Baseball (7 page)

Alexander's pragmatism was soon overwhelmed by the newfound passion for the Hall. Old players lived out their lives hoping to be tapped for the Hall, however belatedly. In reality, there are about five levels of the Hall of Fame, ranging from giants like Babe Ruth to friends of friends or beneficiaries of myth and sentimentality. Fans, writers, and baseball people spend years advocating old-timers who have been slighted by the selection process, first by the baseball writers or later by a panel of old-timers. For many years, Ted Williams was a huge political force on the review committee, paving the way for players he admired—most notably, his old teammate Bobby Doerr and his old rival Phil Rizzuto.

Williams became a voice of conscience, perhaps because of his own childhood experiences with intolerance, since his mother was a Mexican-American in San Diego. During his induction speech in 1966, Williams made an emphatic request: “I hope that some day Satchel Paige and Josh Gibson will be voted into the Hall of Fame as symbols of the great Negro players who are not here only because they weren't given the chance.” People listened to the justice in Williams's thundering tones: in 1971, Paige was voted into the Hall, since followed by seventeen other Negro Leagues players— all in the main wing, as total equals. Early in 2006, the Hall held a mass election and accepted seventeen other prominent veterans of the Negro Leagues.

For every player voted into the Hall, however belatedly, there are others who fall short of the mysterious shifting line. Hearts are broken every year when beloved hitters like Tony Oliva and Gil Hodges or durable pitchers like Tommy John and Jim Kaat are once again passed over.

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For a long time, the Hall went along with the Doubleday legend but in the past generation it has become a repository not only for artifacts but for verifiable history. The Graves letters, lost but recovered in 1997, are no more enlightening than they were in Mills's time. Years ago somebody took down the sign “Birthplace of Baseball” from the Cooperstown exit off the New York State Thruway. There is still a Doubleday Field in Cooperstown, where every year two major league teams play an exhibition, in homage to the man who apparently never played the game in his life.

The Hall keeps growing into a sophisticated, multimedia, online, year-round haven of souvenirs and records, available to serious researchers or casual tourists mainly interested in souvenir T-shirts of their favorite member of the Hall. Yet the Hall is saved from being totally Disneyfied by its location in sleepy upstate New York. The sport also got lucky because the annual induction takes place at the end of July, when little else is happening. No other sport is blessed with the living Norman Rockwell tableau of the induction ceremony: fans pile into rooming houses and bed-and-breakfasts
around Cooperstown and chase down autographs from the stars; agile boys hang from tree branches and gape as the old players weep while being inducted into the Hall.

In the evening, aging members of the Hall sit on wicker chairs in view of the classic American lake, Otsego, straight out of James Fenimore Cooper, and they tell stories about the old days. Baseball is all about stories, many of which are even true.

T
he newly established league had one gaping hole: it did not have a team in New York. And that would not do. Ban Johnson, the president, was a Midwesterner, but he knew that any outfit that dared to call itself the American League needed a franchise in the big city.

A large man with large ambitions, Johnson had been a sportswriter in Cincinnati before he became president of the Western League in 1893. He found investors and players for his league, cracking down on gambling and crude behavior, and in 1901, Johnson changed the name to the American League, going against the westward flow of population to establish himself on the eastern seaboard.

The twentieth century could now officially begin. Charles Comiskey's franchise was moved from St. Paul, Minnesota, to Chicago, and in 1902 the Milwaukee Brewers became the St. Louis Browns. Under Johnson's aggressive recruiting of players, his league outdrew the National League, prompting an agreement that made the leagues equals and competitors in 1903.

Then came the move that would change the American League forever: Johnson encouraged the Baltimore team to transfer to New York, only a mile or two from the haughty Giants of the National League. Located on a plateau in upper Manhattan, the Highlanders, or Hilltoppers, would wallow in mediocrity or worse for nearly two decades, by which time the team had changed its name again. The new nickname was Yankees.

After that flurry of musical chairs in the early years of the century, the two major leagues coalesced into a stable enterprise of eight teams apiece, starting in 1903. The American League consisted of the Highlanders, St. Louis Browns, Chicago White Stockings, Boston Puritans or Pilgrims, Detroit Tigers, Cleveland Indians, Philadelphia Athletics, and Washington Nationals, while the National teams were the Boston Braves, Brooklyn Superbas, New York Giants, Philadelphia Phillies, Pittsburgh Pirates, Cincinnati
Reds, Chicago Cubs, and St. Louis Cardinals. These sixteen franchises would remain in place for a solid half century. How many institutions can say that?

Every sport needs its rivalries. The first feud of the century was between Johnson and pugnacious John J. McGraw, who had moved from Baltimore to the Giants in 1902. A former infielder from St. Bonaventure University in upstate New York, McGraw advocated the scrappy style the Orioles had played a decade earlier, with wiry and hungry athletes slashing line drives for doubles and triples, tossing their elbows and sharpening their spikes. In the eyes of Muggsy McGraw, the home run was essentially a novelty item.

McGraw soon took on the entire upstart American League, calling the financially challenged Athletics “white elephants.” Connie Mack, their owner-manager, proudly adopted a white elephant as his team's symbol. Willowy at six feet, one inch tall and 150 pounds, the former catcher struck a more dignified pose than McGraw. Born Cornelius McGillicuddy in East Brookfield, Massachusetts, he shortened his name to please the fans or perhaps the newspaper typesetters.

When he was long past wearing a uniform, Mack wore a conservative suit in his dugout, just like the bankers who filed into the ballpark at closing hour. Year in, year out, he would strike his characteristic pose, rolling up a scorecard in one hand and giving signals to the men in uniform. As a former player, with no outside income, Mack did not have the luxury of considering himself a sportsman but instead was at the mercy of the attendance and his team's position in the standings. He was strapped by Philadelphia's position as the last major league city to have blue laws, which until 1934 forbade baseball games and other entertainment on Sunday. This restriction meant the Athletics often had to travel overnight to play Sunday games elsewhere. Mack would be vilified for selling off his best players, but that tactic would be used by many other cash-strapped owners over the years.

Despite McGraw's yapping at the American League, the owners agreed on the moneymaking potential of a postseason championship series, the first since 1890. The Pittsburgh team from the
National League played Boston of the American League in a best-of-nine format in 1903, starting with three games at Boston, followed by four in Pittsburgh and then returning to Boston for what turned out to be Boston's clinching in the eighth game. The Boston management was unprepared for huge crowds but was not about to turn away paying customers, even though the crowd threatened to spill onto the field. A group of fans called the Royal Rooters, led by Nuf Ced McGreevey, incessantly sang a show tune, “Tessie,” and many people felt the energy unleashed by the song had powered Boston to victory.

The term “World Series” has an ironic ring these days, given the high level of play in some Asian and Latin American countries, but in those days the name pretty much reflected the only powerhouse in the world. As grandiose as it was, the name “World Series” fit the optimistic mood of the fast-growing republic. McGraw ratcheted up his feud with Johnson and refused to let his Giants play the defending champions from Boston in 1904, but the following season McGraw was persuaded to behave and the Giants won the resumption of the World Series.

The new century had its stars, known all over the country: Ty Cobb, the Georgia Peach; deceptively stocky Honus Wagner; the durable pitcher Cy Young, who would win 192 games for Boston in the first eight years of the American League. The most popular player of all was Christy Mathewson, out of Bucknell College in rural Pennsylvania, who kept his promise to his mother that he would not pitch on the Sabbath and soon became the first national example of the gentleman athlete, contradicting baseball's rowdy image.

Known as Big Six—either for his height of six feet, one and a half inches, or a popular fire engine or early automobile— Mathewson threw a pitch he called the fadeaway, which broke the opposite way from the normal right-handed orbit. He pitched virtually every third game, ultimately winning 373 and losing 188.

The composed Mathewson and the tempestuous McGraw became close friends, the original odd couple, sharing a Manhattan apartment along with their wives. Although Mathewson could be distant, the public respected him for his pitching, his high standards,
and his handsome features. Then he became baseball's foremost casualty of war.

When the Great War broke out in Europe in 1914, the United States tried to ignore it, and did not enter the conflict until April of 1917. With war dragging on, America faced a challenge to its isolationist posture. When anonymous young Americans began to die in the forests and fields of Europe, the American sport faced pressure to respond. In May of 1918, the United States adopted a “work-or-fight” policy for able-bodied men, the first time any American sport had been under public pressure to respond to a national crisis. Since baseball had postured itself as the embodiment of national values, its players were under pressure to either join a defense industry or volunteer for the military. For most of them, the war would be a brief inconvenience, but Eddie Grant, the Harvard graduate and captain of the Giants, became the only major-leaguer to die directly from combat, when he was killed in the Argonne Forest while fighting to rescue the Lost Battalion.

In August of 1918, at the age of thirty-eight, Mathewson signed up for the war out of a sense of responsibility. By now he was the manager of the Cincinnati Reds because his close friend, McGraw, had made sure he had a job when his arm wore out. Mathewson joined the Chemical Warfare Services, along with two other future members of the Hall of Fame—Tyrus Raymond Cobb, thirty-two, the eleven-time batting champion, and Branch Wesley Rickey, thirty-eight, the cerebral college man, once a marginal catcher but now the president of the Browns.

These three relatively elderly soldiers were sent to France, near the Belgian border. Mathewson arrived with the flu, which would soon kill millions of people around the world, and then, in a training exercise, Mathewson accidentally inhaled murderous mustard gas. Later he took another dose of gas near the front. After the Armistice on November 11, 1918, Mathewson returned home a weakened and aged man and he later caught tuberculosis, dying at forty-five.

Cobb was the antithesis of Matty and Rickey, two college men and respecters of the Sabbath. An umpire-baiter, spike-sharpener,
fan-fighter, and teammate-battler with racist tendencies, Cobb became the first great hitter of the century. A review of his records suggests his career average was .366, not the traditional .367. Unpopular with opponents and teammates alike, Cobb confirmed the image of baseball players as crude and uneducated and sometimes even racist.

At the same time, many players were lionized, often appearing in vaudeville music halls in the off-season, recognized through their photographs in magazines and the copious newspapers of the time. Some were immortalized by doggerel like “Baseball's Sad Lexicon,” by Franklin Pierce Adams in New York's
Evening Mail
of July 10, 1910, lauding the Cubs' double-play combination of shortstop Joe Tinker, second baseman Johnny Evers, and first baseman Frank Chance.

Adams's tribute was not as cosmically inventive as the citing of Abner Doubleday as the inventor of baseball, but these eight lines became embedded in the minds of fans everywhere, and perhaps even sportswriters. Tinker, Evers, and Chance were all fine players, who played together as a unit for 10 years, a rarity then and now, but they were not an unprecedented double-play machine, either. In direct response to Adams's little ditty, all three were eventually voted into the Hall of Fame, Evers in 1939 and his teammates in 1946.

While accumulating a folklore, the young industry of baseball was also developing new labor and financial problems. In 1913, the Fraternity of Professional Baseball Players was founded, leading to the outlaw Federal League of 1914, which raided the two major leagues. Connie Mack's A's won four pennants from 1910 through
1914, but after Chief Bender and Eddie Plank jumped to the Federal League, and Home Run Baker sat out a season in a salary dispute, Mack tore apart his team even further, selling a number of players to the Red Sox (who would soon move their better players to the Yankees). The A's soon hit bottom. “The Federal League wrecked my club by completely changing the spirit of my players,” Mack would claim.

The two established leagues survived a restraint-of-trade suit by the upstart Federal League. In 1915, a Chicago federal judge, Kenesaw Mountain Landis, said he was “shocked” that anybody could possibly consider baseball to be “labor.” It was a game, Landis ruled, and, as a national institution, it was not subject to interstate commerce laws. This decision by Landis was vital to the owners because it strengthened the reserve clause, which appeared to bind players to their clubs for the length of their careers, or until they were traded, sold, or discarded. The reserve clause would dominate the industry for the next six decades.