During that year's World Series, the Baseball Writers Association of America held their annual meeting. The Malone-Wilson affair got top billing. Red Smith of the New York Herald-Tribune wrote, "Hack and his buddy Pat Malone were the subjects of impassioned orations because the pair had, that summer, beaten up a couple of Chicago baseball writers. It was really no more than boyish exuberance on their part, but of the assembled authors several were exercised no end. Little Stu Bell, then working on a Cleveland paper, deplored the affair at great length, declaring it hadn't been a first offense. He said that a neighbor of his had been the victim of an unprovoked attack by either Wilson or Malone -- memory is faulty on that point -- in a hotel corridor. At long last, Roy Stockton, of St. Louis, arose to propose a motion forbidding Hack Wilson and Pat Malone to punch baseball writers or friends of Stu Bell. The motion passed."

One of the reasons the BBWAA was formed back in 1908 was to improve the conditions baseball writers had to work in, whether that meant a hostile player or poor facilities. In the first half of the century, writers were assigned to a particular club and stayed with that team from spring training through the entire season. Writers associated with one team were almost as well known to the public as the players they wrote about.

Most games in those days were played at 3 P.M. For morning newspapers, it was standard practice for the writers to wait until the end of the game to pen the story on who won or lost. The papers had the evening to put the story into print. For afternoon papers, writers had more editorial leeway, as they sat in the press box after the game had ended and wrote the stories, often from a second-guessing point of view. They didn't always visit the clubhouse to talk to players or to verify aspects of the game.

What writers thought of him probably didn't matter as much to Hack as his poor showing on the field. He also took a wallop in his wallet. For the year, Hack had lost $6,500 in fines and suspension money. That amounted to about one-fifth of his salary, an astonishing loss in income.

This was Hack's final hurrah with the Cubs. The suspended player was told to clean out his locker in the clubhouse. When he did so, he probably thought he'd be back next spring.

It did not get better. Hornsby told reporters:

"Wilson started out breaking training rules at Catalina last spring. He has been on the verge of suspension four times this season. Two weeks ago I decided to suspend Wilson but I relented when he promised before the entire team he would mend his ways. Malone's attack on two baseball writers was one of the most disgraceful I have ever encountered in the game."

Hack's drinking soon received scrutiny. One baseball writer recalled even Hack saying himself, "You can't bat around all night and bat around three hundred." Another said Hack Wilson enjoyed highballs on the field and off the field.

Hack admitted breaking training rules. To the press he insisted "I got a bum deal," and he noted the difference in clubhouse climate. "Last year if I stayed out late Joe McCarthy would call me off and tell me to lay off that stuff and I obeyed him. It will be a long time before they build up as successful as Joe McCarthy did."

Hack's boot from the clubhouse climaxed a season of 13 home runs, 61 RBIs and a .261 average. He appeared in only 112 games. His plunge of 43 home runs and 128 RBIs from one season to the next is the largest such decrease in major league history. The next steepest fall home run-wise was that of 32 in the case of Brady Anderson, who had 50 homers in 1996 and 18 the next year. Yet Anderson was still a full-time, productive player whose other statistics remained decent. And he didn't have to contend with a deadened ball.

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