Throwback Thursday: Sam Crane, Forgotten Major League Murderer

Each week, VICE Sports takes a look back at an important event from this week in sports history for Throwback Thursday, or #TBT for all you cool kids. You can read previous installments here.

Some people come within grasping reach of their most fervid wish only to find that in the end, whether through self-sabotage or the unremitting competition that is life, they're not equal to it. It slips through their fingers. Sometimes it is only with the benefit of hindsight that we can see they were beating themselves bloody against a barrier they never had the capacity to move. Sam Crane was like that.

This week in 1922, the Brooklyn Dodgers acquired Crane, a shortstop and the only American Major Leaguer to be convicted of murder, from the Cincinnati Reds for $7,500 and a player to be named later. This might seem to be various shades of irrelevant: the Brooklyn Dodgers no longer exist and at the moment the Reds barely do, either; Sam Crane played a grand total of 174 games in the majors and did very little to distinguish himself in that time, failing to hit even a single home run. Though a purported defensive specialist, Crane did things like make 16 errors in 32 games at short for the 1917 Washington Senators—another team that doesn't exist, incidentally—leading to an awesome-in-all-the-wrong-ways .889 fielding percentage. Crane was not a meaningful player in his era, and these things only fade with time. In 1922, Warren Harding was president and King Tut's tomb was opened; that all seems far removed from us now.

And yet, tales of self-destruction have no expiration date, no coming into fashion or going out of vogue. The elements of Crane's story are all too familiar, containing the three eternal elements of American tragedy: jealousy, drink, and a gun.

Crane was a Pennsylvania native and he wanted to be a big league baseball player. His story begins there, with his discovery as a teenager by Philadelphia A's owner-manager Connie Mack (again, both also defunct—entropy is hard at work on the Sam Crane story). Crane was still a teenager when he made his big-league debut at the very end of the 1914 season and failed to record a hit, foreshadowing both his immediate future and that of the A's.

The 1915 and 1916 Philadelphia A's are an unknown country, grab-bag teams that resulted when Mack took an organization that had won four pennants and three World Series in five years and blew it up so thoroughly that even Jeff Loria would be teal with envy. The first year after the big sell-off, the A's went 43-109, and things deteriorated from there. The next year, Mack presided over a 36-117 death march that, in a fair world, would simply have been halted, like a boxing ref saving a battered fighter from dementia or worse.

No team in baseball history has been quite that bad—not the fat and depressed Babe Ruth 1935 Braves, not the "Can anybody here play this game?" 1962 Mets. While those A's featured a few players who had or would have useful Major League careers, they also did a great deal of just throwing whoever showed up onto the field. Sam Crane was in the latter category, taking a few turns at shortstop even though, at 19, 20, and 21 years of age, he had no business being out there at all. He wasn't precocious like Ken Griffey, Jr., or Bryce Harper. He was more like a guy who cut school to smoke cigarettes in front of the 7-Eleven and, instead of juvy, somehow wound up in the major leagues. Mack's primary shortstop that year, Whitey Witt, made an astonishing 78 errors and would spend much of the rest of his career in the outfield. It says something about Crane's abilities that he couldn't even displace that.

Crane's next stop after Philadelphia was Washington, where he was supposed to displace George McBride, another glove-first infielder whose career .218/.281/.264 averages earned him the title "King of the Hitless Shortstops." Crane couldn't do that, either. Three years in the minors followed, during which period Crane did more not-hitting. His glove was still of interest to major league clubs, though, and Mack had brought him up so young that despite all the failed trials he was still only 25 when the defending world champion Cincinnati Reds brought him back to the majors in 1920. He stuck for a couple of years because the Reds' main alternative was one Larry Kopf, another refugee from Mack's bargain circus, and he wasn't very good, either. Again handed a situation in which his team really wanted to get rid of the guy in front of him, Crane got the errors under control but hit .226/.280/.276 over two seasons and was traded to Brooklyn, whose shortstop, Ivy Olson, was going on 36 and needed to be moved to second base, or possibly Europe.

There hasn't been an Ivy in the major leagues since the 1930s. They're gone like Connie Mack and the Senators. Crane was surfing a low wave through a fragile world, but you've probably guessed about how things went. In his third regular-season game with the Dodgers—generally called the Robins then; call it another extinction if you like—a home date against the rival Giants, Crane made three errors. These helped turn a 3-3 tie into a 7-3 Giants victory. The crowd got rowdy. The Dodgers were a hand-to-mouth operation at the time, and hosting the Giants was pretty much how they kept the lights on; a bad showing could result in turnstiles not turning. Crane was summarily dispatched to the Seattle Indians of the Pacific Coast League. He never played another game in the majors.

The Indians became the Rainiers for a while, and then went the way of everything else associated with Sam Crane. Five years passed. Crane carried on in the high minors. A player could make good money doing that in those days, particularly in the PCL, so things weren't all bad, but the dream of big-league stardom was over. After Seattle, Crane went from Buffalo to Reading and, turning 33, had a chance to play for Buffalo again. He turned it down because he had a new dream to pursue, and, unlike baseball, perhaps she loved him back.

Crane met a 25-year-old woman named Della Lyter back home in Harrisburg. He was married at the time, but a glove man knows to go for everything he can reach and some things he can't. Lyter liked Crane, too. His wife took the hint and called a lawyer. The divorce stuck, but Lyter didn't. She dumped Crane and went back to an old boyfriend. On August 3, 1929, Crane grabbed his gun and got drunk, or vice versa, then accidentally on purpose ran into Lyter and her beau. He fired five shots. The boyfriend died later that day, Lyter on August 9.

Crane turned himself in and was subsequently convicted of second-degree murder and sentenced to a term of 18 to 36 years. A cheap irony: he got to be a starter at last, on the prison baseball team.

Connie Mack visited Crane often and lobbied for his parole. It was only fair—he had started Crane down a path that proved to be utterly unrealistic. That's not to say that Mack pulled the trigger, that he misjudged Crane's defensive abilities, or even that he had unrealistic expectations of Crane's glove being good enough to carry a bat that was barely worthy of the name. What he missed was something harder to spot—a quality in the man that obligated him literally to fumble away his opportunities.

Lou Reed described it in his 1978 song "Street Hassle":

You know, some people got no choice
And they can never find a voice
To talk with that they can even call their own
So the first thing that they see
That allows them the right to be
Why they follow it, you know, it's called bad luck.

Casey Stengel meant exactly the same thing when he said, "You make your own luck. Some people have bad luck all their lives."

A final discontinuity from our own time: Sam Crane's nickname was Lucky. Lucky Crane. With most of a century of human history under our belts since then, we have a more finely developed sense of when not to tempt fate. We'd never curse someone with the capacity to dream, or to fall in love, with so damning a sobriquet. It's just not a nickname you hear much anymore.

This piece is indebted to the indispensable SABR BioProject.