"The Faith of Fifty Million People"

The idea staggered me. I remembered, of course, that the World’s Series had been fixed in 1919, but if I had thought of it at all I would have thought of it as a thing that merely happened, the end of some inevitable chain. It never occurred to me that one man could start to play with the faith of fifty million people — with the single-mindedness of a burglar blowing a safe.

from The Great Gatsby - F. Scott Fitzgerald

The nice thing about writing a blog is that you have the freedom to write whatever you please because you don't have an editor looking over your shoulder. The bad part is you don't have an editor looking over your shoulder reigning in your compulsions and keeping you honest. I know my posts tend to come in on the long side and that's putting it mildly. Even so, I often have more material to cover than even I am willing to include in a single post. When that happens, I usually decide it's time for a break and continue with a part two, sometimes even a part three.

In my last post, the one about Shoeless Joe Jackson possibly getting into the Baseball Hall of Fame, I came to a natural end point and left it at that.

Yet, long as that post was, there was still more I wanted to cover on the subject, so I'll be doing that in this post.

There are a couple other reasons. First, it gives me the opportunity to cover one of my favorite subjects, baseball history. Some people assume that because I write about it so often, I must be a rabid baseball fan. The truth is I'm not. I would have a hard time coming up with a list of a dozen current Major League ball players off the top of my head, including those on my hometown teams. I leave that to my son. But I do love the history of the game which ties in, in some curious ways, to the history of this country, especially its urban history, which is what this blog is ostensibly about. At least that's what it says on the masthead.

Writing about baseball also helps me contemplate a topic that has little or nothing to do with the current state of the world, especially American politics, which I've written about ad nauseam for the past ten or so years.

After all, how many ways are there to spell shit show?

Ok now that's off my chest...

One of the things that keeps me interested in the story of the infamous 1919 Chicago White Sox, (eight members of whom including their star left fielder Joe Jackson, conspired to intentionally lose the World Series), is not so much the story itself, but the myths surrounding the story and how willing folks are to buy into them, and to what lengths they will go to defend them, over a century after the fact.

That's pretty much par for the course in the game as until fairly recently, baseball history was not considered a subject worthy of serious study. Its major chroniclers were sports writers, albeit some very good ones. The problem is, these writers may have been good story tellers, but they were lousy historians. Putting it another way, baseball traditionally had a lot of Homers, but few if any Thucydides. Consequently, much of baseball history is built upon a string of myths, (including its own creation myth) with a few facts thrown in for good measure. 

Here's a good article written by a real historian, in fact, the official historian of Major League Baseball, John Thorn. In his piece, Thorn cites an article from the Society of the Advancement of Baseball Research, which debunks many of the myths and misunderstandings surrounding the Black Sox Scandal.

However I do have a bone to pick, ok maybe just a nit, with an issue that Thorn brings up.

It's the idea that Babe Ruth "saved" baseball from the existential threat to the game brought on by the Black Sox Scandal. 

I bring that up because when I told my friend Rich about the last post I was about to write, he made the comment: "Babe Ruth saved baseball after the scandal didn't he?" Even though I've gone on record making that claim, I've had my doubts about the subject for a few years now with nothing to really back it up, so I just answered in the affirmative.

My current feeling is not to diminish Babe Ruth's impact on the game of baseball one bit. I agree with John Thorn and countless others that with his free swinging, all-or-nothing approach to hitting the baseball, there is no person who singlehandedly changed the modern game more than the Sultan of Swat. I commented in an earlier post about a list where Thorn ranked in order the 100 most important people in baseball history. As much of a cliché it may seem, you-know-who was number one. 

Jackie Robinson came in at number two. 

Many people would argue that it should be the other way around and I see their point. But my argument, take it or leave it, is that Jackie Robinson was the Neil Armstrong of baseball, that is to say his groundbreaking role as the first black player in modern Major League Baseball history, was the culmination of the efforts of many people, especially the scores of Negro League players who came before him and upon whose shoulders he stood. There is no doubt that he played the role into which he was cast brilliantly and for that he is well deserving of all the accolades. But if it hadn't been Jackie Robinson, like Neil Armstrong, the first man to walk on the moon, it would have been someone else. 

On the other hand, Babe Ruth changed baseball (some would argue not necessarily for the better*), all by himself.

But did his presence in the game on the heels of baseball's "original sin", its "loss of innocence" and all the other dubious, grandiloquent labels we've come to accept that describe the 1919 World Series Scandal, really save the game from ruin? 

I would argue no, for there is in fact little evidence that the scandal rocked the game to its core and that consequently, the game wasn't in any need of being saved.

Consider the quote at the top of this post from the novel The Great Gatsby. In it, Nick Carroway, the book's narrator is describing a lunchtime meeting where he joins Gatsby and one of his associates, Meyer Wolfsheim. Carroway describes his first impressions of Wolfsheim this way: 

A small, flat-nosed Jew raised his large head and regarded me with two fine growths of hair which luxuriated in either nostril. After a moment I discovered his tiny eyes in the half-darkness.

The trio lunch together and Fitzgerald, in Calloway's voice goes into detail contrasting the demeanor of  Wolfsheim with that of the two Gentiles, Gatsby and Carroway, in words that would never fly today, At one point Gatsby excuses himself leaving Carroway alone with Wolfsheim who directs Carroway's attention to his own cufflinks which turn out to be made of human molars. 

After lunch, Carroway asks Gatsby who this curious character Wolfsheim was, a dentist perhaps? 

"Meier Wolfsheim?" replies Gatsby. The narration continues:

"No, he’s a gambler.” Gatsby hesitated, then added coolly: “He’s the man who fixed the World’s Series back in 1919.”

Then comes the line quoted at the top of this post.

The character of Meyer Wolfsheim was a none too subtle reference to the real Arthur Rothstein, the New York gangster who played a role in the Black Sox Scandal.

If you can get past the anti-semetic subcontext, the line about playing with the faith of 50 million people is inspired. It was appropriated in addition to me, by Ken Burns as the title to his chapter on the decade of the nineteen teens in his Baseball TV series. 

The quote above is also inaccurate, as it is commonly accepted that no, the 1919 Series wasn't "fixed" by one man, rather that the players themselves came up with the idea.

But what really interests me about the quote is this line: "I remembered of course that the World Series had been fixed in 1919." As has been well noted, this year, 2025 marks the centennial of the publication of  The Great Gatsby. Which brings to mind that at the time of the book's release, the Black Sox Scandal had only been a few years old. The Great Gatsby actually is set in 1922, only one year after the trial and banishment of the eight players involved in the scandal. Yet Fitzgerald's use of the world "remembered" sounds as if Calloway was recalling an event that had happened in the distant past, perhaps a decade or even a generation before. If the event was grave enough to have challenged the faith of 50 million people (just less than one half the U.S. population at the time), AND had happened only one year before, one would think Fitzgerald might have used the term "I knew of course" rather than "I remembered..." 

One might argue that Fitzgerald was living in Paris at the time he was writing Gatsby so he would have been farther removed from the event than had he been stateside. But I have perhaps a more plausible explanation. 

Maybe the Black Sox Scandal wasn't as big a deal with baseball fans as we today assume it was. Could it be that Fitzgerald as well as Nelson Algren, James T. Farrell, Elliot Asinov and other writers who took it on as a subject, used the event as purely a literary device rather than an accurate depiction of history? After all, these authors were first and foremost great story tellers, not historians.

OK that's pure speculation, but there is some empirical evidence that backs up my claim that the 1919 Black Sox Scandal really didn't have an existential impact on the game, attendance at ballparks. 

The data comes from the site: BallparksofBaseball.com

Between 1910 and 1916, total yearly attendance for the 16 Major League teams, eight in each league, ranged between 4.5 and 6.5 million fans. On April 17, 1917, the United States entered World War I but despite that, MLB attendance remained within that range at 4.8 million that year. 

However, attendance took a drastic hit in 1918 as many players were either drafted and entered the service or as was the case of Joe Jackson and Lefty Williams, two of the banished 1919 White Sox players, chose to leave baseball to work for commercial enterprises with government contracts that were deemed "essential" to the war effort. There they spent most of their time playing exhibition baseball. With a good number of ball players off to war or somewhere else, attendance took a big hit, coming in at 2.8 million.

World War I ended in November of that year and MLB attendance bounded back in 1919, slightly topping the previous record of the decade at 6,532,439.

Word of the fixing of the Series didn't become public until just before the end of the 1920 season and that year saw a dramatic increase in attendance, up to 9,120,875. If you know your baseball history, you know that was the year that much to the chagrin of their fans, the Boston Red Sox sold Babe Ruth to the New York Yankees. Much of that jump in attendance is a result of New York City alone as attendance for Yankees home games more than doubled from 619,164 in 1919 to a staggering 1,289,422 in 1920. 

You may recall that Ruth started out as a pitcher. That all changed when he moved south to New York because, valuable as he was on the mound, his presence everyday in the lineup as a slugging outfielder was even more valuable. As an everyday presence in the lineup, Babe Ruth hit 54 home runs in 1920. He broke the previous record of 29, set by himself the previous year, on July 19, halfway into the season. By the way, the previous record of 27 homers in one year that Ruth broke in 1919, was set by Ned Williamson in 1884. 

Ruth's 54 home run record lasted all of one year. He hit 59 the following year and 60 in 1927, for arguably the best Major League team ever. 

That record stood until another Yankee, Roger Maris broke it in 1961. 

So yes indeed, Babe Ruth's becoming a Yankee had a profound impact on the popularity of baseball, becoming more profound every subsequent year in the decade of the twenties.

But it must be remembered that as a member of the American League, Babe Ruth only played against American League teams, half of the teams in Major League baseball. 

In 1920, the Yankees' National League stadium-mates the New York Giants** saw their 1920 attendance increase by over 200,000 from the previous year. More dramatic, over in Brooklyn, the National League Robins (today's LA Dodgers), attendance went from 360 thousand+ in 1919, to a little over 800 thousand in 1920. 

It wasn't just New York, attendance was up for every team in the majors in 1920, American and National League, except for Detroit for some reason, and for both Boston teams, the Red Sox, for obvious reasons, and their crosstown rivals the Braves. Maybe for them it was a matter of guilt by association. 

Of course Babe Ruth never played against National League teams during the regular season so it can safely be assumed that he had little impact on the attendance at National League parks, at least until later years when players all over the Majors adopted his style of hitting.

Anyway the 1919 Scandal surfaced and became public at the end of the 1920 season so one would expect that if it had a major impact on the game, it would have been reflected in the attendance at ballgames in 1921 and the subsequent years. Indeed, overall attendance did drop by about five percent in 1921. 

Much of that loss can be accounted for by the understandable drop in attendance of 35 percent for White Sox home games alone. Was it out of disgust with the scandal or simply the fact that the team, one of the best in baseball at the time, overnight lost three out of its four starting infielders, two of its three starting outfielders, and two of its starting pitchers?  The White Sox wouldn't become competitive again until the 1950s. And the Red Sox in 1921 continued to hemorrhage fans, about 30 percent of them from '20 to '21, clearly out of disgust with their owner Harry Frazee, who allegedly sold Babe Ruth to finance his theatrical ambitions.

As for the rest of the teams in baseball, 1921 was more or less break even, some teams gained fans, while others lost fans. The same was true in subsequent years but with overall attendance increasing gradually year by year.

Maybe you see something in those numbers that I don't, but to me they don't show any clear indication that baseball as a whole was in serious trouble after the Black Sox Scandal.

In fact, in the years after the 1919 affair, every team in baseball except the Red Sox, turned a profit. That includes the Chicago White Sox. 

Yes, much of that is due to Babe Ruth who for his part, invented and defined the role of baseball superstar, while the game he represented, gladly went along for the ride.

Because of that, the image of Ruth, the Redeemer in pinstripes, fits in nicely with the narrative of the betrayal of the faith of 50 million people brought on by baseball's "Original Sin".

But that's all likely as much a part of baseball mythology as is so much of the legacy of hands down the game's greatest player with one exception. Babe Ruth really was that. 

Yet the loss of innocence part is all hooey. Outside of a parent and child playing catch, baseball at its purest, there never has been anything remotely innocent about the game.

In fact, just like the kid outside the courthouse in Chicago during the trial of the Chicago eight allegedly saying to Shoeless Joe Jackson: "Say it ain't so Joe",***  one of the most important milestones every American youngster experiences, is having to learn that hard lesson. 

In that vein I'll close with a couple excerpts from one of my all-time favorite writings on baseball, the article Mike Royko wrote to honor Jackie Robinson, written on the day the great man died.

Royko was as good storyteller as there was, but this is as real as it gets:

All that Saturday, the wise men of the neighborhood, who sat in chairs on the sidewalk outside the tavern, had talked about what it would do to baseball.

I hung around and listened because baseball was about the most important thing in the world, and if anything was going to ruin it, I was worried.

Most of the things they said, I didn't understand, although it all sounded terrible. But could one man bring such ruin?

They said he could and would. And the next day he was going to be in Wrigley Field for the first time, on the same diamond as Hack, Nicholson, Cavarretta, Schmitz, Pafko, and all my other idols.

 I had to see Jackie Robinson, the man who was going to somehow wreck everything. So the next day, another kid and I started walking to the ballpark early.

...

I've forgotten most of the details of the game, other than that the Dodgers won and Robinson didn't get a hit or do anything special, although he was cheered on every swing and every routine play.
But two things happened I'll never forget. Robinson played first, and early in the game a Cub star hit a grounder and it was a close play.

Just before the Cub reached first, he swerved to his left. And as he got to the bag, he seemed to slam his foot down hard at Robinson's foot.

It was obvious to everyone that he was trying to run into him or spike him. Robinson took the throw and got clear at the last instant.

I was shocked. That Cub, a hometown boy, was my biggest hero. It was not only an unheroic stunt, but it seemed a rude thing to do in front of people who would cheer for a foul ball. I didn't understand why he had done it. It wasn't at all big league.

I didn't know that while the white fans were relatively polite, the Cubs and most other teams kept up a steady stream of racial abuse from the dugout. I thought that all they did down there was talk about how good Wheaties are.****

NOTES:

*They call it the "Deadball Era", when most of the drama of the game took place on the base paths rather than at home plate. It was the style of hitting and baserunning that created this, not the liveliness or lack thereof of the balls. Players could have hit home runs as Ty Cobb proved time and again, but they chose instead to make contact and keep the ball in play to get on base in any way they could, rather than swinging the bat as hard as possible trying to get the ball out of the park, thereby increasing the possibility of striking out, which Babe Ruth did a lot, for his time at least. But to the fans, the home run became the ultimate symbol of success in the game, and the hard-scrabble fight for every base type of play that Cobb and his contemporaries personified, went out of style. Some would say, to a certain degree anyway, it's coming back. I'm all for that. 

**For 10 years the Yankees shared the Polo Grounds with the National League Giants. The original Yankee Stadium, dubbed "The House that Ruth Built" opened in 1923.

***Yet another piece of dubious baseball lore.

****From Jackie's Debut a Unique Day, written by, Mike Royko and published in the Chicago Daily News, October 25, 1972. Do yourself a favor and read the whole piece because its real payoff, the second thing Royko mentions he'd never forget, comes at the very end. You can find it, along with a couple other articles by the great columnist here.

Baseball Mythology 101

October 1, Wrigley Field- One of baseball´s favorite legends is the story of Babe Ruth´s “Called Shot” during the 1932 World Series. Volumes have been written about it, all asking the important question, did he or did he not point his finger toward the outfield with the intention of telling everyone within eyeshot, that he would hit the next pitch for a home run.

Now if anyone in the history of the game were able to call a home run, it would be Babe Ruth. But consider this, in 1927, the year he hit the greatest number of home runs in his career, 60, he had 540 at bats. Accounting for walks and sacrifices, which aren't counted as official at bats, a conservative estimate would have the Babe facing about 2,800 pitches that year, meaning he hit about one home run for every 50 pitches he saw. Pretty incredible, but imagine the audacity of predicting emphatically to nearly 50,000 fans, and untold millions listening on the radio during the broadcast of the World Series that you were about to do something that back in your prime you were capable of doing only once in fifty chances. That would certainly take a lot of moxie. Did Babe Ruth have a lot of moxie? He certainly did.

But did he call that home run in the fifth inning of the game three of the 1932 World Series? This is what we know for certain:

The Cub players both on the field and sitting on the bench in their third base dugout, as well as the fans were riding the Babe mercilessly during that at bat. And the Bambino returned the compliment. Charlie Root, the pitcher for the Cubs, threw two fastballs in quick succession to Ruth which the slugger took for strikes. Ruth made some kind of pointing gesture (some suggest expressing displeasure for Root´s quick delivery between the two pitches). The next thing you know, Root come low and inside with a changeup which Ruth hit with a vengeance, a screaming line drive which landed between the scoreboard and the flagpole about 490 feet from home plate. And a legend was born.

The headline of an article written by Joe Williams of the New York World-Telegram reporting on the game the following day stated:

RUTH CALLS SHOT AS HE PUTS HOME RUN NO. 2 IN SIDE POCKET.

(It was Ruth´s second home run of the game). After the game Ruth was asked if he intended his gesture to signal that he would hit a home run on the next pitch. He said no. However the legend would not die. There were several notable witnesses that day who said yes indeed he called the home run.

Lou Gehrig who was on deck at the time swore that Ruth called the hone run. Another very credible witness was no less than a future Supreme Court Justice, John Paul Stevens who had this to say: “My dad took me to see the World Series and we were sitting behind third base, not too far back. Ruth did point to the center-field scoreboard. And he did hit the ball out of the park after he pointed with his bat. So it really happened.”

Contrary to logic, as time went on, memories of details of the event got clearer and clearer. Nearly forty years later, long time Cubs PA announcer Pat Piper who was sitting close to the action, told reporter Steve Forrest that there was a fan sitting within earshot of Ruth who was taunting the slugger. Piper recalled Ruth turning to the fan and telling him: “I´ve heard enough from you. This next one´s going out...“ Then Piper recalled Ruth stretching out his arm saying: “...right over there.“

Ruth´s memory of that early fall afternoon in Chicago also became crystal clear as time went on. With each telling of the story The Sultan of Swat was able to recall more and more details, including precisely what expletives were said by and to whom. Here´s one account directly from the mouth of Babe: “Well, I looked out at center field and I pointed. I said, ´I´m gonna hit the next pitched ball right past the flagpole!´ Well, the good Lord must have been with me.”

The grainy photograph on the right can be reliably attributed to the moment. It shows the Babe in the batter´s box pointing his right hand. It´s impossible to say exactly where he's pointing but to my eyes it looks like he's pointing down the third base line toward left field, or possibly to the Cubs´ dugout. The home run he hit was to deep center field. Babe Ruth was certainly capable of hitting a home run in the direction he was pointing, but it´s unlikely if it was his intention to call a home run, that as a left handed hitter he would point to left field. In the picture, he´s holding his arm straight out, as if he´s pointing directly at someone, the third baseman possibly? Could he have been telling Stan Hack that he was going to hit the next pitch down his throat? Perhaps. But not a very good story since his drive seconds later missed the Cub third baseman by at least one hundred feet.

For his part, Charlie Root didn't buy any of it. He was a 200 plus career game winner in the big leagues but went down in history for that one pitch. This was his take:

“Ruth did not point at the fence before he swung. If he had made a gesture like that, well, anybody who knows me knows that Ruth would have ended up on his ass.” I´m guessing the same would have been the case with most other big league pitchers.

So do I think Ruth called his home run shot off Charlie Root? Well as Babe Ruth himself said to Root after the pitcher asked the slugger years later about the incident:

"No, but it made a hell of a story."

Beer and Whiskey: There Used to be a Ballpark Part II

We left our tour of major league ballparks past and present at Miller Park, home of the Milwaukee Brewers, a team named after the industry that made its home town famous, playing in a ballpark named for one of the biggest companies in that industry. It's entirely appropriate that this should be so. While it's not mentioned in either the refrain or any of the twelve or so verses of the game's official anthem, "Take Me Out to the Ballgame",  beer has been an integral part of baseball for all, well almost all of the game's history. Here it might be prudent to have a brief refresher in beer and baseball.

The first major league, the National League was founded in 1876 when William Hulbert, owner of the Chicago White Stockings, decided to put together a serious league of professional ballplayers rather than what already existed, a loosely held together association of teams with erratic schedules, no system in place to keep players from jumping teams, and perhaps most important, no discipline in regard to player or fan conduct.

In that respect we must remember that back then, baseball had to compete with sports like dog fighting and rat baiting for the public's attention and what made those activities popular, beyond their obvious artistic value, was wagering. In that sense, baseball was no different; back then it was a tough sell to convince a workingman to spend his hard eared money and one day off watching grown men in knickers playing a children's game, just for the fun of it. Gambling was the reason baseball became a spectator sport in the first place, as it emerged from the pastoral game played by elite clubs like the New York Knickerbockers in the Elysian Fields of New Jersey, to the more rambunctious game played in places like rough and tumble Brooklyn, and ultimately our "national pastime", the game we know today.

Beyond more than occasional lapses of honesty on the part of players not necessarily trying their best to win games, all the gambling that went on in the open lent a certain air of disreputability to the game of baseball. And what should come as no surprise to anyone who has ever attended a ballgame, so did drinking to excess which believe it or not, people did every once in a while when they got the chance back in the day. William Hulbert wanted no part of any of that.

To make his new league respectable in that particularly rowdy era, drinking and gambling would be strictly prohibited at all National League games. In order to assure players would be paid well enough to resist the temptation of being bought off by gamblers who still plied their trade, just not in the open, the admission price to every ballgame would be fifty cents, steep for those days. Oh and one more thing, there would be no games played on Sunday.

All those restrictions did indeed attract the clientele that Hulbert desired for his new league. Those haughty, mid to upper-crust early National League fans were just as happy not to have to rub shoulders with the working stiffs who were kept away in droves because Sunday was their only day off, they couldn't afford the steep price of admission, and last but far from least, they liked their beer.

Enter the American Association (no relation to the current American League) which was founded in 1881 and began play the following year. The charter franchises of this new league represented big cities, mostly old river towns like Pittsburgh and St. Louis, whose shall we say, "worldly values" set them apart from the rest of Puritan America. One of those cities was Cincinnati whose team, the Red Stockings, was expelled from the National League for defying its ban on beer and Sunday ball. Most of the sponsors of this new league were brewers and distillers which inspired the pejorative term "Beer and Whiskey League", imposed on them by National League owners. As has happened so often in the game of baseball, a term intended to be a slam against a team or in this case an entire league, became a symbol of pride for the offended party. The American Association made no bones about being the league of the working man, who was free to drink all he wanted at their games, especially on Sunday. It should be noted that in those days, fans or "cranks" as they were called, were almost always men.

One of those members of the imbibing industry who entered a team into the American Association was a fellow by the name of Chris von der Ahe, the owner of the St. Louis Browns. Von der Ahe, an immigrant from Prussia, owned a saloon on the north side of town. He knew virtually nothing about the game of baseball except that beer sales at his bar rose considerably whenever the team located down the street at the corner of Grand and Dodier played ball. So he bought the team.

By either sheer brilliance or just dumb luck, von der Ahe signed Charles Comiskey to play first base as well as manage his newly acquired team. Comiskey who today is better known as the founder and long time owner of the Chicago White Sox as well as one of the founding fathers of today's American League, turned the struggling Browns into the powerhouse of the AA, winning four championships out of the ten seasons the league was in existence. The two men had a great run together, Comiskey's brilliance as a baseball man brought success on the field while von der Ahe's talent for promotion, showmanship and giving the customers what they wanted, brought fans into the stands in record numbers.

For starters, von der Ahe charged a quarter to get in to his park, half the going rate of the National League. Not only did he allow the consumption of alcoholic beverages in his ballpark, he set up concession stands to sell the stuff, further advancing his bottom line. Without question, games would be played on Sunday, although open gambling was still verboten. Above all, Chris von der Ahe understood that sometimes it took more than a good team on the field to bring in the crowds. Always the master showman, in the days before there were clubhouses at ballparks, he would have his team dress in his saloon, or their hotel if  they were on the road. Wearing a silk hat and accompanied by his two greyhounds, Snoozer and Schnauzer, he proudly lead his team like a Prussian general as they walked in parade formation to the ballpark. Von der Ahe was the first baseball owner to offer promotions and creating a carnival atmosphere at the ballpark, the true forebear of baseball impresarios such as Bill Veeck and Charlie Finley.

Von der Ahe also believed it was prudent to have AA teams participate in exhibition games outside of officially sanctioned league games, something the National League frowned upon. One exhibition series the  NL could not turn up its nose at was a championship between between its pennant winner, and that of the renegade league. The first of these "World Series" took place in 1884 when the NL Providence Grays defeated the AA New York Metropolitans three games to none. The next two of these championship series pitted von der Ahe's Browns (today's Cardinals) against the White Stockings (today's Cubs), starting what would become one of the most enduring rivalries in all of sports. If you're interested in bragging rights, the first series ended in a tie when Comiskey pulled his team from the field after a disputed call with the series ties at three games. St. Louis won the second series four games to two.

The final resting place of Chris von der Ahe
as well as the statue he had cast of himself
which once stood at the entrance of his
St. Louis ballpark.

Part maverick and part buffoon, von der Ahe didn't know when to leave well enough alone. He became subject to ridicule when he had a statue of himself placed in front of his ballpark. A sportswriter sardonically dubbed the it, "von der Ehe discovers Illinois." His constant meddling with the team exasperated Comiskey who eventually left for the Cincinnati Reds, sending the St. Louis nine into a tailspin from which they wouldn't recover for thirty years. Von der Ahe may have known how to make money but he didn't know how to keep it. He ended up losing his personal fortune and spent the last years of his life tending other people's bars and depending on the kindness of friends, including Charlie Comiskey who sent him a monthly sustenance check until his death in 1913. He is buried in Bellafonte Cemetery in St. Louis underneath the statue he had built for himself.

Despite the early success of the AA, in the end the owners of the NL had deeper pockets and were better able to endure difficult economic times and threats from another league that formed in 1890, the Players' League. The AA folded in 1891. Four of its teams, St. Louis, Pittsburgh, Brooklyn and Cincinnati were absorbed into the  National League, where they remain today respectively as the Cardinals, the Pirates, the LA Dodgers and the Reds.

As I mentioned above, von der Ahe's Browns didn't fare too well after Comiskey's departure. Hoping for a fresh start, the team exchanged their brown stockings for those of a crimson hue. Not long after that, someone connected the color with the red bird known commonly as the Eastern Cardinal and the name stuck. Alas the team's color and name changed but its fortunes did not.

In 1901, yet another major league was formed, the American League. Ironically it was billed as a respectable alternative to the National League which with Hulbert having been dead for two decades, had degenerated into everything its founder tried to avoid. One of its original members was a team from Milwaukee, nicknamed the Brewers. That team lasted all of one year in Brewtown before it moved to St. Louis where they picked up another traditional name, the Browns. These Browns are known for one thing, they were the most God-awful team in major league history. The three most famous players in AL St. Louis Browns history were a bona-fide Hall of Famer, (first baseman George Sisler), a one armed outfielder, and a midget who had one major league at bat.

The AL Browns moved into the old ballpark at Grand and Dodier, a site where baseball had been played in one form or other since the 1860s. Chris von der Ahe had moved his team away from that site to a facility he built next to an amusement park in 1890. In 1909 the Browns rebuilt their ballpark up to the same standards as other major league ballparks of that era, using steel and concrete as the primary structural components rather than wood. As such, Sportsmans Park became one of the classic ballparks in the major leagues, along with Forbes Field in Pittsburgh, Ebbets Field in Brooklyn, the Polo Grounds in New York, Fenway Park in Boston, Comiskey Park and Wrigley Field both in Chicago. The Cardinals continued to play in their dilapidated old wooden ballpark until 1920 when they moved to Sportsmans Park and became tenants of the Browns.

In the 1920s, the Cardinals' fortunes began to change because of the fruits of the labor of one man, Branch Rickey. Rickey, the general manager of the team understood that the woefully underfunded Cardinals could not compete against the likes of the New York Giants or the Cubs when it came to attracting established talented players to their team. So Rickey came up with the brilliant idea of buying up minor league clubs in order to develop talent from the ground up. It took several years but eventually Rickey's implementation of the farm system paid off and in 1926, the Cardinals won their first modern day World Series, defeating the mighty Yankees in seven games. They have been a force to be reckoned with ever since; as far as championships go, they are the most successful club in National League history, and second only to the Yankees in MLB history.

As for the Browns, well not so much. They spent most of their existence in the second division of the American League. Despite the disparity of talent, the Browns held their own with the Cardinals in terms of fan support. When the time of reckoning came and it became obvious in the fifties that St. Louis couldn't support two teams, it was a virtual coin toss which team would leave. Once again, beer played a pivotal role in history as the brewing company Anheuser-Busch bought the Cardinals. Bill Veeck who owned the Browns knew he couldn't compete with Budweiser and threw in the towel, even though the Browns owned the ballpark and the Cardinals were their tenants. The Browns headed east, without Veeck to become the Baltimore Orioles. Once the Cards were the only game in town, they purchased the ballpark and renamed it after their owner, but the name never stuck with the fans.

Sportsmans Park or Busch Stadium I if you prefer, lasted until 1966 when the Cardinals moved into what would become Busch Stadium II, a downtown multi-purpose stadium, the first of the "cookie cutter" bowl shaped stadiums built in the sixties and seventies for both football and baseball. That stadium lasted less than forty years when it was replaced by the current retro style, baseball only ballpark with the fabulous view of Downtown St. Louis and the Eero Saarinen's iconic Gateway Memorial Arch pictured below.

Busch Stadium III, current home of the St. Louis Cardinals

Baseball has been played at this site continuously for 150 years
and counting. That must be some kind of record.

The last game at Sportsmans Park took place on May 8th, 1966. After the game, home plate was dug up, placed aboard a helicopter and flown to the new stadium downtown. That might have ended one hundred years of continuous baseball at Grand and Dodier but not quite. The Busch family donated the land to charity to become the Herbert Hoover Boys and Girls Club. The club continues to maintain the field for baseball and other sports meaning that baseball has continuously been played on that site going on 150 years and counting.

One would be hard pressed to pick one out of the many memorable events that took place at the Corner of Grand and Dodier in North St. Louis. Ten modern World Series were played at Sportsmans Park, as well as four nineteenth American Association/National League championship series in its predecessor. Dozens of baseball immortals played on that field, you can read some of their names on the plaque marking the site of the old ballpark below. Two names not on the plaque are Pete Gray, the one armed right fielder who played for the Browns in 1945 during the closing years of WWII, and Eddie Gaedel, the 3'7" midget Bill Veeck sent up to the plate as a gag in a meaningless game on August 19, 1951.

A few of the stats about Sportsmans Park as noted on the
plaque posted on the Herbert Hoover Boys and Girls Club
of St. Louis, the site of old Sportsmans Park.

Giving it considerable thought, my choice for the most memorable moment in Sportsmans Park would be the 1944 World Series which pitted the Cardinals against the Browns, an all St. Louis World Series. In a year where just about all the good ballplayers were off fighting a war, the Browns fielded a team of senior citizens, featuring an all 4F infield. But doggone it, they had the best, old, mentally unstable, half blind, flat footed players in the league that year and they won their one and only American League pennant. The Cards did have one legitimate major leaguer who would´t enlist until the following year, Stan Musial. He and the Cardinals took the Series in six from the once and future hapless Browns. Regardless of the circumstances, for a brief moment in the fall of 1944, St. Louis was truly the center of the baseball world.

-

Sportsmans Park was not the only ballpark to host a World Series all by itself. From 1913 to 1922, the Polo Grounds in New York City was the home to both the Giants and the Yankees, and in the last two of those years, the National League Giants played the American League Yankees in the World Series, the Giants winning them both.

Today the words New York City and baseball when combined, are so synonymous with the Yankees, it's hard to imagine that the Bronx Bombers were Johnny-come-lateliess when it comes to baseball in the Big Apple. William Hulbert's original National League included a New York team, The Mutuals who were around almost as long as organized baseball itself. They played in 1857 as amateurs (as all ball clubs were at the time) against the Knickerbockers in the storied Elysian Fields of Hoboken, mentioned above. The Mutuals would re-locate to Brooklyn and came along with Hulbert when he created his new league. But things didn't go so well for the Natioanl League Muts as Hulbert's team the Chicago White Stockings dominated the league on the field. The New York club and the Philadelphia Athletics who were in the same predicament, decided it wasn't worth the time, money or effort to play out the remainder of their season on the road. For this affront, the imperious Hulbert banished the teams from the league. Amazingly, the three most populous cities in the US including Brooklyn, an independent city at the time, would not have representatives in the major leagues for six years, until the American Association was formed six years later. They and the National League desperately wanted a New York franchise to join their ranks and both leagues made offers to an independent club called the Metropolitans. The owners of the Mets said yes, to both offers.

With a little slight of hand, they produced two teams, the Mets would enter the AA, while an existing National League team from Troy, NY disbanded, and most of their players, and the team's space in the league, became the New York Gothams, who ultimately became the Giants. That team won the NL pennant in 1889 and played the AA champion Brooklyn Bridegrooms (today's LA Dodgers), in the early incarnation of the World Series, marking the beginning of the second oldest extant rivalry in baseball.

By the turn of the twentieth century, the Giants were firmly established as New York's team. Such was their clout, they were able to use their leverage to prevent the fledgling American League from establishing a team in New York City. So the team intended for the city of New York ended up in a different city but with a very familiar name, the Baltimore Orioles. That situation only lasted a couple of years and the team ended up back in the town which it was intended, playing in a ballpark in Washington Heights, the highest point in Manhattan. Appropriately enough, they were originally called the Highlanders.

The New York American League team had a promising start but never finished better than second place in their first five years of existence. Then that old ennui set in with the owners who were more interested in other activities and rarely invested in their team. In 1915, the team, now known as the Yankees was sold to the man with the most improbable of baseball names, Tillinghast L'Hommedieu Huston, along with his partner, Jacob Ruppert who was in the (you guessed it) brewing business. It was this pair of well to do businessmen, genuinely interested in baseball who were able to make the deal that would forever change the course of Yankee and indeed baseball history, and would make the name Harry Frazee, the most reviled name in Boston since Benedict Arnold.

You probably know the story. Frazee, a theatrical impressario who moonlighted as the owner of the Boston Red Sox, needed cash for a theatrical production. So he sold his incorrigible star pitcher who was also pretty good with the bat to the Yankees. The player's name was George Herman (Babe) Ruth. 

As they say, the rest is history...

It's a bit of a minomer to call the era before Ruth's, the "Deadball Era." The assumption that home runs were scarce because the balls were less lively in those days has been overstated, There were actually fewer home runs during that era because batters weren't  trying to hit them. The approach they took could be summed up in the words of Wee Willie Keeler, an early Yankee star who famously described his approach to hitting this way: "you gotta hit 'em where they ain't" The greatest hitter of the Deadball Era was Ty Cobb who to this day holds the record for greatest lifetime batting average. His scientific approach to hitting enabled him to take advantage of weaknesses in the defense, and his take no prisoners style of base running made him the most dangerous offensive player of his time.  Babe Ruth, the most dangerous offensive player of all time, had a different approach, he swung the bat as hard as he could every time he came to the plate.

It would not be an overstatement to say that Babe Ruth single-handedly changed the game of baseball. What was once a game of small ball played mostly on the base paths featuring daring base running, sacrifice bunts, the hit and run and spikes flying in the air, became the game at the plate with sluggers trying to do it all with one swing of the bat. Old timers like Cobb and longtime Giants manager John McGraw may have berated the new style, but the fans loved it. When the acrimony between the Giants and the Yankees became unbearable, the Yanks built themselves a new ballpark just across the Harlem River from the Polo Grounds less than a half mile away. It was nicknamed "the House that Ruth Built", but the great Bambino was just as responsible for the expansion of many American League ballparks, including Chicago's Comiskey Park, whose outfield grandstands were built specifically to accommodate the crowds that Babe Rut drew when the Yankees came to town.

Yankee Stadium was both the last of the classic ballpark, and the forerunner of the modern baseball stadium. It was completed in time for the start of the 1923 season, and in its first year hosted the World Series, same two teams as the two previous years, however the outcome was reversed. The torch had been passed. It was the definitive blow to the deadball era, Baseball for better or worse, would never be the same.

Like the Cardinals, the Yankees developed players in their farm system and became the most successful franchise in major league history. The Stadium with its distinctive arch motif fascia witnessed several Yankee dynasties. Their single greatest era took place between 1947 and 1964 when they appeared in fifteen World Series and won ten of them. During that time they won an unprecedented five consecutive championships. That record more than likely will stand for eternity.

It's from that era of gaudy glory, when the Yankees were expected to win it all every year, that I'll pick my memorable moment at old Yankee Stadium. In a game that took place on October 4th, 1955, Yank catcher Elston Howard faced Johnny Podres and grounded out to Pee Wee Reese, thrilling Yankee haters the world over as the Bombers lost the World Series that year to the Brooklyn Dodgers.

It would be dem Bums' (as the Dodgers were known affectionately by their fans) only championship. They would pack their bags, along with the Giants, and head for the west coast three years later leaving a void in that town some people believe (the Mets notwithstanding) has never been filled.

My boy and I didn't make it to the sites of Ebbets Field or the Polo Grounds on our recent visit to New York this summer. Much to his chagrin, we didn't make it to Citi Field, home of the Mets either. There is a housing project named after Jackie Robinson where Ebbets Field once stood at 55 Sullivan Place in Crown Heights, Brooklyn. The old stairway in Harlem where fans would descend Coogans Bluff to get to the Polo Grounds is still there. Other than that from what I can tell, save for a few plaques, there is little indication of all the glorious summers that took place on those sites, hardly anything to remind us of Willie Mays's Catch in the '54 Series, the day Jackie Robinson broke the color barrier, the Shot Heard 'Round the World, or the time three Brooklyn Dodger runners all ended up on third base. 

Heritage Field, left and new Yankee Stadium. If you squint hard enough, you can almost imagine...

The same can't be said for the site of old Yankee Stadium in the South Bronx. The original house that Ruth built was demolished after New Yankee Stadium was built across the street. The new park looks more like Yankee Stadium than the old one did after it was defaced during its unfortunate renovation in the seventies. In the biggest most expensive city in the country, the most successful team in baseball could have built a parking lot for its fans on the site of the baseball shrine, or sold the property for a fortune to developers. Instead they outdid every other ball club when it came to honoring the site of their old ballpark. They built a public park on the site accessible to all, day and night. Fragments of the old fascia are mounted to a wall where center field once was, making you realize exactly where you are. Of course the main feature of the park are ballfields where kids from the neighborhood gather to play the game in the footsteps of Ruth, Gehrig, DiMaggio, Mantle, Maris, Jackson and Jeter.

Kids of all ages play baseball on the field where immortals once trod.
Perhaps one day they will join them in that Pantheon.

Baseball, our national pastime is as alive and well as ever on that hallowed ground. It's almost enough to make an old Yankee hater fall in love with the team.

Nah.

Next up, Saving the best for last, Cleveland and Pittsburgh.

There Used to be a Ballpark Part I

The Georgia Peach

Ty Cobb, left, and Joe Jackson.
Contrary to the quote from the movie, the two had a great mutual admiration.

Ty Cobb wanted to play...but none of us could stand the son-of-a-bitch when we were alive, so we told him to stick it.

-the ghost of Shoeless Joe Jackson from the film Field of Dreams

Ty Cobb could cause more excitement with a base on balls then Babe Ruth could with a home run.

-Roger Birtwell

Yes, he's a prick, but he sure can hit. God Almighty, that man can hit!

-Babe Ruth



The greatness of Ty Cobb was something to be seen... and to see him was to remember him forever.

-George Sisler


In 1994, Ken Burns released his epic, reverential ode to the national pastime, a documentary film titled simply, Baseball. It aired on PBS serendipitously at the same time as the longest strike in baseball history, the strike that forced the cancellation of the World Series. Consequently tens of millions of baseball-starved fans tuned in to watch the eighteen and one half hour film which covered the history of the game up to that point, broken up into nine chronological segments or innings as Burns called them, each inning devoted to a specific era of the game.

As is his custom, Burns employed several on camera "experts" who added bits and pieces of detail to the narrative of the story. One of those was writer, editor and passionate baseball fan, Daniel Okrent.

In the episode titled, Third Inning: the Faith of Fifty Million People, a segment was devoted to one of the greatest players in the history of the game. On that player, Okrent sanctimoniously proclaimed that Ty Cobb was "the great black mark on the history of baseball." Speaking matter-of-factly as if he personally knew the man, Okrent called Cobb "brutal" and " a terrible racist."

He continued: "The more his fires burned, the more that provoked him on the field, and I suppose one could say that the happy byproduct was the extraordinary baseball that he gave the fans at the time, but ... there's a moment when you have to say it's not worth it. I think that Ty Cobb in his totality is an embarrassment to baseball."

Much later in Burns's film, he has narrator John Chancellor proclaiming that Cobb was so despised, only three people associated with the game attended his funeral. "If I had to do it over again..." said Chancellor quoting Cobb, "...I'd have made more friends."

That last comment closing the final chapter on Cobb I suppose was an attempt to give a trace of humanity to the man after portraying him as the most inhuman person to ever set foot on a baseball diamond.

I knew about the great Detroit Tiger outfielder's bad reputation twenty one years ago when I first watched Burns's series in its entirety with my friend in his home in Brooklyn, but I never knew he was THAT bad. Not that there was anything original in Burns's portrayal of Cobb, I just had yet to read the biography of him by Al Stump.  Burns's treatment of Cobb made him look practically saintly compared to Stump who portrays Ty Cobb as a paranoid, sadistic, psychotic, racist, sociopath, who probably murdered one or two people along the way.

And that was on his good days.

Then there was the ridiculous bio-pic based loosely upon Stump's work where Tommy Lee Jones's portrayal of Cobb is virtually indistinguishable from the Creature from the Black Lagoon.

Fortunately for Cobb's reputation I suppose, Burns' film was seen by far more people than all the other scurrilous works on Ty Cobb combined, and for those like me, the final word on Cobb was that he was merely a run of the mill racist-asshole, rather than a bona fide monster.

I became intrigued with the idea that there was more to Cobb than meets the eye after reading the entry on him in The New Bill James Historical Baseball Abstract. While not denying the racist-asshole part, James's portrayal of Cobb is nuanced. He concludes his section on Cobb with this bit of home brew psychology:

Ty Cobb's racism and his anger I believe, were fueled not by smugness or even resentment, but by an unusually intense fear of his own limitations, No one is more macho than a man who feels inadequate,; no one walks straighter than a man who is half drunk. When Ty Cobb felt threatened he lashed out at the world. He felt threatened a lot-but as long as he wasn't challenged, he was a very nice man.

Nice man or not, in today's world we can forgive the occasional asshole, but there is zero tolerance for the racist.

Here's a little more insight into Ty Cobb's racism from the great Buck O'Neil:



Notice how Mr. O'Neil puts the interviewer in her place when she asks him why he doesn't condemn Ty Cobb for his racist ways.

Ty Cobb got into a lot of fights in his life, brutal, inexcusable bursts of violence, where his rage, along with his fists, feet or any other part of his body he could flail about, were directed sometimes even at women. Seldom did he pick a fight, but when he felt offended even in the slightest, he went ballistic. Some of his rage was directed at black people. Far more often it was directed at white people. Buck O'Neil was right, Ty Cobb could be mean to anyone, not just blacks. "That was Ty Cobb" he said.

Despite all the wisdom in O'Neil's comments, he did get a few things wrong. Ty Cobb did not come from a poor background, nor did he have only a fifth grade education. Cobb's family was comfortably middle class, and his father was an educator and later a state legislator who placed a very high value on his children's education. He pushed his firstborn, Tyrus Raymond, in the direction of either law or medical school, and discouraged young Ty from his passion of becoming a ballplayer, which at the time was considered a disreputable profession.

No one can say exactly what Ty Cobb was taught as a child about what his relationship with black people should be. True, he grew up in the post-Reconstruction South where anti-black sentiment was especially rampant, but his father in his role as legislator, fought for the rights of black people, and other ancestors were conscientious objectors during the Civil War because of their abolitionist beliefs.

After I saw this clip and read James's piece, I became interested in what made the man called "The Georgia Peach" tick. Searches on the web turned up numerous sites which addressed the question: "Was Ty Cobb a racist?" I thought, "well of course he was, everybody acknowledges that, even Bill James and Buck O'Neil."

Then I came across a quote from Ty Cobb. In 1952, reporters asked his opinion of African American Americans playing baseball with whites. This is what he said:

I see no reason in the world why we shouldn't compete with colored athletes as long as they conduct themselves with politeness and gentility. Let me say also that no white man has the right to be less of a gentleman than a colored man. In my book, that goes for baseball but for all walks of life...

The Negro should be accepted whole-heartedly and not grudgingly into baseball. The Negro has the right to professional baseball and who’s to say he has not?

To today's ears, Cobb's language sounds archaic, condescending and patronizing. Some claim his words are disingenuous as they were uttered twenty five years after Cobb retired from the game, and was no longer threatened by black players taking his job away. Others claim the words are meaningless because by the time Cobb made his comment, Jackie Robinson had been in the major leagues for five years and the integration of baseball by 1952 was a fait accompli.

But it must be remembered that in 1952, fewer than half of the teams in the major leagues had brought up a black player. It would be another seven years before every major league team had a black player on its roster. Several minor leagues in 1952 had yet to integrate at all. In 1952, the integration of baseball was still a hotly debated, emotional topic.

When Cobb made his comment, he was no longer affiliated with baseball, he was financially well off, and perfectly free to speak his mind. In 1952 there was hardly the stigma of being viewed as a racist as there is today. Personally Ty Cobb had little to gain by expressing his support of integration, while he had plenty to lose in terms of respect from many of his fellow Southerners. He chose not to mince his words or equivocate; his comments in support of the integration of baseball came out loud and clear, blasting, in the words of the Associated Press at the time, "a home run for the Negro player."

Cobb also was known to have attended several Negro League games often throwing out the first pitch and sitting in the dugout with the players. He also lavished praise on many of the black players who came up to the big leagues in the fifties and saved the biggest praise of all for Willie Mays who he said was the only ballplayer of any race he would pay to see play.

Cobb's are not the words and actions of a virulent racist. Considering the source, given the fact that they were uttered before most of the major milestones in American Civil Rights history, his words could be considered downright revolutionary. So what gives? Was Cobb trying to prove something, perhaps showing the world his softer side? Was he mellowing in old age, or was he in fact not as bad as we thought?

In his painstakingly researched new biography, Ty Cobb: A Terrible Beauty, author Charles Leerhsen attempts to answer that question by separating fact from fantasy.

Leerhsen's conclusion, and I don't think I'm giving too much away here, is that while a complex man capable of excessive violence as well as considerable benevolence, most of the really bad stuff that we associate with Cobb today, especially concerning his relationship with and feelings about black people, did not come to light until after he died in 1961. Ironically, the propagator of the ill will attributed to Ty Cobb after his death was none other than the man whom Ty Cobb hand picked to help write his autobiography. Cobb would learn shortly before he died that he picked the wrong man for the job.

That man was Al Stump.

Cobb's so called autobiography, My Life in Baseball: The True Record, ghost written by Stump, was published shortly after Ty Cobb died. Cobb's intention was to write a book that would set the record straight about his career, and put aside the common notion that he was a dirty ballplayer who routinely slid into bases sharpened spikes high, with the intention of maiming his opponents. In the end however, with little actual contact with Cobb, Stump wrote the book he (Stump) wanted to write, with a few concessions to his subject. Once he got hold of the manuscript after a long struggle with Stump, Cobb hated it and tried to sue to stop its publication. But it was too late, Cobb's health failed him and he died before he could do anything to stop the book.

At the time of his death, Ty Cobb, according to Leerhsen, was not a controversial figure and the sales of his ghost written autobiography were mild to say the least. Most of the comments on the book were about its inaccuracies. Then there was the book's voice. Leerhsen sites one passage from the Cobb autobiography which to him sounds more like the words of a "jaded sportswriter than an old ballplayer." You decide for yourself from this little tidbit about an alleged incident that was reported in the Ken Burns film as if it were God's honest truth:

No I didn't once attack Nap Rucker the pitcher in the bathroom and try to throw him out of the tub in which he was relaxing. That phony fable has dogged me for more than half a century and I doubt there are enough fans to fill a broom closet who don't believe it happened--which it never did. I don't know who constructed that particular piece of Limburger, but it has an odor I first concocted with certain New York writers--never exactly simpatico to me--who've made certain it appeared in every language but the Sanskrit.

Reading that made me sadly realize that my all time favorite Cobb quote also came from the autobiography and was written in exactly the same voice as the above passage:

Baseball is a red-blooded sport for red-blooded man. It's no pink tea, and mollycoddles had better stay out. It's a struggle for supremacy, survival of the fittest.

Maybe it's the mollycoddle in me but I've read and listened to several interviews of Ty Cobb and have to say, as much as I want that to be Cobb himself speaking, that's just not him coming through those words.

Not satisfied with the paltry amount he made off the Cobb autobiography, Stump forged ahead with a new project that was sure to milk some money out of the dead ballplayer. That move, Leerhsen contends, "is the key to the destruction of Cobb's good name."

Stump followed up the book with the publication of an article describing his relationship with Cobb while the two men supposedly worked together on the "autobiography." If the public wants dirt, one can hear Stump's thoughts going through his head, "I'll give them dirt"

In the introduction to Stump's article reprinted in an anthology called "The Greatest Baseball Stories ever Told", the editor complained that the Cobb autobiography was "self-serving... a white wash from cover to cover..." and that "Cobb wrangled final approval over everything" (which come to think of it, as Cobb's supposed autobiography, wasn't that his prerogative?). Stump himself claimed that his conscience compelled him to show the public the "true" Cobb.

In 1962, Stump's article, Ty Cobb's Wild Ten Month Fight to Live, appeared in True, a men's adventure magazine. The article portrays Cobb in the last year of his life as a paranoid, pill popping, half-insane drunkard who never left home without carrying a huge amount of cash in a paper bag and a pistol. Stump claimed that when he told people of his book deal and his plans to spend time with Ty Cobb, in no uncertain terms he was told that he was taking his life into own his hands.

Stump's Cobb terrorized everyone he came in contact with, including the doctors and nurses who tended to him during his frequent visits to the hospital. Stump's Cobb also proudly boasted to the author that he killed a man in Detroit, one of three assailants in an armed robbery. In his story, after the three fled from an enraged Cobb after they stabbed him, the ballplayer followed one of his attackers into a dead end alley where proceeded to use his Belgian pistol (which wouldn't fire) to pistol whip the hapless would-be villain until:

 ...he had no face left. Left him there not breathing, in his own rotten blood. 

From there the ballplayer proceeded to catch a train for a ballgame he next day, where he happened to get three hits. It was only after the game when he got medical treatment for his stab wound.

On and on the article went relaying tales of hair-raising middle of the night journeys through snow covered mountain passes in order to satisfy one of Cobb's many whims like visiting Joe DiMaggio, or contest a payment on a measly check. Despite being a millionaire many times over, Stump's Cobb is a mean spirited tightwad who would remove (and re-use) the stamps on the self-addressed return envelopes from countless fan letters, before tossing the rest of the letters into the fire, as it saved on firewood.

In his article, Stump also elicited comments from contemporaries of Cobb, fellow ballplayers who insisted that Cobb was indeed as dirty a player as the rumors had him to be.

By doing so, Stump refuted virtually everything he wrote in his previous book on Cobb.

The article is a barn burner, a real page turner. The only problem according to Charles Leerhsen is that Al Stump made most of it up. Leerhrsen methodically debunks much of what Stump writes:

• According to Leerhsen, the doctors and nurses who treated Cobb during the last year of his life had nothing but good things to say about him. 
• Police reports from the city of Detroit have no record of a faceless body found in the city on the day Stump claimed Cobb killed the robber. 
• Ty Cobb was known for answering virtually all of his fan mail, sometimes even apologizing for being overly verbose in his responses. 
• Cobb also was very generous with his money, founding an educational fund and a hospital which both benefit the disadvantaged. 
• The ultimate debunker of the piece is that Stump more than likely only spent a couple of days alone with Ty Cobb, not the several months claimed in the article.

The above mentioned film titled Cobb, was loosely based upon the True article. It's maker, Ron Shelton, admitted that he added scenes that were not in the article. One particularly ghastly scene has Cobb attempting to rape a woman in Las Vegas, but is thwarted by his own impotence. When Charles Leerhsen asked Shelton about the scene, the writer-director told the author that he and his screenwriter (Stump), made the scene up because "it sounded like something Cobb would have done."

Another biography of Cobb came from a more respected source, professor of history Charles Alexander whose book, Ty Cobb, (where DO authors come up with such original titles?) was published in 1984. Unlike Stump's work, Alexander's is thoroughly researched and extensively foot noted. Unfortunately, many of Alexander's cited sources come from you guessed it, Stump's Cobb autobiography, which Stump himself refuted shortly after he wrote it. Alexander also cited numerous passages from the True article

Stump still wasn't done with Ty Cobb. He went on to write yet another biography published in 1994 called Cobb: The Life and Times of the Meanest Man Who Ever Played Baseball. Stump begins that book by reprinting the True Magazine article, then goes on with the body of the book which brings up many of the ugly incidents in Ty Cobb's life but with a significant twist. The victims of virtually all of Cobb's violent acts in the new biography are black.

Leerhsen goes through all of the incidents cited by Stump and also Alexander, and finds that in the majority of them, the victims of Cobb's assaults were actually white. Leerhsen got his information either from checking birth certificates or by deducing that the lack of specific details of their race in news reports from the time (i.e.: no mention of them being black which  in those days, was always the case if they were black), strongly implies that they were in fact, white. This is not to excuse Cobb's transgressions, he had many; but it does bring up yet again Alexander's and Stump's credibility by asking the question, why would they claim Cobb's victims were black when there is no evidence of that?

An obvious answer is that by 1984 and beyond, race had become a contentious issue, far more than it was in 1961. By portraying Cobb as a racist, whether or not it was really true, the authors created sensational interest in their works where it wouldn't have existed before.

Charles Leerhsen was not the first person to discredit Al Stump. In an article first published in 2010 in The National Pastime, Wiliam R. Cobb, no relation to the ballplayer, writes a very detailed account about a shotgun that once belonged to Ty Cobb which ended up in the possession of a famous baseball memorabilia collection. The shotgun was claimed to be the weapon that killed Ty Cobb's father. It also had an interesting provenance as it once was in the possession of Al Stump.  In Stump's works on Cobb, he claims the ballplayer told him that his father's head was blown off by a shotgun. (Cobb's mother accidentally shot and killed her husband, mistaking him for an intruder). But William Cobb checked press accounts around time of the incident, police and court records from the trial of Amanda Cobb which all point to her having used a pistol to accidentally kill her husband, not a shotgun.

In none of the accounts of the death of Ty Cobb's father written before Stump's, was there any mention of a shotgun.

Why would Stump insist that Mr. Cobb was killed with a shotgun, and not just any shotgun but the one he happened to have in his possession? You don't think it could have been so he could sell the gun for a vastly inflated chunk of change do you? Well Stump did happen to put a good deal of Cobb's personal effects in his possession up for sale, many that supposedly had Cobb's signature, which later were proven to be forged. Eventually the auction houses refused to list any piece of Cobb memorabilia with the name of Al Stump listed on the provenance. Small wonder.

Incidentally, the shotgun in question was engraved with Ty Cobb's name and Stump claimed Cobb used it on numerous hunting trips. Not only would it be quite bizarre for Cobb to have his name engraved on the weapon that killed his father, not to mention use it to shoot ducks, but it seems unlikely that a murder weapon would have left been in the possession of the family of both the deceased and the perpetrator. Nonetheless, Stump went with the story probably assuming if his readers would buy all the other crap he wrote about Cobb, they'd buy this cockamamie story too.

Ken Burns obviously bought Stump's story, lock, stock and barrel. In his film he got off a final dig at the ballplayer, describing Ty Cobb's last days with words that came straight out of the pages of Stump's True Magazine article, including an interesting revelation that Cobb "deplored" the integration of baseball.

Maybe it's just me, but I'll take Ty Cobb's word on that matter over Al Stunp's any day.

Why wouldn't Ken Burns? As much as I enjoyed his baseball film, with its incessant sentimentality combining images of long lost players and fields of dreams, backed by a soundtrack of The Star Spangled Banner and Take Me Out to the Ballgame played on every conceivable instrument from a marching band to a flageolete, I couldn't help be struck by how much the story he told resembled a fairy tale. Just as every good Brothers Grimm story needs a witch who eats little children, Ken Burns's baseball tale needed a dark, despicable villain as the perfect foil to heroes such as Christy Mathewson and Jackie Robinson. The mythical Ty Cobb created by Al Stump perfectly fit the bill, while the complex, real people behind those myths would never cut the mustard. A reasonable Ty Cobb advocating near the end of his life for the inclusion of African Americans in baseball, would never do, any more than a Christy Mathewson taking time off from spring training to witness the public hanging of a black man in Alabama, or a Jackie Robinson taking time off from being a demigod to act like a prima donna.

In his book, Leerhsen recalls the famous movie line: "When legend becomes fact, print the legend."

Much has been written about Charles Leerhsen's book being "revisionist history", an attempt to rehabilitate the image of a man about whom much has been written. Bill James begins his piece on Ty Cobb this way:

If one were to take the time to document a thousand times in which Ty Cobb went out of his way to be kind to other people, including black people, would this change his image? I fear it would not.

He's probably right, so ingrained is our image of the man as a monster, we're afraid to let go, even when confronted with the truth. Leerhsen's theory is that we all need people like the mythical Ty Cobb because they make us feel better about our own inadequacies. We say to ourselves, I may be bad, but hey, at least I'm not a violent racist prick like Ty Cobb.

Leerhsen pulls no punches in describing Ty Cobb's many shortcomings. His book does not attempt to rehabilitate the man by giving us a new window into those shortcomings in order to understand them. Instead he addresses Cobb's real-life issues in detail while at the same time making a very good case that much of what we think we know about Ty Cobb is dead wrong, a contrived set of falsehoods set in motion by one unscrupulous man whose motivation was nothing more than his own fame and fortune. In that vein, Ty Cobb: A Terrible Beauty does not attempt to revise history;  it tells the story of a real man while at the same time puts to rest an outrageous lie.


CODA

Now that's out of the way, what makes Charles Leerhsen's Cobb biography such a great read are the accounts of Ty Cobb the ballplayer. It's true that he did spike a number of infielders who made the foolish mistake of getting in his way on the base paths, but not with any greater frequency than other ballplayers of his era. While he spent much of his post-career, trying to clear his name as a dirty player, when he actually played, he didn't seem to mind his opponents thinking that he actually sharpened his spikes before each game (he really didn't). He readily admitted being a "mental hazard" to his opponents while running the bases, as the seed that he might do something crazy, planted in the minds of his opponents, was sometimes all it took. Part of his success stemmed from the fact that Ty Cobb was probably the most opportunistic ballplayer in the game's history.

Here's a quote from one of his teammates if not one of his biggest fans, Sam Crawford:

...Ty was dynamite on the base paths. He really was. Talk about strategy and playing with your head, that was Cobb all the way. It wasn't that he was so fast on his feet, although he was fast enough. There were others who were faster, though, like Clyde Milan, for instance. It was that Cobb was so fast in his thinking. He didn't outhit the opposition and he didn't outrun them. He outthought them!   

A lot of times Cobb would be on third base and I'd draw a base on balls, and as I started to go down to first I'd sort of half glance at Cobb, at third. He'd make a slight move that told me he wanted me to keep going -- not to stop at first, but to keep on going to second. Well, I'd trot two-thirds of the way to first and then suddenly, without warning, I'd speed up and go across first as fast as I could and tear out for second. He's on third, see. They're watching him, and suddenly there I go, and they don't know what the devil to do. 

If they try to stop me, Cobb'll take off for home. Sometimes they'd catch him, and sometimes they'd catch me, and sometimes they wouldn't get either of us. But most of the time they were too paralyzed to do anything, and I'd wind up at second on a base on balls ....

In his epilogue Charles Leershen recounts a story that pretty much sums up Ty Cobb. On a hot miserable day in Detroit with two out in the last of the ninth and the Tigers down by a bunch, Ty Cobb reached first on a single. Even the home town fans groaned. Wally Pipp the Yankee first baseman suggested to Cobb that he put an end to everyone's misery by letting himself get picked off. Cobb agreed, and took an "accommodating" lead off first. When the pitcher threw to Pipp, Cobb took off for second and got himself in a rundown. Needless to say, after a few bobbled balls, Cobb ended up on third. The next batter popped up to end the game. Now the ump at first heard the conversation between Cobb and Pipp and asked Cobb why he crossed up Pipp. Cobb, surprised as anyone in the ballpark said he didn't mean to do it, but as soon as he saw Pipp reaching to tag him out, "something exploded inside of me. I just couldn't stand there and take it without a fight."

I thought of that the other day while attending a major league game with my kids. The home team was down by a bunch with two outs in the bottom of the ninth. The batter was a weak hitting infielder, batting from the left handed batters' box. The infield played this guy with a significant shift towards right field where this batter was most likely to hit the ball, a move usually reserved for power hitters. They would never have played Ty Cobb, another left handed hitter that way because he would have had a field day against such a shift. But today even weak hitters swing for home runs rather than trying to place a hit in the spot vacated by the infielders. Cobb would have been appalled. Sure enough, the batter struck out, but the catcher dropped the ball. While he fumbled around for what seemed an eternity looking for the ball, instead of taking off for first base as he was entitled, our batter just stood there looking perplexed as if to say, "what do I do now?" Finally the catcher found the ball and tagged the batter out as he never left the box, game over.

Ty Cobb's fight for every base style of baseball died out when Babe Ruth came along and popularized the home run. The so called "deadball era" style of baseball survived in the Negro Leagues where players routinely scored from second base on a bunt, ended up on second after a walk, and executed the most exciting play in all of baseball, the stealing of home, incidentally a record for which Ty Cobb holds to this day.

Once the Negro Leagues became absorbed into the major leagues, that style of play died out altogether in professional ball.

Ty Cobb became a dinosaur while he was still a player, as the fans and later the analysts deemed it should be so. They all seemed to believe that every player, even weak hitting middle infielders are better off swinging for a home run, even if it means a greater likelihood of striking out, rather than choking up on the bat and trying to place the ball, "hitting it where they ain't" for a base hit. (Cobb by the way was no weak hitter, he proved time and again that he could hit home runs when he wanted to. Even then he hardly ever struck out).

Sabrmetrically speaking, this all or nothing approach may be a more prudent strategy in the long run, but it sure is a heck of a lot less fun to watch.

Oh to have the chance to see Ty Cobb play again, if only once.

Fortunately, reading Charles Leerhsen's superb book Ty Cobb: A Terrible Beauty, is the next best thing.

Dream Team

BOSTON , March 19, 1936- Coming off his team's worst season ever and on the verge of bankruptcy, Emil Fuchs, the owner of the Boston Braves has come up with a brilliant plan to save his team. With nothing to lose, Fuchs has had a change of heart and asked Babe Ruth, who retired in mid-season last year after an un-productive three months, to re-join and manage the team. Ruth who has long expressed an interest in managing, gladly accepted the offer under the condition that he would have complete control over player personnel. Fuchs has obliged.

Babe Ruth

Ruth's first move sent shock waves through the major leagues as he single-handedly erased forty years of organized baseball tradition by breaking up the team and signing several Negro players to join the club. The starting nine of the new look Braves includes some of the luminaries of black baseball: first baseman Oscar Charleston, second baseman Sam Bankhead, third baseman Judy Johnson, outfielders Jimmy Crutchfield and Cool Papa Bell, and a battery consisting of catcher Josh Gibson and the incomparable pitcher, Satchel Paige. Joining Paige on the mound will be Ted "Double Duty" Radcliffe, and lefty Leroy Matlock.

As bench-minder, Babe Ruth plans to insert himself into the lineup on occasion as pinch hitter.


NEW YORK CITY, October 8, 1936- At Yankee Stadium today the unthinkable took place as the Boston Braves, a team who last year posted the third worst record in baseball history, took the World Series from the mighty New York Yankees, winning the Fall Classic in a decisive game seven. Led by the greatest Yank of all, rookie manager Babe Ruth, the Braves with their new cast of characters, mostly players from the Negro Leagues, took everything the Yankees were able to dish out and then some as they frustrated the Bronx Bombers almost every step along the way.

The old Bambino whose qualifications to be manager were once discounted in the baseball world, seemed to let the team manage itself as his players played old school, opportunistic ball, slap-hitting, bunting and running at will on the unsuspecting New York pitchers and infield. Indicative of the style of play that won the championship, the winning run came in the top of the seventh in game seven as the Braves' Cool Papa Bell, showing little signs of slowing down at 33, advanced from first to third on a Sam Bankhead bunt, then later scored the game's only run on a Lefty Gomez wild pitch. Satchel Paige, while giving up early hits to Bill Dickey, Lou Gehrig, George Selkirk, (Ruth's replacement in the outfield), and youngster Joe DiMaggio, shut down the Bronx Bombers in order in the final three innings, preserving a brilliant four hit shut out; final score, Braves 1, Yankees 0.

But it wasn't all running and pitching that won Boston the championship, these Braves have power to back up their speed on the base paths. Josh Gibson who at only 25, has already been compared to his famous manager on a number of occasions, hit a remarkable six home runs in the series. Veteran Oscar Charleston, who many believe is the real brains behind the team, hit four dingers and drove in twelve runs in the series. Even Bell, not usually known for his power, hit two round trippers, and recorded seven RBI.

For many, the highlight of the series came late in game six when Babe Ruth put himself in to pinch-hit. With nobody on base, the Yankees had the game well in hand leading by six runs when Ruth came up to bat against his former teammate Johnny Broaca. The bespectacled right-hander (perhaps out of compassion), floated a curve ball over the plate and as in days of old, the Sultan of Swat parked the ball into the upper deck of the right field stands. Not a soul was seated nor a dry eye in the house as the greatest ballplayer ever circled the bases of the house they say he built, perhaps for the last time.

But it was the future not the past that reigned supreme this year as Satchel Paige stole the show. He won all three of his starts, allowing only four runs, frustrating the Yankee hitters with his control of a fastball that has few if any peers in the game. While most of these Yanks including DiMaggio have faced Paige before in exhibition games, the high-kicking "Satchelfoot" seemed to save his best for this series. Showing typical confidence in his stuff, Paige brought to his game a new found seriousness, a sense of purpose born out of the desire to prove that he and his teammates indeed deserved to stand exactly where they were standing, on top of the world.

-

That account of the 1936 baseball season is of course, fiction. It was inspired by a recent New York Times article about Julia Ruth Stevens, the daughter of Babe Ruth. In the article, Mrs. Stevens claims that her father, who expressed a strong desire to manage a ball club, was overlooked not because of his lack of qualifications, but because he intended to hire black ballplayers.

Except for his well documented respect for some African American ballplayers, Mrs.Stevens's memories fly in the face of just about everything that has been written about Babe Ruth. The popular image of him is of a carousing, carefree, but lovable lout. The general impression was that he was not exactly the sharpest knife in the drawer; great as he was as a player, no one in the game took the idea of him managing a ball club seriously.

In the article, Mrs. Stevens claims that while her dad was quite the rake in the early days, he had settled down by the time his playing days were over, and was in fact, quite an intelligent, caring human being. One could discount Mrs. Stevens's remarks as a 97 year old’s sweet remembrances of her long departed old man; but maybe, just maybe, there might be something to it.

In 1936, the Babe's full year of retirement, hiring blacks to play ball was not a threat that would have gone unnoticed. Baseball famously had excluded African Americans as participants in the game since the 1890s, and that ban, which was not officially spelled out on paper, was as binding as a straight jacket. In 1936 that jacket was pulled as tight as ever and no one, not even someone with the clout of Babe Ruth could loosen it.

It would take eleven more years before Jackie Robinson became the first African American ball player in the major leagues in the twentieth century. In the intervening years, several events took place to make that possible:

• World War II: African Americans in the armed forces fought valiantly to help establish democracy in Europe and the Pacific only to come home to a country where they were treated as second class individuals. That irony was not lost on many Americans, both black and white. 
• The death of the Commissioner : Perhaps no man has ever been so aptly named as Judge Kenesaw Mountain (as in, he who will not be moved) Landis. Baseball Commissioner Landis's rule was law and that law extended to the so called "gentlemen's agreement" banning black players from the game. Any time the issue of the color line was brought before him, Landis would explicitly deny that there was any ban in place, then move on to the next issue, thereby tabling all propositions to integrate the game. When he died in 1944, his replacement Happy Chandler expressed his support of integrating the game. 
• Joe Nuxhall and Pete Gray: Despite the fact that baseball lost many of its best players to the war effort, in 1942, President Roosevelt wrote the Green Light Letter, commanding that baseball go on in any way it could for the morale of the nation. The game went on with teams that were made up largely of men who were not eligible for military service. Joe Nuxhall was a 15 year old left handed pitcher who the Cincinnati Reds briefly put in their lineup, and Pete Gray was a one armed-outfielder who played one season for the St. Louis Browns. The fact that baseball owners would gleefully accept children and players missing limbs, but still not blacks, was truly a bitter pill to swallow. 
• Politics: Government officials in Boston and New York City put pressure on their cities' teams to enact equal opportunity hiring programs, extending to players.The big league teams in those cities conducted tryouts for black players in 1945 with no results; they turned out to be shams, show trials at best. 
• $$$: Despite all the changes mentioned above, the one issue that ultimately moved baseball to integrate was money. Attendance at Negro League games was booming by the mid-forties, especially at the East/West All Star game held annually at Comiskey Park in Chicago. That game alone drew over 50,000 every year. Owners couldn't help but notice.

The Houdini baseball needed to free itself from the straight-jacket of segregation turned out to be Branch Rickey. Egalitarianism may have played a role in his efforts to bring a black player to the Brooklyn Dodgers but Rickey, the team's president and general manager made no bones about the money that could be made with the potential of the black community's dollars spent at the ballpark. Rickey stopped at nothing to achieve his goal. The most important piece to the puzzle was to find the right player to break the barrier. He understood that any mistake could set the cause back ten years. Unlike others who publicly expressed their desire to integrate the game, Rickey kept quiet until the last possible moment. To that end, in order to alleviate suspicions while scouting black players for his team, Rickey announced plans to create a new, (and bogus) Negro League. Once Rickey found his man, he took pains to lecture the black community on how to behave in the stands when Jackie Robinson took the field. For their part, the black fans who attended Dodger games in every National League park in 1947, understood what was at stake and took those words to heart.

A brilliant account of the atmosphere at one of those ballparks, written by Mike Royko on the day Jackie Robinson died, can be found here (found among other articles by the great columnist).

I wrote a piece last year that bemoaned the fact that while Jackie Robinson is deservedly a national hero and icon, the people who immediately followed him into the big leagues are all but forgotten. Larry Doby, Hank Thompson, Willard Brown, and Dan Bankhead (Sam's brother) all played in the major leagues in 1947 but none of them are household names. The same can be said for the black ballplayers who preceded Robinson. The scenario at the top of this post was made up, but the teams were not. The players listed as members of the Boston Braves were actually members of a real team at the time. Some called it the greatest (non all-star) team ever assembled, others called it the best team money could buy. The Pittsburgh Crawfords were put together by a Steel City entrepreneur who worked on both sides of the law named Gus Greenlee. Taking advantage of the Great Depression, a power vacuum in the Negro Leagues, and the lack of any rules preventing him from doing so, Greenlee was able to rob other teams of their best players. He knew what he was doing; five of the Crawfords' starters are in the Baseball Hall of Fame, which is saying something as it is exponentially more difficult for a Negro League player to be honored by that institution than a major league player from the same era. Of those players, only Satchel Paige would ever play in the big leagues where at 42 he became the oldest "rookie" in baseball history.

How the 1936 Crawfords would have fared against the Yankees (who in 1936 were on the verge of yet another dynasty era), is anybody's guess. The comparison between black baseball and the major leagues is a difficult task because Negro League statistics are notoriously unreliable and even when stats were complete, competition was erratic. All the black teams barnstormed extensively each season and some of those games were against teams comprised of major leaguers. More often than not, the black teams won. Some point out that's not a fair comparison because the black players had more to prove than the whites. I'm not so sure I buy that argument. Like all professional athletes, the white players were competitors at the pinnacle of their profession; they hardly would have allowed themselves to be beaten, especially those players who couldn't stand the humiliation of losing to blacks. Ty Cobb who was often on the losing end of those games eventually refused to play against blacks for exactly that reason. So many big league teams lost to black teams in the twenties that Judge Landis barred major league teams from participating in games against black teams. (He did not prevent big leaguers from playing on non-sanctioned teams however).

Perhaps a more reasonable standard of judgement are the testimonies of countless baseball people, including some major league stars who like Babe Ruth, claimed the best black players were as good as the best white players and deserved to be in the majors. Another reasonable standard was the performance of the first black players who made it into the big leagues. Jackie Robinson won the National League Rookie of the Year Award in 1947, despite the fact that he was by most accounts, not the best player in the Negro Leagues when he became the chosen one. In the decade after Robinson was signed by the Dodgers, a trickle of black players made it into the big leagues, yet some of the most recognizable names of that era, Roy Campanella, Ernie Banks, Frank Robinson, Henry Aaron, Willie Mays, and of course, Jackie Robinson, were black players. In the fifties, Sam Jethroe, Joe Black, Jim Gilliam, Frank Robinson, and Willie McCovey, won Rookie of the Year honors. Roy Campanella, Willie Mays, Hank Aaron and Ernie Banks (two years in a row) all won the MVP award. Brooklyn pitcher Don Newcombe won both awards as well as the being the first winner of the Cy Young Award. According to the Win Shares system of evaluating ballplayers devised by Bill James, approximately twenty percent of the best players in the National League in the early fifties were black players, a percentage far in excess of their numbers in the league.

Given that, it's not much of a leap to realize that a good number of the best players playing the game before Jackie Robinson, were indeed Negro League players. Banning a high percentage of the best players available, the major leagues before 1947 did not truly represent the best baseball of the era. It's tantalizing to imagine what if his daughter is right, and Babe Ruth had been chosen to be the manager of a major league team, AND been allowed to include black players.

One thing's for sure: it would have been a hell of a team.

The 1935 Pittsburgh Crawfords
Top Row: L-R: Olan Taylor (1B), Judy Johnson (2B), Leroy Matlock (P), ?, Josh Gibson (C), Hood Witter (trainer).
Middle Row: L-R: 'Cool Papa' Bell (CF), Sam Bankhead (SS), Oscar Charleston (1B), Clarence 'Spoony' Palm (C), Jimmie Crutchfield (OF), Ernest 'Spoon' Carter (P), William Perkins (C/OF).
Bottom Row: L-R: Timothy Bond (SS/3B), Howard, Bertrum Hunter (P), Sam Streeter (P), Harry 'Tin Can' Kincannon (P), Duro Davis (P).

If only...