The Old Ball Game (3 page)

In other words, Americans didn't just play stuff, indoor or out; they were an ingenious folk who naturally favored games that required inordinate intelligence. This seemed to matter. It certainly did to McGraw, who was always going on about how much
brainwork baseball needed (which also suggested, by extension, that a manager of such an intellectual enterprise had to be truly bright). Mathewson didn't have to talk about it; he was universally known to be smart as a whip.

Of course, all the cultural analyzing aside, the games that a people favor are those that they find the most fun. But baseball certainly did possess certain ingredients that had made it what
everybody
called it then: the American national sport. First of all, it was a team game, requiring that “prompt and easy co-operation muscularly.” As the
Baltimore Morning Herald
rhapsodized: “The
fin de siecle
players must possess a high order of brains, must be of correct habits, have plenty of ambition and be possessed of a certain docility and evenness of temperament such as will insure proper discipline and the frictionless working together of the whole team.”

However, peculiar to most team games, baseball features a distinct individual subset, where every batter has a mano a mano confrontation with the pitcher—a
turn
at bat. This neatly satisfied both the unique American organizational talent—it wasn't cowboys that settled the West, it was wagon trains—along with the role for that idealized American individual, the lone wolf.

Moreover, at a time when most Americans labored at long, enervating hours, six days a week of ten-hour workdays, it helped, too, that baseball was not so physically demanding as the back-and-forth team sports. It is certainly no coincidence that at this time, American football, a mean, grueling diversion, was a game played for the most part—and at the highest level of proficiency—by college boys who otherwise were lifting nothing heavier than textbooks. Indeed, the sport was dominated by the wealthiest young gentlemen of all, from the Ivy League. These young gallants not only had the energy to engage in such a demanding activity, but they also could use football to show off, proving that they were every bit as tough as the working classes. Thus, while it is ironic, it is perfectly understandable why baseball,
the softer (and, allegedly, more intellectual) game, became a professional entertainment while football, which is so much more gladitorial, remained essentially an amateur distraction, played primarily by students, for many more years.

Baseball grew up largely in New York and Brooklyn (when it was a city unto itself) strictly as a middle-class amusement— white collar, as we would say today. Its popular increase was viewed as a Good Thing for America. Indeed, in some respects it wasn't so much that Americans played as it was that Americans were
improved
by baseball—perhaps especially the immigrants and other lowlife who had to be educated in this new uplifting way of life on earth. Do-gooders from Jane Addams to the only contemporary American cardinal, James Gibbons of Baltimore, attributed qualities of spirit and cohesion to baseball. Playing it bound us and lifted us alike. Wrote Edwin G. Burrows and Mike Wallace, New York historians: “The spread of baseball, some thought, was a triumph of the civilizing process.” Baseball, like Emily Post later on, taught you how to behave middle-class.

Neither was baseball itself modest about its uplifting—and all-American—qualities. Wrote
Spalding's Official Base Ball Guide
in 1888: “It is very questionable whether there is any public sport in the civilized portion of the world so eminently fitted for the people it was made for as the American national game of base ball. In every respect it is an outdoor sport admirably adapted for our mercurial population. It is full of excitement, is quickly played, and it not only requires vigor of constitution and a healthy physique, but manly courage, steady nerve [and] plenty of pluck.”

(And where
did
pluck go? It was such a wonderfully American quality of that time.)

Of course, why it was that baseball and football caught on in the Republic instead of cricket and soccer is one of America's more enduring sweet mysteries. Unfortunately, de Tocqueville had passed on by then, so we can't ever be sure. The simplest explanation has to do with proficiency. Baseball and football (and
later basketball) require more dexterous skill. There are no 6-4-3 double plays in cricket, and the most adroit soccer player in the World Cup can't do with his feet what a run-of-the-mill junior high football or basketball player can manage with his hands. Proficiency mattered so to a nation on the make.

On the other hand, probably the most intriguing thing about baseball's success is that the sport depends primarily on eyesight. The greatest athletes in the world in terms of speed, strength, and dexterity aren't worth a hill of beans on the diamond if they lack hand-eye coordination. John McGraw signed Jim Thorpe for the Giants, and he was a bust precisely because he couldn't hit a ball that curved—never mind all the other stuff he could do better than anybody else on earth. Although pitchers do not require the same level of ocular acumen as hitters, spotting a pitch— control—is crucial. It's art. Mathewson, who was also a fabulous football player, understood very well. “A pitcher is not a ballplayer,” he declared.

But for whatever reasons, baseball caught on in America. Cricket had had its chances, too. The first cricket club in New York was founded in 1839, while the Knickerbocker Base Ball Club didn't begin playing games at Madison and Twenty-seventh Street until three years later. And cricket maintained something of a following even into the twentieth century. Perhaps it tells us more about how little the first World Series mattered, when Boston played Pittsburgh in 1903, but notwithstanding, in the
New York Times
, the newspaper of record, the first game of the first Series was simply listed under a roundup headline that read:
YESTERDAY'S BASEBALL GAMES
, while the larger headline on that same sports page concerned a match on Staten Island, which was:
ENGLISH CRICKETERS WIN
.

Surely, too, something of the popularity of baseball (and football) had to do with the fact that, whatever their English antecedents, they were indigenous American games. Curiously, the favored
individual
spectator sports that caught on in the latter part
of the nineteenth century—horse racing, boxing, tennis, golf, and track—had all more or less been transported from the British Isles and were quickly accepted here. But, by golly, we needed our own team games. Soccer aficionados in particular, of course, have never gotten over the fact that their sport is number one virtually everywhere in the world except in the U.S., but the fact is that it just never caught the fancy of Americans. Of course, it is an article of faith every year that
next year
America will redeem itself and catch up with the universal taste and embrace soccer as a spectator worship,
'SOCKER' FOOTBALL GROWS IN FAVOR
headlined a story in the
New York Herald
during the 1905 World Series. Such a story might have been run, wistfully, every October since then.

But baseball was the team game that began to rule. Early on, Union troops spread the sport during the Civil War, and afterward, whether in the farmlands or in the great cities that began to explode with the industrial revolution, baseball became the American game of the American dream. Especially for any minority boy seeking inclusion, baseball was the key to membership. As late as 1923, in one of the dandiest paeans to fellowship extant, the
Sporting News
(which was always called “the Bible of baseball”) warmly boasted this scripture: “The Mick, the Sheeny, the Wop, the Dutch and the Chink, the Indian, the Jap or the so-called Anglo-Saxon—his nationality is never a matter of moment if he can pitch, hit or field.”

(Of course, notably lacking from that friendly roster is the African-American, who had been excluded from “organized” baseball by 1880. As vulgar and common as the
Sporting News'
ethnic references might be, it is worth noting that even two years later, in 1925, the
New Yorker
, that bible of sophistication, wrote that when McGraw got rid of a popular player, he had “sold [him] down the river like any common field nigger.”)

So baseball embraced and even elevated its participants, and it provided common amusement for the citizenry. In 1869 the
Cincinnati Red Stockings became the first professional team (although staffed with many New Yorkers), and soon thereafter, in the 1870s, leagues began to bloom. So much of baseball's unique heritage developed so quickly: trades of players, the reserve clause, player unions and strikes, major leagues and minor leagues, large markets and small markets. Beer made an early alliance with baseball, especially in cities with considerable German populations, where the brewery barons caught on quickly that games played in the sunshine made the ideal place to sell their suds to the cranks sitting in the hot bleachers (so named, of course, because the hot sun bleached the wood).

Baltimore, Cincinnati, Louisville, Philadelphia, and Pittsburgh all had franchises backed by beer money, and Christian Frederick Wilhelm Von der Ahe, known as “Der Boss President,” owner of the St. Louis Brown Stockings, was so far ahead of his time that he had largely been forgotten when Bill Veeck came along many decades later to put a new shine on Von der Ahe's ideas. In order to increase crowds and sell beer, Der Boss President offered fireworks, oompah bands, merry-go-rounds, water slides, horse races, Wild West shows, special trolley cars, a stadium club, ladies' sections, and, of course, a
biergarten
. Only bobblehead dolls avoided Der Boss President's prescience.

But baseball, then as now, was always struggling not to screw up a good thing. It seems amazing now, at a time when all leagues the world over feature a
postseason
that almost seems as inclusive and enduring as the
regular
season itself, but the idea of playoffs and divisions pretty much eluded the owners. Not only that, but as late as 1899, the National League—then the only major league—had twelve teams. As a consequence, there was one winner and eleven losers, many of whom were eliminated from serious consideration by the holiday at the end of May, then called Decoration Day.

The Cleveland Spiders of 1899 are often cited for their spectacular ineptitude, finishing eighty-four games behind the Brooklyn
Superbas, with a 20–134 record, but inglorious losers were the order of the decade. Moreover, some teams had no long-term hope whatsoever because of what was called “syndicate baseball,” wherein one owner owned two teams. He would stock one of his two teams with most of the best players, so essentially what developed was a situation where some of the so-called major league teams were really minor league farm clubs. Even for the better teams that had nothing to point to at the end of the season, it's rather amazing that interest and attendance held up as well as it did.

Baseball also suffered two blows it had no control over in the 1890s. The financial panic of'93 and the Spanish-American War of '98 both kept down the crowds and threatened the lives of whole franchises. On a sustaining basis, though, the decline of Andrew Freedman's Giants from mediocrity to embarrassment hurt all of professional baseball, because with a laughingstock of a team in the nation's biggest city, the sport lacked the national spotlight that only McGraw and Mathewson would finally bring to it at the dawn of the new century.

Freedman had purchased the Giants for forty-eight thousand dollars in 1895, right after the club finished second, trailing only McGraw and the Orioles. An Indianapolis department store magnate, John Brush—“the Hoosier Wanamaker” he was called—had also sought to purchase the Giants. Freedman attacked Brush in the bar of the Fifth Avenue Hotel before a friend of Brush stepped in and walloped Freedman. Nonetheless, he got the team and soon alienated everybody. He did not help his press relations by punching out a
Times
reporter and regularly barring his many and sundry newspaper critics from the ballpark. Freedman was good-looking. Also: cheap, impulsive, and disagreeable—“utterly lacking in tact”—but he was prominent in Tammany and quick to blame his friendlessness on anti-Semitism.

One time in 1898 at the Polo Grounds, a former Giant named Ducky Holmes, then playing for the Orioles, got into some dispute
with a member of the home team and, as a final fillip, screamed: “At least I'm not working for a sheeny anymore.” Freedman heard the slur and went berserk, and when the umpire wouldn't punish Holmes for his outburst, the Giant owner ordered his team off the field, forfeiting. The truth of the matter, though, was that when it came to Andrew Freedman, the animating emotion was not anti-Semitism but anti-Freedmanism. Jews didn't like him any better than anybody else, and he was so generally despised that that antipathy was transposed upon the whole Giant franchise.

The fact is, what prejudice there was in baseball as the nineteenth century wound down was generally directed against the Irish. They predominated on the diamond and, in fact, had been prominently involved in the sport since its earliest years. In 1858 the Waspy Knickerbockers had consented to play a series against an Irish team from Brooklyn called Po Reilly's, and crowds of thousands had showed up despite a fifty-cent admission fee. Over time, “The Sons of Erin,” as the
Sporting News
invariably called them, had come to play so large a role in professional baseball that there developed the same sort of backlash against the Irish in baseball as, say, was directed at blacks in the 1970s when they began to dominate the National Basketball Association. Well into the 1890s, probably up to 40 percent of major league players were of Irish descent.

The Irish themselves were, naturally, not only proud of their preeminence, but convinced that they did indeed have a special aptitude for the game. In 1896, Bill Joyce, one of Andrew Freedman's revolving-door Giant managers, offered this assessment (which pretty much was the consensus wisdom of that time): “Give me a good Irish infield, and I will show you a good team. . . . You want two or three quick-thinking sons of Celt to keep the Germans and the others moving. . . . Get an Irishman to do the scheming. Let him tell the Germans what to do, and then you will have a great combination.” (Good Lord, but the
Germans must have been slowpokes; most every contemporary reference cackles at their lack of foot speed.)