. He did so as one of the game’s great showpersons. He did so simply by being himself.
Sitting in an ornate royal box behind home plate at Stamford Bridge Grounds in Chelsea, watching the first baseball game of his life, the King of England heard umpire Bill Klem call a strike.
Turning to Walter Hines Page, the United States ambassador to Great Britain, King George V remarked, “I thought that one was pretty low.”
King George caught on quickly. The rest of England did not.
The date was Feb. 26, 1914. About five months later, on Aug. 4, King George would write in his diary, “I held council at 10:45 to declare war with Germany. It is a terrible catastrophe but it is not our fault … Please God it may soon be over.”
This glorious day, however, was dedicated to the pomp and circumstance of the most star-studded and spectacular baseball game ever played on English soil. It was, by one eyewitness account, “the greatest event that America has ever shown England.”
Among the luminaries on hand that day were John McGraw (who would pen a Page 1 account of the game for the New York Times), Tris Speaker, Jim Thorpe, Charles Comiskey, Damon Runyon, the Duchess of Marlboro, the Duke of Devonshire, the Earl of Chesterfield, Lord Desborough, the Earl of Lonsdale, Rear-Admiral Sir Colin Keppel, Sir Frederick Ponsonby and Lord Granville. The star of stars was King George, then 48 years old, four years into his reign and soon to be the grandfather of the future Queen Elizabeth II.
The game culminated the longest and strangest MLB exhibition tour ever pulled off: 50 games over 138 days in which players from the New York Giants and Chicago White Sox circumnavigated the globe—from the United States to Japan to Hong Kong to Manila to Australia to Sri Lanka to Egypt to Italy to France and, finally, to England and Stamford Bridge, the famed venue that opened in 1877 and since 1905 has served as home to Chelsea Football Club. The traveling party first gathered in Cincinnati on Oct. 13, 1913, and returned March 6, 1914, in a snowstorm to New York harbor aboard the RMS Lusitania, the luxury liner that 14 months later would be sunk by torpedoes from the German submarine U-20.
The purpose of the trip was to introduce the American pastime to the world. The day before the game at Stamford Bridge, Harry Gordon Selfridge, the American proprietor of his famed eponymous department store, threw a reception at the Hotel Savoy for the touring Americans. White Sox manager Jimmy Callahan addressed the crowd there, explaining that the exhibition in England was arranged not to have baseball supplant cricket but simply to show off the sport.
King Charles III is not expected to attend, though he could decide at the last minute to pop in and create international buzz, the way King George V did in 1914, providing the biggest gate receipts for the American ballplayers on their around-the-world-in-138-days tour.
Comiskey, the White Sox owner, and McGraw, the Giants manager, organized what was then the third international baseball tour and the first in a quarter of a century, following trips to England in 1874 and to seven countries, including England, in 1888. The organizers hoped to break even. Thanks largely to King George, they wound up netting almost $100,000, or about $3.1 million in today’s dollars.
Traveling by special trains, the troubadours first played 31 games in 33 days in the United States, not including rainouts in Abilene, Sacramento and Seattle. On Nov. 19 they left Seattle for Japan on a steamship. So rough were the seas they did not arrive in Yokohama until Dec. 6, four days late.
Everywhere they went the players encountered enthusiastic crowds, though the fervor in Japan impressed them the most. “The Japanese surprised us with their knowledge of inside baseball,” Callahan said. “No matter where we went in Japan the crowds followed us after the games were over. American fans have nothing on the Japanese as rooters.”
On Feb. 1, the Giants and White Sox played a game in the shadow of the pyramids in Cairo. It ended in a tie, only the second such tie in the series. Games in Rome and Paris were rained out. By the time they reached London, the White Sox led the series 23–20 with two ties. (In four other games, the teams combined rosters to play against local teams, winning all four.)
The traveling party arrived in London from Nice on Feb. 24. A few players, including Tip O’Neill and Jim Mullen, left London for Ireland to fetch Callahan, who had left the tour in Paris for the Emerald Isle and was lost in the wilds of Kilkenny.
That night the ballplayers in London attended an evening show in their honor at the Prince of Wales Theatre. The next morning, they toured the House of Parliament before heading to the luncheon at the Hotel Savoy. Presiding over the lunch, with 300 people filling the ballroom, was John L. Griffiths, Counsel General of the United States to Britain, a garrulous, beefy man and noted dinner speaker. (He would die suddenly of a heart attack three months later at age 58.)
Griffiths compared baseball to cricket, noting how each sport suited its country’s temperament. Cricket, he reminded the audience, allows for a recess of tea.
“But imagine such a condition in baseball,” he said, “yet both games build up a people from whose loins spring men of greatness.”
He painted a scene of a batter hitting a ball with the score tied and a full count in the bottom of the last inning.
“While the result is impending,” he gushed, “a man may be pardoned for forgetting his home ties, the names and ages of his children, and even his own name or whether he is married or single.”
Meanwhile, a controversy brewed. McGraw was quoted by a New York newspaper saying American soldiers were superior to their British counterparts because of the athletic discipline in the states and how baseball benefited the mind as well as the body. The Pall Mall Gazette, a London Daily, chastised McGraw as impertinent. Talk of a boycott began to grow around London.
McGraw did not attend the luncheon, blaming his absence on a severe cold contracted from the “damp, foggy weather here.” He denied making any such statements comparing American and British soldiers.
King George V (center) was among the 30,000 or so in attendance. / Courtesy James E. Elfers
The controversy blew over, especially after King George announced he would attend the game. According to a wire service report, the announcement had “almost a magical effect in London, which has a touch of baseball fever. It was the chief topic of conversation not only at the American bars of big hotels but even where Englishmen gathered around for their 5 o’clock teacups.” The game sold out in two hours. Stamford Grounds accommodated about 30,000 people for the baseball game.
A royal box was built behind the plate, replete with screening to protect the royals from foul balls. The box was draped in red cretonne and trimmed in palms, lilies, hyacinths and narcissus. It was furnished with Louis de Quinze armchairs upholstered in white flowered silk. Looking back, it was the day the luxury suite was born.
On game day, the players dressed at their hotel and were driven to Chelsea in automobiles bedecked with silk American flags on the hood. They received a police escort.
“Had it not been for this protection,” McGraw wrote, “we would never have been able to reach the grounds on account of the immense crowds.”
King George was driven there by “ordinary limousine,” according to Runyon, the legendary writer whose account included this preface as a nod to the wonder of technology: “Special by cable to New York, and leased by wire, the longest in the world.” The world was getting smaller, and baseball wanted a bigger piece of it.
Wearing a derby, not a crown, the king and his party entered Stamford Grounds at precisely 3 p.m. Noticing his majesty, the spectators rose from their seats and let out a great roar. The king bowed in appreciation at the welcome. The players walked toward the royal box and serenaded the king with three cheers. King George told McGraw and Comiskey, “I am very glad to have you gentlemen here with your baseball teams.” McGraw expressed his appreciation. King George then tossed a baseball to Callahan, who gave it to Klem, who gave it to Jim “Death Valley” Scott, the starting pitcher for the White Sox.
The king’s enjoyment was visible. He cheered wildly when White Sox righthander Red Faber pitched out of a one-out, bases loaded jam. When Joe Benz of the Sox was hit by a pitch, King George laughed when he heard an American fan yell, “That’s right, kill him!” Said the king as Benz took his base, “He certainly deserves something for being hit.”
When a foul ball whizzed past the royal box and broke a window above it, King George scooped up a piece of broken glass as a souvenir. He laughed when he saw how a police officer had to track down foul balls. With Page’s help, he kept score in the game program, using a table set up next to his upholstered chair for that very purpose. He looked mystified when a fan, upon watching Thorpe swing and miss at a pitch, yelled, “There’s a hole in the bat!”
He was most awestruck, McGraw said, “by the grace of the players and by the high flies.” King George also wondered how pitchers could make the ball swoop and arc. Giants lefthander Charles Bunn Hearn, known as “Bunny,” was summoned to show him how pitchers gripped and released the ball, which is how Bunny Hearn forever would tell people he taught the King of England how to throw a curve.
Also in the royal box, the Earl of Chesterfield was so mesmerized by this baseball exhibition that it wasn’t until later he realized someone had stolen an ornate pin from him. It was valued at $2,500, or $78,000 in today’s dollars.
Wrote McGraw, “If the King had been at the Polo Grounds at a game which would decide the world’s series he could not have witnessed a harder played battle than the clash today.”
The game was a corker, even though, according to one observation of the English fans, “Before two innings had been played, many of them confessed themselves mystified. For the remainder of the game they sat as though in a daze.”
The New York Times, in an account it trumpeted with the preface, “By Marconi Transatlantic Wireless Telegraph,” noted parts of the game particularly amused the English fans. They could not fathom why the coaches talked so much. (“It wasn’t right to confuse the players,” as one was quoted.) Others didn’t like the idea that foul balls did not count. (“’Twas a shame when the ball goes so far.”) They were puzzled by the spitball tactics of Faber. (“Why does the pitcher kiss the ball all the time?”)
After the eighth inning, just past four o’clock, hundreds of English fans left their seats to grab afternoon tea. They missed a wild finish.
In the last of the 10th with the Giants up, 4–2, and Buck Weaver on second base, Sam Crawford of the Detroit Tigers, added to the Sox for the tour, smoked a game-tying home run. Wrote Runyon of the wild response in the crowd, “That was when those Americans really began to cut loose with some homelike enthusiasm. Even the British seemed to sense the tense excitement of the situation.”
The Giants did not score in the top of the 11th. Then, as if the bombastic Griffiths had presaged the moment, Tom Daly, the 23-year-old White Sox first baseman, ended the game with a walkoff home run into the left field bleachers off Faber. People cheered the players even as they left the grounds. Ambassador Page told the teams that the game was “the greatest event that America has ever shown England.”
The king stayed for all 11 innings, befitting George’s reputation as an unpretentious monarch who changed how royalty connected with commoners. He and his wife, Mary, would visit working blue-collar families and inquire about living conditions. He often visited troops on the front lines during the war. He preferred collecting stamps and game shooting over the opera, once writing, “Went to Covent Garden and saw Fidelio and damned dull it was.”
Baseball caught his fancy. When the players returned to the Savoy, a message from King George awaited them. He told them he enjoyed the game almost as thoroughly as the day on which his father’s horse won the English Derby.
The next morning, the English dailies offered reviews of the American pastime, mostly expressing a preference for cricket over baseball. “Two runs in an hour is too slow for an Englishman, who wants to see a hundred knocked up in cricket in that time,” the New York Times summarized.
One writer compared the exhibition to a “short music-hall turn,” or limited run show: it wins delighted applause but “it becomes mechanical by its very perfection.”
That same morning, the Americans boarded the Lusitania, sailing out of Liverpool. It took them seven days to cross the Atlantic. On their last night on the huge liner, Germany Schaefer belted out German songs and Mike Donlin, a favorite of the bleacher creatures at Stamford Bridge who elicited chants of “Mike! Mike!”, entertained the crowd with songs and stories.
The exhibition did not ignite a baseball craze in England. The realities of war squelched any momentum for a new pastime. The game, however, did begin to take root in England in the 1930s, when Hollywood motion pictures ignited a fascination with all things American. Again, though, war interceded and baseball in England remained little more than a curiosity.
On the morning after the King of England watched 11 innings of baseball from his finely upholstered silk armchair, the London Daily News put the phenomenon into perspective:
“For about two hours a foreign sort of pandemonium whirled in the arena. Wonderful deeds, no doubt, were accomplished when the world-famous White Sox of Chicago and the universally acclaimed Giants of New York met to fight out a game of the American pastime, but it was all Greek to the crowd.
“After yesterday’s showing, baseball still remains and will remain an exclusively, peculiarly transatlantic dish, such as clams, crackers and canvasback.”
One hundred and 10 years later, as the Mets and Phillies serve up another dish of baseball across the pond, the perspective still applies.
