Word: marquard
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...MARQUARD DE VILLIERS, M.D. Pretoria, South Africa...
Unlike modern games, where dozens of new balls are used in nine innings, the games of the memorable days of Cy Young and Rube Waddell, Rube Marquard and Jeff Tesreau and Ed Cicotte used the same ball inning after inning. Batters pounded it until it was brown and hard to see, pitchers doctored its horsehide; everything was stacked against the hitter (everything, that is, except for the occasional inspirations of such oldtimers as the pre-World War I Phillies' Otto Knabe and Mike Doolan, who once broke up a game with the Giants by swabbing the ball with capsicum...
Choking back their happy sobs, two press services and Hearst's tabloid New York Mirror ran the story that way, without bothering to check up on it. At one point in the hearing, said the Mirror, Marquard's "voice broke and the pitcher who once glared at enemy batters and dared them to hit his 'high, hard one' burst into tears...
Next day, when the press found time for a second look, reporters found the real Rube Marquard. He was far from the Bowery. He had a perfectly good job as a pari-mutuel ticket-seller at the $50 window at a New Jersey race track, and insisted indignantly that the $50 window was a post no drinking man could hold. He had spent the previous evening playing pinochle with his wife and the neighbors...
...imposter was picked up drunk again the following day. The New York Sun, which had not printed the original phony, quoted the real Marquard as saying, "You'd think those things would be checked more closely, wouldn't you?" The gullible Mirror quoted Marquard in slightly different words. According to the Mirror, Rube said: "You'd think a judge would be more careful...