Many have wondered what happened to Hack Wilson in 1931. Could his skills have eroded so dramatically within the span of a year? Was his problem as much intangible -- emotions, personality -- as physical?

Author David Nemec asks in The Great American Baseball Team Book, "Would McCarthy have allowed Wilson to disintegrate to the point where he followed up his record-shattering season with just 13 home runs and 61 RBIs in 1931?"

There is truth in this view. Hornsby was a contributing if not major factor to Hack's decline in 1931. He did not support Wilson the way McCarthy did, and this point has been made already. A good manager learns to get the most out of his players by motivating them in specific ways. Not all managers do this, of course, but it seems clear in retrospect that a positive, encouraging environment is usually the best for athletic performance. Finally, different players require different types of motivation -- some react to fear, some to reward, some to encouragement.

On sports teams, when two individuals don't get along, there's a degree of mutual responsibility on both ends of the equation. Besides, Hack's baleful results that season were also due to the change in the ball and his inability to focus on the game itself. Hornsby never made Hack lift one drink to his lips. And instead of drowning his proverbial sorrows, Hack could have chosen to train and practice harder. He went the opposite direction. His hubris made him expect the good times to continue, no matter.

Hack's tenure with the Cubs was over -- even the fans and sportswriters knew it. Hack was only 31 years old in 1931. He had suffered no known injury. His troubled ankles seemed better than they had been in the past. Was there some physical problem unrelated to Hornsby and drinking?

Speculation did exist about his eyesight and recurring migraines that apparently bothered him. When Hack was out of baseball some years later, he visited a Martinsburg doctor named Stuyvesant Butler. He had heard of Butler's articles showing the relationship between migraine headaches and spots in one's vision. Hack reportedly told Butler that he had suffered from migraines during the 1929 World Series. Other than an excuse for his play, if this was true, perhaps the migraines also affected him in subsequent years.

Reports indicate that Butler tested him and found that he did suffer from migraines. To what degree this influenced his playing ability is uncertain.

For one thing, in 1930 Hack Wilson had one of the greatest offensive seasons baseball has ever known, and eyesight or headaches did not seem to trouble him then.

Eyesight and migraines aside, Hack stood at the cusp of 1932 accused of disgracing his uniform, his profession, his family and all those close to him, both on and off the field. This was a much more serious offense back in that day and age, when insubordination among athletes was not tolerated. The reserve clause, for one, made it legally possible for a team to simply fire a disgruntled athlete with little consequence. Moreover, this was a post-Victorian Age culture that, for better or worse, placed faith in the obedience to leadership. The questioning of authority, more pronounced among contemporary athletes and the rest of society since the 1960s, was not widely practiced during Wilson's era. To do so threatened one's career.

While Wilson had always lived in rebellion against straight-laced society, he had never come so close to ostracizing himself from baseball as he had in 1931. The gauntlet was thrown his direction once again, but this time in a far more serious way. At stake was not only his reputation -- certainly he didn't seem to mind the roadhouse image he cultivated -- but the game he loved. Could he make a comeback, as he had done so in the past? Settling down for Hack Wilson was as alien a concept as imaginable.

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