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"And he was in this country club at night at dinner with this other girl, and he saw the Spanish girl appear in the doorway. She saw him through these big glass doors, and she reached into her pocketbook and took out a revolver. About that time Babe thought he'd better leave, and he ran through the doors out onto the golf course, and she fired, and she hit him in the leg. And then he showed us the scar on the back of his leg and said, 'Aw, she was a good girl, it didn't amount to nothing.' "
Werber spent most of the next few seasons in the minors, and the Yankees sold him to the Red Sox in 1933. In Boston, he quickly evolved into a solid and occasionally spectacular third baseman, batting a career-high .321 in 1934. Traded to the old Philadelphia A's in 1937, Werber eventually went head-to-head with their legendary owner/
manager, Connie Mack, in contract talks.
"Mr. Mack would always wait until the last day to get his contracts out because it reduced the time you'd have to argue," Werber says. "It put pressure on the players. Now I finally got his contract, and he wrote me a nice letter saying the club had had a bad year, and this would be a bad year to come, and that his payroll was too high. So I wrote a letter back to him. I said, in summary, 'Mr. Mack, what I would advise you to do is to sell your ballclub and get into another business.' He took this, and rightly so, as being an affront. So he sold me to Cincinnati, and that worked out very well."
The deal paid off right away for the Reds, who got themselves a fiery leadoff hitter who helped drive them to the National League pennant in 1939 and the World Series title the following year. "Cincinnati was unique," he says. "I hadn't been there too long before the doorbell rang. It was the personnel director of the Kroger grocery and baking company, big outfit. He came in—had a big basket full of champagne and wine, a pineapple, bananas, apples, oranges —and he said, 'We admire the way you put hustle into this ballclub.' Well, I had put hustle into the ballclub. That was fun."
But by 1941 his career was clearly on the decline, brought on by a painful, surgically repaired big toe he'd broken years before when he kicked a water bucket in the dugout. "I had an ugly disposition," he says. (The website baseballreference.com, which highlights similar players across eras, compares Werber to a hard-nosed star of the 1990s, Lenny "Nails" Dykstra, among others.)
After eleven seasons, Werber quit the game, a .271 career hitter with 271 doubles, 539 runs batted in, and 215 steals. In the fall of 1942, he joined his father in the insurance business in Berwyn, Maryland, outside Washington, where he was an overnight success. "The most I ever made playing baseball was $13,500, plus World Series checks, but the first year I was in business, I made over $100,000," he says. "That was $20,000 more than Babe Ruth ever made playing baseball."
Lunch is over now, so he takes the elevator down one floor and rolls through the hallway to his one-bedroom apartment. It's decorated with photos of friends and family, children and grandchildren, and on a side table, there's a scrapbook filled with birthday cards and messages. Many of them reflect Werber's nearly lifelong link to Duke. (He was pleased to get a birthday phone call from Mike Krzyzewski, who also had four basketball shirts delivered as a gift.) Former athletics director Tom Butters' name had come up in conversation, and Werber plucks out the card Butters sent. Butters wrote, in part: "Bill Werber is the most principled man I have ever known. He has stood behind those principles for nearly a century. While I have not always agreed with him, I have always respected him, and do to this day. I would put my life on the line for this man."
Werber is visibly moved by the words. But after a moment, he brightens—time for another story. "Tom Butters was late for an appointment with me once," he says. "The [donation] check that I'd been prepared to write for him was pretty substantial for those times. But he showed up an hour or two late, and I refused to talk to him. I sent him on his way. He didn't like that much.
"Later I heard he was talking to somebody who told him they were going to go see Bill Werber, and Butters said, 'For chrissakes, don't be late!' "
Werber laughs a long time about this one. Principles never get old.
Scher '84, a former managing editor of Baseball America and scoreboard operator at Durham Athletic Park, is a senior editor at ESPN The Magazine.
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