A few days ago, I was reading an opinion column in our local newspaper. It recounted the US Air Force’s seven stealth bombers’ 36-hour flights to and from the Middle East with two pilots to each plane and precision midair refueling. The next paragraph was simply:
“Tinker to Evers to Chance. QED.”
I actually knew what that meant!
My dad taught me that baseball reference.
The first couple years after my family moved from a small Arkansas town (pop. 466) to a Missouri metropolis (pop. 6,466), Dad would drive us back home (as we called it) most Sundays to see my grandparents. At least that was the ruse.
My dad would have been in his mid-thirties then, and before we moved, he was a regular player on the town’s baseball team. On Sunday afternoons, the wooden bleachers at the park’s baseball diamond were jam-packed with spectators rooting for the home team as they took on nearby town teams: Gentry, Decatur, Jay, Oklahoma. Most of the players had ball shirts, but not real uniforms.
The first time Dad was called on to “fill in” may have been just that. The team didn’t have enough players without him. The next Sunday, I recall Mom saying, “Raymond, you shouldn’t wear those dress pants. You know you’ll end up playing.”
But he wore his new work slacks, and he played ball in them. Even as a ‘tween at the time, I figured out he wore them just in case he wasn’t needed on the ball field. Then he could shrug and sit in the stands with the rest of us visiting with relatives, as if that’s what he intended all along. He was always the best-dressed player on the field.
On the drive back to Missouri, the staticky radio voice of Harry Caray filled the car as he relayed play-by-play for the Cardinals. I asked what he meant by “Tinker to Evers to Chance.” It had a rhythm to it, and I liked it.
Shortstop Joe Tinker, second baseman John Evers, and Frank Chance on first were infielders for the Chicago Cubs in the early 1900s. They were Legendary for their double plays. Those ballplayers were way before Dad’s time, and even before Harry’s, but broadcasters sometimes referred to the trio when a team skillfully got the job done.
The phrase was pulled out of a 1910 poem written by New York Evening Mail columnist Franklin Pierce Adams, who was lamenting that his Giants had been beaten by the Cubs. Since it’s in the public domain now, I can reprint it. A ‘gonfalon’ is the pennant.
These are the saddest of possible words:
“Tinker to Evers to Chance.”
Trio of bear cubs, and fleeter than birds,
Tinker and Evers and Chance.
Ruthlessly pricking our gonfalon bubble,
Making a Giant hit into a double –
Words that are heavy with nothing but trouble:
“Tinker to Evers to Chance.”
The phrase Tinker to Evers to Chance became part of our vernacular meaning efficient, a well-oiled machine, like clockwork. I googled it and found the phrase referenced in TV episodes of Hogan’s Heroes and The Brady Bunch. Detective Philip Marlow says it when sorting through mail in Raymond Chandler’s The Long Goodbye: “Mail slot to desk to wastebasket, Tinker to Evers to Chance.”
And now I was reading it in the newspaper. I didn’t know what QED meant, so I looked that up. It stands for the Latin quod erat demonstrandum. No way I would have known that. In modern lingo it means something like ‘point proven’ or ‘enough said.’
Politics aside, I think Americans will agree that those Air Force pilots exhibited high-caliber, well-trained, first-rate teamwork.
Tinker to Evers to Chance. QED.
