Arena Stage in Washington is bringing back the classic musical Damn Yankees.
“One of America’s most beloved musicals is coming back,” the promotional copy reads, “dusted off and spit-shined for a new generation. All the elements that made it famous are there: a diehard love of baseball, one man’s fateful (and hilarious) pact with the Devil, and Broadway’s sexiest femme fatale … but gently re-tooled for its first major revival in the 21st Century.”
I don’t mind them “dusting off” Damn Yankees, as long as they keep Joe Hardy, the main character, the same. I believe that Joe Hardy was based on my grandfather Joe Judge. And Damn Yankees has always been special to me and my family.
Joe Hardy first appeared in Douglas Wallop’s The Year the Yankees Lost the Pennant, which became the show Damn Yankees. Wallop dated and almost married my Aunt Dorothy, Joe Sr.’s youngest daughter, in the 1940s, and she recalled that “he loved baseball, and was steeped in Senators’ history.” There are some odd coincidences. Both characters share the same name, and in the film, Joe mentions to the other players that he has just “rented a place in Chevy Chase,” where Joe Judge lived. The Devil in Damn Yankees marks September 24, my birthday, as the day Joe must relinquish his soul.
Joe Judge played first base for the Washington Senators from 1915 to 1930, and then for the Brooklyn Dodgers and Boston Red Sox his last two years. In his 18 years in major league baseball he had a .298 batting average, 2,352 hits, 433 doubles, 1037 RBI, 1,500 double plays, and was the American League fielding leader five times. After retiring, he coached at Georgetown for twenty years, sending several players to the majors.
My grandfather was not the kind of player, or the kind of man, who ever got into any scandals or drew a lot of attention to himself if it didn’t involve his play on the field. Family, friends, and sportswriters all describe him the same way: polite, soft-spoken, humble. A 1925 article in Baseball magazine described him as “the sheet anchor of the Washington infield.” Off the field, Judge was apparently the most sober and even-tempered man in any room. Relatives, players he coached, journalists — everyone he came in contact with or who has read about him all describe him as a gentleman.
My grandfather’s career was between 1915 and 1934, which means it partly took place in the “dead ball era” before the 1920s. He learned to play a game that was about singles, bunts, fielding, and defense, not the home run derby that baseball became in the 1920s, with the arrival of Babe Ruth.
My grandfather once wrote about the Hall of Fame in the pages of Sports Illustrated. (It’s long been an open secret in the family that the article was actually written by my father, who at the time was a writer for Life magazine.) Called “Verdict Against the Hall of Fame, it was published in the June 6, 1959, issue of Sports Illustrated. “The Hall has lost some of its meaning and much of its glory in recent years,” it read.
My grandfather named players who were in the Hall for inappropriate reasons. Players Joe Tinker, Johnny Evers, and Frank Chance were in simply because of the ring of their double-play combination, Tinker to Evers to Chance. Tinker’s lifetime average is .264, Evers’s .270. The article pointed to catcher Ray Schacht, lifetime average .253, and shortstop Rabbit Maranville, who never hit over .300. The essay then blasted the growing tendency to favor players with more personality than talent: “To be a credit to the game of baseball, a man need not have got off a record number of wise cracks or assembled a record number of feature-stories. There are a lot of colorful palookas.”
He added that “today many so-called sluggers couldn’t steal a base if they were alone in the park. They are not expected to throw too well or run too fast as long as they can belt the ball out of the park when their one moment of usefulness arrives. The idea of being a team member sometimes is lost completely, and what we have is an association of specialist businessmen investing their specific talents and carefully watching their own special interests, upon which they hope to declare a dividend the following year.”
On May 1, 1931, Joe Judge took himself out of a game in Boston. He had his appendix removed the following day. He was 36, and the operation ended his career in the majors. He bought a restaurant in D.C., Joe Judge’s. Then he took a job coaching at Georgetown University, a job he loved. In 1959, he was forced to retire because he hit 65. By then, baseball was broadcast on television. Grandpa could watch from home. My father used to say that Gramps was exactly like the crotchety old man watching the Nats losing in the beginning of Damn Yankees — razzing the players on his TV and trying to show the generation that pushed him out how to play the game.
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My grandfather died after suffering a heart attack while shoveling snow on March 11, 1963. The papers reported the news, calling him “the greatest of all the Senators’ first basemen.” Columnist George Clifford of the Washington Daily News summed him up this way: “Joe Judge was not a character in the clownish, bittersweet fashion of sports. The stories about him become legends simply because of his ability.” Perhaps the best line to summarize my grandfather came from Sam Rice, the great Senators outfielder. When he learned of Joe Judge’s death, Rice said, “There was no play he couldn’t make.”
“This is a man,” my father used to say to me, “who gave forty years of his life to baseball.”