The marijuana rumor

McCarthy was a great manager, but a lousy human being.

Why did McCarthy start the rumor? With detective-like qualities and using as a guide a manuscript his grandfather wrote, Matt Dahlgren pieced together the story.

It began with a meeting, at the suggestion of James Dawson, who covered the Yankees for The New York Times, between Dahlgren and Lefty O’Doul, an expert hitting instructor, at the wedding of Joe DiMaggio and Dorothy Arnold.

McCarthy, apparently seeing O’Doul as a threat, learned of O’Doul’s hitting help and confronted Dahlgren about it. After that season (1940), McCarthy orchestrated Dahlgren’s trade to the Boston Braves.

At the time, McCarthy explained the trade by saying that Dahlgren’s arms were too short to play first base, even though Dahlgren, who had replaced Lou Gehrig the year before, was widely considered the league’s finest first baseman.

But in a subsequent conversation with “baseball insiders,” McCarthy offered a different reason for the trade, demonstrating his resentment of Dahlgren at the same time. Dahlgren, his grandson quoted McCarthy as saying, would not have made a game-losing error in a late-season game that hurt the Yankees’ pennant chances “if he wasn’t a marijuana smoker.”

Dahlgren did not become aware of the rumor for a couple of years, but it was responsible for a series of moves in his career. In the next two seasons, 1941 and ’42, he played for the Braves, the Cubs, the Browns and the Dodgers. Early in 1943, Dahlgren had an unpleasant salary session with Rickey, a frugal — cheap — general manager.

This has to be one of the strangest baseball stories I've ever heard. Dahlgren was one-time all star, a terrific first baseman (though no replacement for The Iron Horse when it came to the bat), and his career was destroyed by intimations he smoked marijuana? Don't talk to me about how great the game was back then if managers and team executives were willing to trade away or ignore good players -- because of the color of their skin or allegations that they smoked marijuana.

Of course, Lefty O'Doul is always in the thick of things.