Baseball (12 page)

Half a century after their demise, the Negro Leagues are part of a proud folklore, with many of their players voted into the Baseball Hall of Fame, many of them posthumously, many of them without ever playing in the majors. Gibson, an alcoholic, died of a stroke in 1946 at the age of thirty-five. Buck Leonard was too old when the majors opened up in 1947. Oscar Charleston would find himself stranded on third base, overqualified in a AAA league, held back by unspoken quotas, watching younger blacks move past him to reach the majors. One swing, Charleston used to say. All he wanted was one swing in the majors. He never got it, although late in life he would be voted into the Hall of Fame.

Once banned from roadside diners, forced to take leftover dates in major stadiums, ignored by mainstream America, the Negro League teams are now admired retroactively: a trendy fashion note as well as a sign of defiance or homage. One can walk down a street
in any major city and see somebody, not necessarily black, wearing the garb of the Pittsburgh Crawfords or the Homestead Grays, purchased in high-end sporting goods shops or hawked online, and not cheap, either. Major League Baseball now recognizes the Negro Leagues by selling their gear. In 1995, MLB coughed up the first profits from selling imitation Negro League memorabilia, checks worth $143,248 for survivors and family members.

At the very least, the retro Crawfords and the faux Grays send a message of nostalgia and regret. Parents may have to explain to their children how Josh Gibson once hit homers as far and as frequently as Babe Ruth and Henry Aaron, but an admirer of Josh Gibson walks down Michigan Avenue, in a fashionable jacket. After decades of segregation, it seems only fair.

I
n August of 1921, one of the great American combinations was unveiled—even better than the peanut butter and jelly sandwich. This fortuitous new blend was radio and baseball.

Up to then, baseball had been available only to people who went out to the ballpark or congregated around a telegraph set for the results of a World Series game or read the results in the sports pages, a contribution from William Randolph Hearst's newspaper empire back in 1885.

But starting in 1921, baseball began providing almost instant pitch-by-pitch information to fans in kitchens, offices, living rooms, saloons, and eventually cars. Radio also created that reassuring, loopy American presence, the hometown broadcaster.

The first game was broadcast by Harold Arlin, a twenty-six-year-old technician with radio station KDKA in Pittsburgh, on August 5, 1921. Using a microphone cobbled together from a converted telephone, he re-created the pitch-by-pitch details clattering over the Western Union wire, via Morse code. From his perch a few miles from the ballpark, he also improvised some fanciful details.

“I was just a nobody, and our broadcast—back then, at least— wasn't that big a deal,” Arlin said in 1984, two years before his death at ninety. “Our guys at KDKA didn't even think that baseball would last on radio. I did it sort of as a one-shot project, a kind of addendum to the events we'd already done.”

Two months later, the first game of the 1921 World Series between the Giants and Yankees was also broadcast on KDKA, as well as WJZ in Newark, New Jersey, and WBZ in Springfield, Massachusetts. Grantland Rice, the famous sports columnist, was broadcasting live inside the Polo Grounds while another broadcaster took the pitch-by-pitch details from the telegraph signals.

Within a decade, most baseball towns, major and minor—ex-cept, surprisingly, New York—were enlivened by the warbling or staccato voices of men (always men) describing baseball games. At
first, most broadcasts were a new art form—baseball from the click-ety-clack of the telegraph, helped immeasurably by the man in the studio.

One local announcer, Ronald (Dutch) Reagan, honed his vivid imagination while describing Chicago Cubs games, despite the theoretical handicap of his being in a studio in Des Moines, Iowa. Reagan later moved to Hollywood and became first an actor and then governor of California and later president of the United States.

To cover up a malfunction in the telegraph system, broadcasters were adept at inventing reasons for the interruption: arguments at home plate, grave injuries, sudden rain squalls, swarms of locusts, anything to explain a break in the action. But imagination was not checked when games began to be broadcast from the ballpark. These flights of fantasy troubled the newspaper reporters who shared the same sardine-can press boxes.

“I don't know which game to write about—the one I saw today, or the one I heard Graham McNamee announce as I sat next to him at the Polo Grounds,” Ring Lardner wrote.

Eventually, the electronic and print sections of the press boxes were separated by soundproof panels, so the writers would not be distracted by the version going out over the airwaves. Up to that point, writers had been kings of the sports media, but their status began plummeting downward and has never recovered.

All broadcasters developed their own styles, nervous twitches, verbal tics. Generally unseen, they were Everyman, with spectacles and brimmed hats, straight out of Sinclair Lewis's
Main Street
, the best-selling novel of 1921. Curt Smith, a former White House speechwriter for George H. W. Bush, wrote a book,
Voices of the Game
, in which he described the appeal of Cincinnati's first popular broadcaster, Harry Hartman:

“Harry was sort of rough around the edges, it's true, and his dictionary wasn't too thick, but he was earthy and people liked him,” said Lee Allen, a native of Cincinnati and later a historian at the Baseball Hall of Fame. “Please remember—southern Ohio's a very old-fashioned, cornball sort of place, ‘Little Germany’ and all that. Well, Harry was like that anyway, and he fit in.”

Before long, every ball club had developed its very own dotty uncle, complete with signature phrases. “Get up, Aunt Minnie, and raise the window! Here she comes!” was the whoop by Rosey Rowswell, who broadcast Pirate games for KDKA from 1936 through 1954. As the Pirate home run cleared the fence, one of Rowswell's assistants would simulate a broken window or scattered pots and pans. “That's too bad,” Rowswell would shout. “She tripped over a garden hose! Aunt Minnie never made it!”

Arch McDonald of WTOP in Washington, D.C., would shout, “There she goes, Mrs. Murphy!” at every home run by the Senators. Mel Allen of the Yankees would shout “How about that?” quite frequently.

The early broadcasters brought the game to the far corners of America, via 50,000-watt clear-channel stations, accessible in a dozen states. Fans in Arkansas and Georgia became fans of the St. Louis Cardinals via station KMOX. In dense valleys of Appalachia, fans picked up the games over WLIW in Cincinnati or KDKA in Pittsburgh. In rural sections of upstate New York, you could pick up games on several New York stations—or from Boston, Cleveland, Detroit.

If gravitas were the standard, Walter Lanier (Red) Barber was the first great baseball broadcaster. A Southerner, Barber had the ascetic dignity of a lay preacher, the education of a college graduate, and the code of an actual journalist. “He reminds me of the Arabian horse,” said Buzzie Bavasi, the former Dodger executive. “Every thoroughbred racehorse in the world is descended from the Arabian. Every announcer learned something from Red.”

Barber started college late, after working in the fields of central Florida, and he first spoke into a microphone on the University of Florida station only because somebody else failed to show up. In 1934, at the age of twenty-six, Barber was hired by the Cincinnati Reds' new owner, Powel Crosley, Jr., to broadcast games over the Crosley radio stations. The first major league baseball game he ever saw, he described.

He did fine, cultivating his own Faulknerian phrases, calling his perch in the radio booth the Catbird Seat, a phrase he learned
from a poker player smugly holding the winning cards. What Irish people called a donnybrook, Barber called a rhubarb. To punctuate a rally-ending play, Barber tersely described the key details, then used the phase “Oh, doctor,” before letting the crowd noise finish the story.

Barber's familiar “Oh, doctor” has since been appropriated by latter-day broadcasters, just as the exclamation “Holy cow!” has become the trademark of several broadcasters. The long and informal makeup of the sport continues to produce strange sound effects, including those from Chris Berman of ESPN, who is popular for his obsessive puns on players' names. Nobody breaks Aunt Minnie's dishes anymore.

—

Lighting was another major innovation that came about on Barber's watch, while he worked for the new Cincinnati general manager, Larry MacPhail, a Rickey protégé. While running the Cardinals' farm team in Columbus, Ohio, MacPhail had induced Depression-age fans to spend their remaining quarters on the Red Birds after he spruced up the ballpark, ran promotions, and installed lights to permit night games. Moving to Cincinnati, MacPhail decided to put in lights there, too. He saw the value in letting fans eat supper after a hard day at the factory, and then, as the Ohio River valley heat subsided, making their way toward shimmering lights on the western edge of downtown.

Dire results were predicted. Fans would go blind. Players would be maimed. Morals would tumble. Crimes would be committed.

The first major league night game was against the Phillies on May 24, 1935. President Franklin D. Roosevelt pressed a telegraph key, made of Alaskan gold, a gift to President William Howard Taft many years earlier, thereby turning on the lights in Cincinnati. The light towers, with their 632 bulbs, costing a total of $50,000, used up more than a million watts of electricity.

“They waited until it got good and dark,” Barber recalled in 1988. “And then the lights came on at precisely 8:30 P
.
M. The crowd immediately became ecstatically happy, and the game itself was beautifully played.”

The Reds' Paul Derringer beat the Phillies' Joe Bowman, 2–1. In 1988, Bowman recalled: “There was a lot of talk about how you weren't going to be able to see the ball, you'd only see half the ball, and so on. I didn't have any trouble seeing the ball.”

Night games changed baseball forever. The players no longer had a regular schedule of sleeping or eating and had more excuse to become night owls, but many fans welcomed the lower temperatures at night. For baseball writers, with first-edition deadlines looming in the early evening, there was now the need to come up with a story before the game, putting more attention on issues and personalities, rather than the play-by-play details.

MacPhail moved on to Brooklyn, where he installed a set of lights for the first night game on June 15, 1938. A large crowd was more attracted by the lights than the young Cincinnati starting pitcher, Johnny Vander Meer, who had pitched a no-hitter in his previous start. Under the new lights, Vander Meer walked eight men but pitched his second consecutive no-hitter. No other pitcher has ever done it.

The critics of night games tended to be won over by the sound of turnstiles. After seeing fans surge into the first night game in Washington, Clark Griffith, the owner of the team, began campaigning to raise baseball's temporary limit from seven to twenty-one night games. One by one, the major league teams installed lights, until 1948, when fifteen of sixteen teams had them.

The last holdout for day games would be dear old Wrigley Field. The ownership resisted until 1988 when the Cubs were battling for a postseason berth and the networks pointed out the differing income between day playoff games and night playoff games. Despite great gnashing of teeth from traditionalists, Commissioner Peter Ueberroth, a man with respect for the bottom line, ordered the Cubs to put in lights.

By 1990, 71 percent of major league games were scheduled at 5:00 P
.
M. or later. (The doubleheader, that old staple, was virtually gone.) A decade later, the figure of night games had dropped slightly to 67 percent. World Series games, however, were all played at night, at 8:00 or 8:30 P
.
M. on the East Coast, which meant that
eastern television markets were essentially abandoning children. The networks said it made economic sense, and baseball capitulated, meanwhile brooding that children were more interested in video games than ball games.

In New York, all three teams resisted regular radio into the late 1930s, fearing broadcasting the games would cut into ticket sales. But in 1939, MacPhail brought Red Barber from Cincinnati to Brooklyn, and the other two New York teams had to compete. The Yankees brought in Arch McDonald from Washington, where he was known as “The Rembrandt of Re-creation,” to work the Giant and Yankee home games. He lasted a year and was replaced by Mel Allen, with that mellifluous Southern voice that somehow worked so well in the Bronx.

—

The next logical leap from radio was television. The first televised game was on May 17, 1939, between Princeton and Columbia universities, broadcast by NBC, which used one camera. The broadcaster was Bill Stern, who was known for his apocryphal tales, including one that had Abraham Lincoln urging the Union troops to make the world safe for baseball. (In those inventive times, Stern was also known for changing football ball-carriers in the middle of a play, requiring a lot of sideways handoffs or passes. A colleague once explained why Stern might not be ideal for broadcasting horse races: “You can't lateral a horse.”)

A few months later, Barber called the first game of a Saturday doubleheader between Cincinnati and Brooklyn for NBC. According to the
New York Times
, “Television set owners as far as fifty miles away viewed the action and heard the roar of the crowd.”

After World War Two, the NBC network came up with
The Game of the Week
, with a phalanx of broadcasters, producers, and statisticians descending on one chosen game. “As a kid growing up, there wasn't a lot for me to do in Searchlight,” Senator Harry Reid, the Democrat minority leader, said in 2005 about his childhood in rural Nevada. “No parks. No high school. No movie theater.” Reid added: “But we did have our radios and the baseball
Game of the
Week.
I looked forward to this broadcast, and even remember the disappointment I felt after I tuned in some afternoons, only to hear it was raining in some far-off city and there would be no game that day. The radio brought some of the greatest names in baseball to Searchlight, including Jackie Robinson and his Brooklyn Dodger teammates.”