Where did baseball come of age? Not where you might think.
New York City is enduring a professional sports drought of epic proportions. Football, as currently played by the Giants and Jets, is essentially over by Thanksgiving, with both clubs eliminated from playoff contention. None of New York’s three regional hockey teams has hoisted the Stanley Cup in the past 20 years, and basketball is drier still. The Knicks last won an N. B. A. championship in 1973, when the embattled Richard Nixon was president. The Brooklyn Nets, a haven for feuding superstars, have yet to reach the finals.
But baseball has caused fans the most grief. The Mets, with two improbable World Series victories in their 62- year existence, have failed rather spectacularly to match the success of the West Coast- bound teams they replaced, while today’s Yankees bear scant resemblance to the pinstriped Bombers who won a record 27 World Series, the last coming in 2009. It’s quite a comedown for a city that once supported three storied major- league franchises in three different boroughs.
What makes New York baseball unique, writes Kevin Baker in this insightful, beautifully crafted narrative, is its role as chronic ler of c u l t u r a l c h a n g e . Baker, a n o v e l i s t and hist o r i a n , wisely ignores the m a n y claims regarding where baseball was first played, focusing instead on its modern roots. Baseball didn’t come of age in the cow pastures and small towns dotting the nation’s heartland, he notes. Baseball is an urban game. More precisely, it is “the New York game.”
New York, says Baker, is where the rules were perfected and people first kept score. It’s where the first true baseball stadiums were constructed and admission was charged, where the home run emerged, players became media stars, and trickery — the stolen base, the bunt and other nefarious ploys — entered the game. “I understand that a curveball is thrown with a deliberate purpose to deceive,” fumed Charles Eliot, the stiff- necked president of America’s leading university. “Surely this is not an ability we should want to foster at Harvard.”
In truth, baseball was a nasty game well into the 20th century, marred by riotous crowds and vicious brawls. Players slid into bases, spikes up, hoping to draw blood. Pitchers routinely aimed at the batter’s unprotected head. In 1920, Carl Mays of the Yankees, a notorious “beanball” artist, planted a pitch on the temple of Indian shortstop Ray Chapman with such force that it drove parts of the skull into the brain. Chapman died the following day. “My conscience is absolutely clear,” Mays declared.
Still, baseball’s popularity soared. By World War I, New York’s three majorleague teams were firmly established — the Brooklyn Dodgers and New York Giants representing the National League, the New York Yankees representing the American League. Baseball grew as New York City grew. The Brooklyn Bridge and the massive new subway system motivated team owners to build stadiums with enormous seating capacities. New York’s swelling immigrant population encouraged the search for ethnic prospects — Irish, German, Italian, even Jewish — as long as they were white. The construction of two transportation palaces, Grand Central Terminal and the original Penn Station, allowed teams to travel widely in style. The surge in newspaper readership brought a wealth of writing talent to the city. Think of a press box with Ring Lardner, Grantland Rice, Damon Runyon and Heywood Broun sitting side by side.
There were problems as well. World War I temporarily shut down the game. In 1919, baseball faced a defining moment when members of the Chicago White Sox, in the pay of gamblers led by the New York City kingpin Arnold Rothstein, conspired to throw the World Series. ( The Sporting News blamed it on “dirty, longnosed, thick- lipped and strong- smelling” immigrant types.) Left no alternative, the owners installed a law- and- order federal judge, Kenesaw Mountain Landis, as the first baseball commissioner, with orders to clean up the game. He responded by banning the offending players for life.
Landis also proclaimed that “Negroes are not barred from organized baseball by the commissioner.” But this time he deferred to the owners, knowing that they had no intention of breaking the color line, which extended to players from the Caribbean. The legendary manager John Mcgraw, then with the Baltimore Orioles, was not alone in bemoaning this waste of talent. He even tried subterfuge by signing a light- skinned Black prospect named Charlie Grant and passing him off as “Chief Tokohoma” of the Cherokee Nation. It fooled no one. “If he really keeps this Indian,” the White Sox owner
Charlie Comiskey sneered, “I will get a Chinaman of my acquaintance and put him on third.”
And then, of course, there was the Babe.
No ballplayer was better suited to wide- open, splashy, Prohibition- era New York. Ruth kept an 11- room suite at the Ansonia and nightclubbed with the best of them. An incorrigible womanizer, he destroyed his friendship with his teammate Lou Gehrig, the beloved “Pride of the Yankees,” by carousing with Gehrig’s wife. The Ruth we recall today from granular newsreels — paunchy, spindly- legged, gingerly trotting the bases — is but a shadow of the “sleek, muscular” pitcher turned outfielder who arrived from Boston in 1920 and set the game ablaze. As Baker sees it, Ruth may not have been the most valuable baseball player of the 20th century — Joe Dimaggio appears to have earned that spot — but he was “the most important athlete in history.” While Pelé, Michael Jordan and Muhammad Ali starred in “more universally popular sports,” it was Ruth “who first made professional sports big time, with all that would follow.” I don’t happen to agree, but it makes for a good barroom argument.
Dodger baseball meant Hilda Chester and her cowbell leading the bleacher cheers, with her piercing “Eacha heart out, ya bum”; the organist Gladys Goodding playing the national anthem with her terrier pup standing at attention; the off- key “Dodger SymPhony” serenading in the aisles; and the public- address announcer, Tex Rickards, imploring the crowd before each game to “don’t throw nuthin’ from the stands!”
The Yankees, meanwhile, never took their foot off the gas. Led by Colonel Jacob Ruppert, they plowed their profits back into the organization by hiring scouts to find the best young prospects and creating a farm system where this talent could bloom. The Colonel was also coldblooded in contract negotiations, backed by a “reserve clause” that bound players permanently to the team. He forced Ruth and Gehrig to take pay cuts at the height of their careers, and openly humiliated Dimaggio for asking for a small raise. Joe “would never complain again,” says Baker, “at least not in public.”
One hopes for a second volume from Kevin Baker, every bit as good as this one.