Transcript Baseball 1920-1929  Without a doubt baseball was “king” in the 1920s.

Baseball 1920-1929
 Without a doubt baseball was “king” in the 1920s. The game had reached
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stability in that the 16 franchises had been established for at least a decade,
the World Series had become institutionalized since its onset in 1900.
Minor-league baseball teams at levels from Class AAA to Class D were located
in almost every town of more than 10,000 throughout the eastern United
States and much of the western.
The 16 major-league teams were all in the Northeast, where the majority of
the population was situated.
Teams were located from Boston to Washington, D.C. The southwestern limit
was St. Louis where two teams, the Cardinals of the National League and the
Browns of the American League, were established.
The northwest limit was Chicago with its two squads, the Cubs and the White
Sox.
Major-league baseball was given extensive coverage in one of the newest and
most popular sections of daily and weekly newspapers, the sports pages.
Baseball 1920-1929
 Baseball was both a rural and urban game, though it
would have been challenging to play the game in the
squalid sections of many of the inner cities populated
by the newest, poorest immigrants.
 The game was popular in schools and municipal play
areas and one that many fathers had played, so there
was an intergenerational captivation with the game
that could be shared in families.
Baseball 1920-1929
 All major-league baseball games were played during the day (the first major-
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league night baseball game was not until 1935) and the starting times were
usually 3 P.M.
Most of the fans who could attend would have not been working class, but
rather management or so-called white-collar workers, since they had some
latitude in leaving their workplace early enough to attend a game.
Men attended games in suits and white shirts, since most had come directly
from work and that was the accepted dress for this level of worker.
Women were not frequent attendees unless they were accompanied by a male
Most women would have been at home tending to families or at low-paid
jobs; there were simply no women in management at the time. Thus, it would
have been unlikely that many “respectable” women would have or could have
gone to baseball games alone.
Seeking more business, many teams promoted “Ladies Days,” where a
woman was given free admission (and would have been accompanied by a
man, who paid).
Baseball 1920-1929
Ethnicity and Baseball
 Organized baseball was segregated. It had not always been so,
but no African American had appeared on a major league
roster since 1889 when Moses Fleetwood Walker had played
in the International League, then considered a major league.
 Baseball did serve as a societal entrée for many white, firstgeneration immigrants from throughout Europe.
 Many played under assumed names in order to seem more
“American” or, in some cases, to retain their amateur status
for college sports.
 Baseball was a very assimilative sport, that is, there was less
tolerance for diversity than in some other minor sports and
this was likely the reason that players altered their “foreign”
surnames.
Baseball 1920-1929
Ethnicity and Baseball
 African Americans formed and played in their own leagues,
including a few major-league-level leagues, the Negro National
League and the Eastern League.
 In 1924 the first Negro League World Series was held with the
Kansas City Monarchs defeating the Hilldale club of
Philadelphia, 5 games to 4.
 Earlier in the decade Negro League teams had played a
number of major-league clubs in exhibition games after the
regular season ended, but this was stopped by the new
commissioner of baseball, Kenesaw Mountain Landis, in 1924.
 Games featuring white and black players continued, but the
white players could no longer compete in their major-league
uniforms and the games were, thusly, promoted as a particular
Negro League team against a team of white “all stars.”
Baseball 1920-1929
Ethnicity and Baseball
 Andrew “Rube” Foster was considered the “father” of the Negro
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Leagues was a fantastic pitcher in the early part of the century and
then formed the Negro National League and helped form the Eastern
League.
Some of the top players in the Negro Leagues: John Henry Lloyd,
Oscar Charleston and Biz Mackey (all eventually elected to the
Baseball Hall of Fame),
The Negro Leagues were well covered by the African American press
such as the Chicago Defender, the Pittsburgh Courier, and the
Amsterdam News.
Segregation in the 1920s extended to major- and minor-league
baseball and led to the growth of outstanding Negro league teams.
The development of a separate group of newspapers that drew mostly
on African American readers provided the exposure necessary for the
Negro Leagues to succeed.
Baseball 1920-1929
Economics and Legal Issues
 Players were not usually middle class, unlike most of the
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attendees of games, who were.
Most players were working class, with few skills and
education, happy to be paid to play baseball.
There were exceptions, with a small, but significant
number of players having attended or graduated from
college.
The owners had all of the power to keep players under
contract and prevent their movements to other teams.
Salaries were relatively low, just above that of a middlemanagement wage earner.
Baseball 1920-1929
Economics and Legal Issues
 The owners' power was legally sanctioned by the U.S.
Supreme Court in 1922, in a case that had been brought
by a baseball club in the Federal League.
 This league had operated in the latter years of the 1910s
before the National and American Leagues offered
financial inducements to some Federal League owners to
drive the league out of business and maintain the
monopoly that the established major leagues had on
players and player salaries.
 One Federal League owner, instead, brought a lawsuit
against the National League under U.S. antitrust laws,
claiming, essentially, that the major leagues were an
illegal monopoly that restrained trade and led to illegal
higher prices for customers.
Baseball 1920-1929
Economics and Legal Issues
 In a case that would have impact for the next 75 years or
more, the Court decided that baseball was not as much a
business as it was a sport or entertainment, and the
antitrust laws did not apply to baseball for that reason.
 Such a finding meant that the reserve clause, which bound
players to one club until the team might decide to release
the player, was not illegal.
 Player salaries were artificially contained for more than 50
years until the reserve clause was found to be an unfair
restraint of trade.
 Even with that handicap, there were still a few players
whose salaries rose enormously in this period; Babe Ruth,
the player credited with making baseball more popular than
ever and whose name was synonymous with baseball
excitement and accomplishment.
Baseball 1920-1929
Economics and Legal Issues
 Ruth's emergence as a national hero came at the
same time that the throwing of the 1919 World
Series by members of the Chicago White Sox.
 This led to baseball hiring its first commissioner,
Judge Kenesaw Mountain Landis.
 Baseball had had various players who were either
known or rumored to have accepted bribes to “fix”
games for many years, but this was the biggest,
most complex plot ever known.
 The perceived sanctity of the World Series made
the crime seem all the more despicable.
Baseball 1920-1929
Economics and Legal Issues
 The case against the players was not fully investigated and
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brought to trial until 1921. Because of various errors in
retaining evidence, the 8 players were acquitted, despite
confessions.
The verdict was not convincing to Judge Landis, who he had
been hired by organized baseball to provide order to a nearly
anarchic enterprise, largely magnified by the Black Sox trial.
Following the trial, Landis banned all 8 players from
organized baseball for life.
Including “Shoeless” Joe Jackson, who left the game with a
lifetime batting average of .356, the 3rd highest of all time.
Due to this, he has been barred from election to the Baseball
Hall of Fame.
Baseball 1920-1929
Baseball and the Media
 Sports pages became an integral part of the major newspapers only
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in the early twentieth century.
By the 1920s, a few sportswriters had begun to make names for
themselves, enhancing the various sports through their reporting.
Some of the best known included: Grantland Rice, Paul Gallico, Ed
Sullivan, Damon Runyon, Ring Lardner, Walter “Red” Smith, and
Alison Danzig.
Runyon, Lardner, and Gallico went on to become well-known
novelists and short-story writers in other areas besides sports, but
their writing lifted the respect given to sports journalism.
Sullivan went from sport reporting to “gossip”/entertainment
writing, before moving to radio and then television as the host of a
top-ranked variety show, which aired from 1948 to 1971.
Baseball 1920-1929
Baseball and the Media
 After graduating from Notre Dame in 1927 Walter
“Red” Smith covered baseball and boxing.
 He wrote for the St. Louis Star and the Philadelphia
Record before becoming a writer and columnist for
various papers in New York City, beginning in 1945.
 He won a Pulitzer Prize for his New York Times
writing in 1976 at the age of 71.
Baseball 1920-1929
Baseball and the Media
 Rice was more known for his college football coverage and as an early radio
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reporter.
Radio was invented in the late 1800s, but commercial radio did not become
cheap enough to make feasible until 1920 and the first station on the air with
actual licensing was KDKA in Pittsburgh, which covered the election returns for
the 1920 presidential election between Cox and Harding.
The next year one game of the World Series between the Yankees and the New
York Giants was broadcast; the following year the entire series was broadcast on
two stations in Baltimore and Schenectady, New York.
Grantland Rice was the announcer.
Radio amplifiers were set up in the ballpark, so listeners could hear the sounds of
the game and imagine that they were right there.
By the end of the decade, every top sports event would be broadcast on the radio
as 50 percent of all American households had a radio.
Baseball 1920-1929
Baseball through the Decade
 The World Series was the most listened-to baseball event.
 At first, it was feared that radio broadcasting would lower regular
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attendance at games, but, in fact, the opposite occurred.
Radio made fans of more people and attendance rose during the 1920s.
Cleveland Indians vs. Brooklyn Robins in the 1920 W. S.
Bill Wambsganss of Cleveland made the only unassisted triple play ever in
World Series history as the Indians won the series in 7 games.
During the regular season, while at bat, Indians' shortstop Ray Chapman
was killed by a ball pitched by Carl Mays.
Chapman was and is the only major leaguer even to have been killed in a
contest.
His death was not an incentive to find more protective headwear for
players, and batting helmets did not become mandatory for major-league
use until 1971.
Baseball 1920-1929
Baseball through the Decade
 The New York Yankees became the dominant team in baseball.
 Led by Babe Ruth, they won pennants in 1921, 1922, 1923, 1926,
1927, and 1928.
 The 1927 team is often called the greatest team of all time and
the term “Murderers' Row” was coined to describe their hardhitting batting order, which featured Ruth, Lou Gehrig, and Bob
Muesel at the middle of a lineup that led the league in batting
average, triples, home runs, and slugging percentage and scored
70 more runs than the next closest team in the league.
 They also had 4 of the top starting pitchers in the league and won
the American League pennant by 19 games, then swept the
Pittsburgh Pirates in the World Series in 4 games.
Baseball 1920-1929
Baseball through the Decade
 Ruth and Gehrig were seen as the top 2 hitters in the
game, 1 or the other consistently leading the league in
runs batted in and/or home runs.
 Ty Cobb was just ending his Hall of Fame career, but still
hit .357 at the age of 40 to finish 5th in the league.
 Despite the Black Sox scandal being exposed in the early
part of the decade, Ruth's mammoth home runs and the
new power-hitting of baseball overall drove attendance
astronomically higher, from 52 million in 1910–20 to
more than 86 million in the 1920s.
Baseball 1920-1929
Baseball through the Decade
 The National League pennants were won by the
New York Giants more than any other team of the
decade (4), but the St. Louis Cardinals and the
Pittsburgh Pirates were also outstanding with 2
pennants each.
 John McGraw, the Giants' manager, helped fuel
the New York rivalry between the Yankees and the
Giants.
 Until Yankee Stadium was completed in 1923, the
Yankees shared the Giants' home field, the Polo
Grounds, from 1913 to 1922.
Baseball 1920-1929
Baseball through the Decade
 The National League had its future Hall of Famers:
Rogers Hornsby (nicknamed “Rajah”), Paul and
Lloyd Waner (known as “Big and Little Poison”),
Grover Cleveland “Pete” Alexander, and Chuck Klein.
 In the American League, Walter Johnson (the “Big
Train”) was the top pitcher, and Al Simmons, Harry
Heilman, and Robert “Lefty” Grove were future Hall
of famers.
Baseball 1920-1929
Baseball through the Decade
 Baseball was transformed in the 1920s from a
game where singles and adept base running were
the dominant mode to one where home runs
became the key to success.
 In 1921 Babe Ruth hit 59 home runs; the next
highest total was 24.
 By 1929 Ruth led again with 46, but the next
highest totals were 43and 42.
 The game was more popular than ever, and
baseball players, especially Ruth, were recognized
heroes throughout the country.