BASEBALL

Survival

Perhaps the best thing that can be said about Major League Baseball in the 1980s is that it survived. Although the decade witnessed superb individual and team performances on the field, it was probably more notable for its labor disputes, strikes, threats of strikes, owner-collusion scandals, many substance abuse revelations, the Pete Rose betting affair, and, in general, the shortsightedness of those who ran the game. But despite these and other serious problems, baseball somehow remained vibrant and popular. In 1980, for instance, a record forty-three million people paid to see Major League Baseball games, income from baseball television contracts accounted for a record 30 percent of the game's $500 million revenue, and television ratings for the World Series had never been higher. Over the course of the decade all of these leading indicators would continue to improve, which suggests that baseball's place as the national pastime was not as diminished as some critics maintained. "In the coming decade, profits, salaries, attendance, and general excitement over things baseball would be greater than ever," observed historian Charles Alexander, "but it would be an unprecedentedly strifefilled period. If baseball's best of times, the 1980s, in some ways, would also be its worst."

Parity

Baseball dynasties were abundant in the 1970s: the Baltimore Orioles won three consecutive American League (AL) pennants (1969-1971); the Oakland Athletics took three World Series in a row (1972-1974); the Cincinnati Reds were victorious in two straight World Series (1975-1976); and the New York Yankees returned to championship form by winning the World Series in 1977 and 1978. The 1980s, however, were a time of surprising parity in both the AL and the National League (NL). Though several teams won more than one pennant in the 1980s—the St. Louis Cardinals won three, while the Kansas City Royals, Los Angeles Dodgers, Oakland Athletics, and Philadelphia Phillies won two apiece—no team was able to win the World Series back-to-back. Why this was the case is difficult to answer. Some observers suggested that the players' free-agent status contributed to the unprecedented parity. Others noted that the inception of the amateur draft in 1965, more liberal trading rules, the contraction of minor-league farm systems, and expansion of major league clubs helped even out competition. As Benjamin Rader put it, "Stockpiling players became more difficult than in the past." No matter what the reasons were, the decline of baseball dynasties clearly did not hinder the game. In fact, it probably contributed to baseball's popularity by giving fans genuine hope that next year would bring their team a championship.

Third Sacker Series

The 1980 season concluded with the Kansas City Royals meeting the Philadelphia Phillies in the World Series. A well-rounded club with a great deal of playoff experience from the late 1970s, the Royals were led by third baseman George Brett. During the regular season Brett flirted with the .400 mark and ended up hitting .390 with 24 home runs and 118 runs batted in (RBI) in 117 games to win the AL Most Valuable Player (MVP) award. The Royals won their first ever pennant by sweeping the AL East champion New York Yankees in the American League Championship Series (ALCS). The Phillies were also loaded with playoff veterans, such as Cy Young award—winning pitcher Steve Carlton and first baseman Pete Rose, and were also led by a slugging third baseman, Mike Schmidt. The NL MVP, Schmidt set career highs with 48 home runs and 121 RBI. The NL Championship Series (NLCS) between the Phillies and the NL West winner Houston Astros was particularly dramatic, with the final four games going into extra innings. The Phillies won the World Series in six games behind the pitching of Carlton and reliever Tug McGraw, Schmidt's power hitting, and fine all-around defensive play. It was their first world championship.

Labor Woes

In 1981 the Major League Baseball season was marred by a bitter player strike that lasted from 12 June to the end of July and led to the cancellation of 713 games, a third of the schedule. The strike resulted from a dispute over compensation for players who switched teams as free agents. Several public opinion polls suggested widespread hostility toward the players, whose average salaries had ballooned with the advent of free agency in the late 1970s; according to one report, in 1970 the average major leaguer's salary was $25,000; in 1976 it was $52,000; and by 1980 it had reached $185,000. The fifty-day strike cost the players approximately $30 million in lost salary and the owners about $166 million in lost revenue. After the strike was resolved noted baseball writer Roger Angell of The New Yorker argued: "If the strike proved anything, it was that the owners do not hold themselves accountable in any way to their customers. The crisis left a very sour feeling, not just because of the loss of the dailiness and flow of summer baseball, or because of the bitterness and hostility of the negotiations, but because no one on the owners' side could ever put forward a brief, reasonable explanation of the deadlock or prevent its prolongation until the last moment at which some vestige of the season could be retrieved. From first to last, the crisis was an invention of the owners—the inevitable result of their determination to radically alter or put an end to the basic structure of player free-agency, and thus to win back by force what they had lost in bargaining and in the courts and through mediation." As if to prove that neither management nor the players' union had learned much from their previous conflict, in 1985 another baseball strike was called. Thankfully, though, that midseason work stoppage lasted only two days. In an attempt to salvage the 1981 season, baseball commissioner Bowie Kuhn implemented a split-season format. According to Kuhn's plan the division leaders before the strike would be declared the first-half winners, and the teams that finished atop their division after the strike were declared the second-half winners. The first- and second-half winners in each division then played a best-of-five-game miniplayoff before the regular playoff between the division champions. The results were mixed. The plan produced more postseason revenue for the owners, but the two teams with the best records in the NL, the Cincinnati Reds and the St. Louis Cardinals, failed to make the playoffs. Still, the 1981 World Series was an exciting affair. The Los Angeles Dodgers, led by Steve Yeager, Ron Cey, Pedro Guerrero, and phenomenal rookie pitcher Fernando Valenzuela, beat the New York Yankees in six games after they had been down two games to none.

AMERICA'S CUP?

It was often said in the 1980s that America was slipping as a superpower, that Americans had lost their competitive edge in the world marketplace. As proof of this phenomenon in sports, some pointed to the loss of the America's Cup in 1983. After the United States held the most prestigious trophy in yachting for 132 years, the longest winning streak in sports history was broken when Australia J/beat Liberty, skippered by Dennis Conner. "Remember how it was when the U.S. hockey team beat the Russians at the 1980 Olympics and Americans who had never seen a hockey game and who had given up saluting the flag after fifth grade were swept up overnight on a tidal wave of patriotic fervor?" asked Sarah Pileggi of Sports Illustrated. "Multiply that ardor a hundredfold and you'll have some idea of what winning the America's Cup…meant to Australians."' Not one to take losing lightly, Conner worked tirelessly over the next four years, working with designers to improve yachting technology and raising millions of dollars. "Competition is life's blood," said Conner, "and I'm a vampire." In February of 1987 Conner captained Stars & Strifes to a four-race sweep of the Australian yacht Kookaburra III to regain the America's Cup. In the process he transformed the twenty-six-inch silver cup from a trophy signifying yachting supremacy into an expansive national symbol. Thomas Boswell listed the meanings attached to the victory: "Let's see? America loses something on the world stage that it once held unquestionably. The United States wakes up, works hard and gets it back. Could we be talking about economic strength vis-a-vis the Japanese? Or military power compared with the Russians? Or the persuasive power of moral authority in the world community? Or maybe 'all of the above,' plus whatever else you want to throw in the pot?" For many the America's Cup, previously little known outside the sailing community, became a national treasure during a time of national insecurity.

Sources:

Thomas Boswell, "The America's Cup: Reductio ad Absurdum" in Game Day: Sports Writings 1970-1990 (New York: Doubleday, 1990);

Sarah Pileggi, "It Isn't America's Cup Any Longer," Sports Illustrated (3 October 1983): 82-85;

Roger Vaughan, "Obsessed," Life (September 1988): 82-85.

Iron Cal

From 30 May 1982 onward there was at least one constant in Major League Baseball: Cal Ripken Jr. Ripken played for the Baltimore Orioles, and for the rest of the decade—and well beyond it—Ripken did not miss a single game. "The Streak is baseball's most amazing feat and Ripken perhaps the game's most respected performer," noted one writer. "He commands adulation from his peers and fans alike." In many ways a throwback to an earlier era when ballplayers seemed more dignified and humble, the 6-foot 4-inch, 220-pound Ripken established a new offensive standard by which shortstops would be measured. By the end of the decade Ripken had collected 204 home runs and averaged 93 RBIs a year, astonishing numbers for his position. At the same time Ripken was an excellent defensive player: what he lacked in speed and range he made up for with a strong throwing arm, intelligence, and experience. He led AL shortstops in assists five times in the 1980s and in 1984 set an AL single-season mark for assists with 583. Although he won the Rookie of the Year (1982) and Most Valuable Player (1983) awards in consecutive seasons, and he was on seven straight All-Star teams in the 1980s, Ripken was better known for his assault on Lou Gehrig's all-time record of 2,130 consecutive games played. For many the most incredible thing about Ripken's streak was that he played all but 27 of his games at shortstop. "In an age when the concept of a sports hero is justifiably under attack," wrote Mike Lupica, "Ripken has actually behaved like one. Baseball fans identify with Ripken more than with the loud chest-thumpers of sports because he is like them in this one crucial way: He goes to work every day." On 6 September 1995 Ripken played his 2,131st consecutive game.

The Year of the Tiger

The 1984 season marked the debut of New York Mets pitcher Dwight Gooden. A nineteen-year-old right-hander, Gooden won 17 games and struck out 276 batters (a major-league rookie record) in just 218 innings on his way to winning the NL Rookie of the Year award. Because of his youth and pitching skill, some observers called Gooden "the Mozart of baseball." Nevertheless, after having been acquired from the Cleveland Indians in June, veteran Rick Sutcliffe of the Chicago Cubs won the NL Cy Young award by going 16-1. Sutcliffe, along with NL MVP second baseman Ryne Sandberg and relief pitcher Lee Smith, led the Cubs to their first-ever NL East division title, but Chicago could not get past the San Diego Padres in the NLCS. The Padres met the Detroit Tigers in the World Series. The Tigers began the season with a 35-5 record, ended up 104-58 in the regular season, and swept the Kansas City Royals in the ALCS. In the World Series the Tigers roared to a five-game victory over the Padres behind Kirk Gibson's clutch power hitting. The Tigers got productive years from Darrell Evans, Alan Trammell, Jack Morris, and Willie Hernandez, who became only the second relief pitcher to win the league MVP and Cy Young award in the same season. Unfortunately, the Tigers' World Series victory precipitated riots in Detroit in which eighty-two people were injured and one man was killed.

Drug Scourge

"A cloud called drugs is permeating our game," said baseball commissioner Peter Ueberroth in the wake of the 1985 Pittsburgh drug trial, which saw seven alleged drug dealers, most of whom had dealings with major-league ballplayers, prosecuted for smuggling, distributing, and selling cocaine and other drugs. Despite the embarrassing revelations coming out of federal court in Pittsburgh, which suggested that approximately two dozen current and former ballplayers allegedly used cocaine and amphetamines, drug abuse was nothing new to the national pastime. The year before, for instance, pitcher Pasqual Perez was jailed in Santo Domingo for cocaine possession. Also in 1984 Willie Aikens, Jerry Martin, Willie Wilson, and Vida Blue of the Royals served three months apiece in federal prison for possessing or trying to buy cocaine. Lonnie Smith of the Cardinals entered a drug rehabilitation program the same year. Regrettably, these were not isolated incidents. Steve Howe first sought professional help for his cocaine addiction in 1982. That same year fellow Dodger Bob Welch wrote of his battle with alcoholism in Five O'Clock Comes Early. Future Hall of Fame pitcher Ferguson Jenkins was arrested by Canadian police in 1980 for possession of cocaine, marijuana, and hashish. Before the 1980 season All-Star catcher Darrell Porter became one of the first ballplayers to admit his drug problems publicly. Dock Ellis played most of his twelve-year career while on drugs and supposedly threw a no-hitter while under the influence of LSD. Moreover, when those ballplayers who battled the bottle are considered, the list becomes even more lengthy and luminous: it includes former stars such as Mickey Mantle, Jimmie Foxx, Hack Wilson, Grover Cleveland Alexander, and Babe Ruth, among many others. In any event Ueberroth responded to the 1985 public confessions by suspending Dave Parker, Keith Hernandez, Joaquin Andujar, Lonnie Smith, and seven others. Under the terms of Ueberroth's punishment, the offending players could have their suspensions lifted if they agreed to donate a percentage of their salaries to drug abuse programs, perform community service, and submit to random drug testing. Not surprisingly, all the implicated players accepted these conditions. Still the problem continued. Alan Wiggins, LaMarr Hoyt, Otis Nixon, and Leon Durham all abused illegal drugs after Ueberroth's symbolic housecleaning. Most famous, Dwight Gooden of the Mets entered the Smithers Alcoholism and Treatment Center in 1987 after testing positive for cocaine. Three years later, Gooden's former teammate Darryl Strawberry sought treatment at Smithers for alcohol abuse.

Baseball At Its Finest

The 1986 postseason was the most memorable of the decade. In the ALCS the Boston Red Sox met the California Angels to decide the pennant. With the Angels leading three games to one, Dave Henderson of the Red Sox smashed a two-out, two-run home run in the ninth inning to save the game. The Red Sox eventually won game five 7—6 in eleven innings and the series in seven games. The NLCS between the powerful New York Mets and the pitching-rich Houston Astros was just as dramatic. A tight series, in which four contests were decided by one run, the Mets were trailing for most of game six when they tied it in the ninth. The Mets took a 7-4 lead into the sixteenth inning, but Houston scored twice before Mets reliever Jesse Orosco struck out Kevin Bass with two runners on base to end the game and the series. Following the game Mets manager Davey Johnson said, "This was major league baseball at its finest. If you didn't enjoy this, you don't enjoy anything." The final two games of the World Series were no less exciting. After five contests the Red Sox led the Mets three games to two. In game six the Red Sox were winning 5-3 going into the bottom of the tenth frame, poised to win their first world championship in sixty-eight years. But after two quick outs, the Mets staged a comeback. Three hits and a wild pitch later, the Mets had tied the score. With the winning run on third base in the person of Ray Knight, veteran first baseman Bill Buckner allowed Mookie Wilson's routine ground ball to go between his legs as Knight scored to win the game. Thomas Boswell of the Washington Post wrote that "the Red Sox defeat will live, vivid and symbolic, growing in the retelling for years." Game seven was almost as devastating for Red Sox fans. Their team took a 3-0 lead into the sixth inning but could not hold it and eventually lost 8-5. It was, wrote Boswell, "the most brutal team disappointment in baseball history." Of course, for the Mets and their fans it was a tremendously gratifying series.

Necessities

The 1987 season began with a jolt. baseball commissioner Peter Ueberroth had previously announced that the season would be dedicated to the memory of Jackie Robinson, the legendary second baseman for the Brooklyn Dodgers who broke baseball's color line forty years earlier. To commemorate that anniversary, Ted Koppel invited Al Campanis, the Los Angeles Dodgers' vice president for player personnel and one of Robinson's former teammates, to be a guest on the 6 April episode of the television program Night line, Early in the show Koppel asked Campanis why there were no black baseball managers, general managers, or owners: "Is there still that much prejudice in baseball today?" Campanis replied: "No, I don't believe it's prejudice. I truly believe they may not have some of the necessities to be, let's say, a field manager or perhaps a general manager." A stunned and incredulous Koppel allowed Campanis to continue. "I have never said that blacks are not intelligent. I think many of them are highly intelligent," said Campanis, "but they may not have the desire to be in the front office.…They're outstanding athletes, very God-gifted, and they're very wonderful people, and that's all I can tell you about them." Campanis was fired two days later for his racist remarks and for inadvertently revealing the fact that after forty years of integration many of those who ran the game still maintained troubling views with regard to race, "Name baseball's 100 most powerful people—owners, league executives and general managers—and 99 are white males," wrote Thomas Boswell a year later. "Many are conservative, a few reactionary. Al Campanis was typical." The Campanis debacle led some to point out that less than 2 percent of the top administrative positions in baseball were held by racial minorities and that African American players continued to be relegated primarily to certain positions, such as the outfield and first base. "Baseball had tried to portray itself for years as a beacon of racial enlightenment," noted writer Richard Scheinin. "But now the truth was out: the systemic racism of American society remained woven into the fabric of the game." Fortunately some in the baseball establishment seemed willing to try to rectify this deplorable situation. After the Campanis incident Ueberroth hired outspoken African American sociologist Harry Edwards as a consultant on minority affairs. One of Edwards's first acts was to hire Campanis to his staff. "We are going to have to deal with the Campanises in baseball," explained Edwards, "and it's good that I have a person in-house who knows how they think." In 1988 racial minorities comprised approximately 10 percent of baseball's front-office personnel, and Frank Robinson and Cito Gaston were hired as managers. A year later former ballplayer and broadcaster Bill White became president of the National League. These and other developments led Dan Gutman to write that "Campanis probably did more to advance the progress of blacks in sport than all the speeches, protests, and articles on the subject combined."

Dramatic Dodgers

Orel Hershiser and Kirk Gibson of the Los Angeles Dodgers had big years in 1988. Hershiser went 23-8 with a 2.26 earned-run average (ERA) and finished the season with a 59-inning scoreless streak to win the NL Cy Young award. In his first year in the National League Gibson hit .290 with 25 home runs and 76 RBI to win the NL MVP award. Many thought Darryl Strawberry of the New York Mets was a more worthy recipient considering his 39 home runs and 101 RBIs. Despite productive years from their star players, the Dodgers surprised many by beating the New York Mets in the playoffs to take the pennant. They won in large part because Gibson hit decisive home runs in games four and five and because Hershiser had a 1.09 ERA in 24 2/3 innings in the NLCS, shutting out the Mets in game seven. Waiting for the Dodgers in the World Series were the Oakland Athletics. Led by AL MVP Jose Canseco, Mark McGwire, Dave Stewart, and Dennis Eckersley, the powerful A's swept the Boston Red Sox in the ALCS to take the first of their three straight AL flags. The conclusion of the first game of the World Series provided Major League Baseball with its most dramatic moment of the decade. The Dodgers trailed 4-3, with one on and one out. Dodger manager Tommy Lasorda summoned the injured Gibson to pinch hit. Gibson, barely able to walk, made what would be his only appearance of the series. He worked the count to 3-2 against ace reliever Eckersley. After fouling off four pitches, Gibson delivered a two-run homer to lift the Dodgers to a 5-4 victory and the most spectacular come-back in World Series history. "Down to his last strike, Gibson hit a home run that, in some still photos, seemed to have been struck with one hand," wrote Boswell. "No player, not in the entire twentieth century, had hit a sudden-death homer to turn a World Series defeat into victory." Propelled by Gibson's heroics, superior pitching, and outfielder Mickey Hatcher's inspired play, the Dodgers beat the A's in five games. "The Dodgers' unexpected triumph in the century's eighty-fifth World Series capped a tremendously successful baseball season," noted Charles Alexander, "one that saw attendance and television ratings reach all-time highs."

The Saddest Year

According to political columnist George Will, the "1989 season was baseball's saddest season in seventy years." Negotiations continued between baseball owners and labor representatives to compensate those players who had been victims of owner-collusion scandals in the mid 1980s. Former Dodgers star Steve Garvey, who was said to be "so clean that he squeaked," had paternity suits filed against him by two women. Red Sox third baseman Wade Boggs was publicly humiliated when his four-year extramarital affair with Margo Adams was revealed. Donnie Moore, a former relief pitcher with the California Angels, reportedly never got over giving up an important home run in the 1986 ALCS against Boston: he shot his wife and then committed suicide. Dave Dravecky of the San Francisco Giants broke his arm pitching while making a comeback from cancer, and then broke it again in the on-field celebration after the Giants won the pennant. After a summer of intrigue, denial, and impassioned recriminations, Cincinnati Reds manager Pete Rose was banned from baseball for allegedly gambling on baseball games. Rose, baseball's all-time hit leader and a personification of the self-made man, denied the accusations. "I'd be willing to bet you, if I was a betting man," he said, "that I have not bet on baseball." Be that as it may, on the basis of a league-sponsored investigation, which writer Roger Kahn described as "an unconvincing mix of allegation and distortion," baseball commissioner A. Bartlett Giamatti was convinced that Rose had wagered on the game. In late August Giamatti announced that Rose had agreed to a lifetime suspension from baseball. "The matter of Mr. Rose is now closed," declared Giamatti. "It will be debated and discussed. Let no one think it did not hurt baseball. That hurt will pass, however, as the great glory of the game asserts itself and a resilient institution goes forward." According to many, the Rose controversy was the worst episode in baseball history since the Black Sox scandal of 1919. The fiftyone-year-old Giamatti died of a heart attack eight days after concluding the Rose case. The former president of Yale University, Giamatti was commissioner of baseball for five months. "He added a touch of class to the game, but was hopelessly out of touch with its soulless reality," lamented Richard Scheinin. Less than seven weeks after Giamatti's death, as the Oakland Athletics and the San Francisco Giants were preparing for game three of the World Series at Candlestick Park, a massive earthquake shook the Bay Area. The quake registered 7.1 on the Richter scale, killed more than sixty people, left thousands homeless and frightened, and caused billions of dollars in damage; needless to say, the World Series was postponed. Lastly, combative and self-destructive former New York Yankee player and manager Billy Martin was killed in December in a drunk-driving accident. Despite some impressive on-the-field achievements, such as Kevin Mitchell's 49-home-run, 125-RBI performance and the Baltimore Orioles' dramatic 32 1/2 game improvement over the previous year, the final baseball season of the 1980s was most memorable for its tragedies.

Breaking Records

For all its problems baseball provided fans with a great deal of pleasure in the 1980s, largely because many ballplayers performed brilliantly and established some remarkable single-game, regular-season, postseason, and career records and achievements. Len Barker, Tom Browning, and Mike Witt each pitched perfect games during the decade. In all, the period witnessed seventeen no-hitters, including Nolan Ryan's record-setting fifth. In 1986 Roger Clemens set a major-league record by striking out twenty hitters in a single game. That same season Bob Homner tied a major-league record by slugging four home runs in a game and Mike Scott established a first by throwing a no-hitter to clinch a division title. Kirk Gibson hit one of the most dramatic home runs ever, a ninth-inning, pinch-hit, tworun shot to lift the Los Angeles Dodgers over the Oak-land Athletics in the first game of the 1988 World Series. From a single-season perspective there were more than a few performances of historic caliber. George Brett hit a phenomenal .390 batting average in 1980, which remains the highest major-league batting average since Ted Williams hit .406 in 1941. In 1982 Rickey Henderson obliterated Lou Brock's single-season stolen base record by swiping 130 bases. Dwight Gooden's 1985 season must rank among the greatest of all time: he led the NL in wins (24), ERA (1.53), and strikeouts (268) and thus earned the "pitcher's triple crown." In 1987 Paul Molitor hit in 39 straight games, the fourth-longest streak in AL history. The following year Orel Hershiser set a major-league mark with 59 consecutive scoreless innings pitched, and Jose Canseco became the first player ever to steal 40 bases and hit 40 home runs in the same season.

Milestones

Over the course of the decade milestones were passed and dominant players emerged. The exclusive 300-win club admitted Steve Carlton (329 career wins), Don Sutton (324), Phil Niekro (318), Gaylord Perry (314), and Tom Seaver (311). Rollie Fingers set an all-time mark for saves with 341. Ferguson Jenkins earned his 100th AL win to become only the fourth pitcher to win 100 games in both leagues. Steve Carlton became the all-time left-handed strikeout leader. Carlton and Nolan Ryan dueled one another for the all-time strikeout mark: Carlton ended up with 4,136 while Ryan pitched until 1993 and collected 5,714. Mike Schmidt won three NL MVP awards, while Dale Murphy and Robin Yount won two league MVPs apiece. Wade Boggs won five AL batting crowns and had seven consecutive 200-hit seasons. Tony Gwynn won four NL batting titles. Rickey Henderson led the AL in stolen bases nine times, and Ozzie Smith won all ten NL Gold Glove awards at shortstop. Jack Morris was the decade's winningest pitcher with 162 victories. Dwight Gooden won his 100th game before he was twenty-five years old.

WINNING ATTITUDE

Jim Abbott's baseball career was one of the more compelling stories during the 1980s. Though his major-league win-loss record does not yet indicate it, there is little doubt that Abbott is special. "Abbott's goal is to blend in and be a great pitcher, but to millions of Americans he'll always be more," wrote Steve Marantz. Born without a right hand, Abbott inspired a generation of people (not all of whom were sports fans) to challenge convenient, simplified definitions and so-called physical limitations. "Any type of definition that puts me or anybody like me in the category of disabled is completely wrong," Abbott explained. "I feel blessed with what I've been given. My missing five fingers have been compensated [for in] so many other ways. I've been given a frame, a throwing arm, and so many other things. I'm not sure there's a lot of people within those parameters who wouldn't feel the same way." In high school he was a two-sport star: a magnificent pitcher and a talented quarterback. At the University of Michigan he won the Golden Spikes award as the best college player in the country. In 1986 he pitched for the U.S. team at the Pan American games and became the first American in twenty-five years to win a game in Cuba. The following year Abbott won the Sullivan Award, the annual honor given to the top amateur athlete in the nation. He played for the 1988 U.S. Olympic team and pitched the gold medal-winning game in Seoul. The number one pick of the California Angels in the 1988 amateur draft, he ended up being one of the few players never to play in the minors. As a major leaguer he quickly established himself as a fierce competitor and won twelve games as a rookie on a weak Angels team. At every level of competition Abbott transformed doubters into believers. Perhaps Abbott put it best when he said, "Just because other people think you are handicapped, that does not make it so." To prove his point yet again, Abbott pitched a no-hitter for the New York Yankees on 4 September 1993.

Sources:

Norman Macht, Jim Abbott: Major League Pitcher (New York: Chelsea House, 1994);

Steve Marantz, "'Courage is so much more than playing baseball with one hand," Sporting News, 216 (19 July 1993): 12-15.

Grand Finales

The 1980s were also a time of transition. Willie Stargell retired in 1982 as the Pittsburgh Pirates' all-time home run leader with 475. After twenty-three years with the Boston Red Sox, Carl Yastrzemski retired in 1983, having played in more AL games than anyone else in history: he also collected 3,419 hits and 452 home runs. Johnny Bench, the preeminent catcher of his generation, hung up his mask for good at the conclusion of the 1983 season. Jim Palmer ended his career as one of the finest pitchers in AL history in 1984 with 268 wins. That same season Joe Morgan broke Rogers Hornsby's record for career home runs by a second baseman and retired. A year later Rod Carew rapped his 3,000th hit and retired at the end of the season with a lifetime batting average of .312. On 11 September 1985 Pete Rose stroked hit number 4,192 to break Ty Cobb's fifty-seven-year-old record: Rose retired in 1986 with 4,256 hits, his legendary reputation for hard, intelligent play intact. Reggie Jackson called it quits in 1987 with 563 home runs, sixth on the all-time list. Four-time Cy Young award-winner Steve Carlton finished his career in 1988. Eight-time NL home run titlist Mike Schmidt retired in 1989 with 548 home runs to finish directly behind Jackson on the all-time homer register. With the notable exception of Rose, they were all elected to the Baseball Hall of Fame in their first year of eligibility.

State of the Game

For Most Major League Baseball players and owners the 1980s were tremendously prosperous. By the end of the decade over fifty million fans annually attended major-league games and baseball's gross revenues were more than $1 billion a year. Up-and-coming players like Roberto Alomar, Jose Canseco, Joe Carter, Dave Cone, Randy Johnson, Dave Justice, Barry Larkin, Mark McGwire, Greg Maddux, and perhaps most notably Ken Griffey Jr. emerged to take the place of fading stars. Of course, the 1980s were also a troubled time. Some small-market clubs faced fiscal limitations that hindered their competitiveness, and many players continued to experience drug problems. The most pressing concern, however, remained the power struggle between team owners and the Major League Baseball Players' Association. Despite being a lucrative industry, baseball suffered terribly from acrimonious labor conflicts, which more than anything else threatened the game's stronghold on the American imagination.

Sources:

Charles C. Alexander, Our Game: An American Baseball History (New York: Holt, 1991);

Roger Angell, Late Innings: A Baseball Companion (New York: Ballantine Books, 1982);

Thomas Boswell, The Heart of the Order (New York: Penguin, 1990);

Dan Gutman, Baseball Babylon: From the Black Sox to Pete Rose, the Real Stories Behind the Scandals that Rocked the Game (New York: Penguin, 1992);

Benjamin G. Rader, Baseball: A History of Americals Game (Urbana & Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1992);

Richard Scheinin, Field of Screams: The Dark Underside of America's National Pastime (New York: Norton, 1994);

George F. Will, Men At Work: The Craft of Baseball (New York: Harper & Row Perennial Library, 1990).

BASEBALL

Old-Time Baseball

The 1940s rank as one of the most spectacular decades in baseball history, despite the disruption of war. At the beginning of the 1940s, games were played in the daytime by white players and watched by fans who normally lived fairly close to the park. When the decade ended, night games were an accepted and crucial part of professional baseball; black players were not only participating, they were reshaping the game; and radio, television, and modern-style marketing promotions were captivating fans in every part of the county.

The Two-Team Monopoly

During most of the decade the Saint Louis Cardinals and Brooklyn Dodgers turned the National League into an exclusive, two-team monopoly. From 1941 through 1949, the Cardinals and Dodgers won seven pennants. Only the Chicago Cubs, in 1945, and Boston Red Sox, in 1948, disrupted the two-team battle for supremacy. In 1941 and 1942 the Dodgers and Cardinals went to the final day of the season before the National League champion was determined. In 1946 they were tied at season's end, forcing the first National League playoff in modern times. The teams also shared something other than success—a general manager. Branch Rickey, who had established the farm system that eventually provided the Cardinals with nine pennants, went to Brooklyn in 1942, and within a short time the "Bums of Brooklyn" had something to cheer about.

Heroes Galore

Some of the greatest legends of baseball played during the 1940s. Saint Louis outfielder Stan Musial boasted a .346 batting average and 302 doubles during the decade to lead the National League, while Ted Williams was champion of the decade in the American League, with a .356 batting average, 234 home runs, and 893 runs batted in. In pitching, Detroit's Hal Newhouser of the American League collected the most wins, 190; the lowest earned-run average; 2.83, and most strikeouts; 1,579. In 1944 and 1945 he was also the first player since Jimmie Foxx to win back-to-back Most Valuable Player awards for his performance. Only Babe Ruth had homered more than Ralph Kiner, who led the National League seven straight times, collecting 369 home runs in ten years, or one every fourteen times at bat. Cleveland shortstop-manager Lou Boudreau's 1948 season, when he won the Most Valuable Player award, included a .355 batting average, 106 runs batted in, and 116 runs scored.

Memorable Beginnings

The decade began with plenty of baseball excitement. The American League Detroit Tigers beat the Cleveland Indians and their future Hall of Famer Bob Feller—winner of twenty-seven games that year—on the final day of the season for the right to meet the Cincinnati Reds in the World Series, The Reds, on the other hand, had to activate their forty-year-old coach Jimmy Wilson for service behind the plate because one catcher was injured and the other committed suicide as the season drew to a close. The Reds went on to win their first world championship in twenty-one years in 1940. But it was the following year, the 1941 season, that captured the attention of America. For sports fans even the war in Europe did not overshadow Ted Williams's .406 hitting display or Joe DiMaggio's record-breaking fifty-six-game hitting streak. It was a baseball connoisseur's year. On the last day of the season Williams approached a doubleheader batting 3996, which would have been rounded off to the magic average of .400 and made him the first player since 1931 to crack the .400 barrier. Yet, Williams declined to sit out the game to preserve his record. In a magnificent display of confidence and skill, Williams went six for eight against Philadelphia to finish with a .406 batting average.

DiMaggio

Despite the consistency and skill of Williams's season-long march toward the history books, it was DiMaggio's quest for baseball's longest hitting streak that captured the most attention in 1941. Once he hit safely in thirty-eight games and streaked for the record of forty-four, set in 1897, fans followed his every turn at bat. The consecutive hitting streak ran from 15 May to 17 July; DiMaggio won the American League Most Valuable Player award; and the Yankees won the pennant and the right to play against the Brooklyn Dodgers in the World Series. In the fourth game of the series with the Yankees behind 3-4 in the ninth inning, Dodger catcher Mickey Owen dropped a game-ending strike three and allowed Yankee outfielder Tommy Henrich to make it safely to first base. The Yankees rallied to win the game 7-4 and build a 3-1 lead in the series. That same year, Lou Gehrig, one of the most popular Yankees ever, died at age thirty-eight, two years after he missed the first game of his career due to a mysterious debilitating disease. He bid farewell to his fans at Yankee Stadium on 4 July 1939, designated Lou Gehrig Day, and died on 2 June 1941. Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis was thereafter referred to as Lou Gehrig's disease.

Baseball Goes to War

Nineteen games into the 1941 season, Detroit slugger Hank Greenberg was inducted into the army, symbolizing the changes ahead for baseball. He was not the first major leaguer to be drafted; that distinction fell to Philadelphia pitcher Hugh Malcahy, but because he was a highly paid star, Greenberg's induction made headlines and set off considerable debate about the role of baseball during wartime. At first the impact of the draft was manageable. In 1942, for example, 328 out of 607 major league ballplayers were in uniform. But that quickly changed. In May 1942 Joe DiMaggio was sworn in as a U.S. Army Air Force aviation cadet; by 1943 pitcher Bob Feller was the navy captain of a 40-mm gun crew, and hundreds of other healthy young men followed. In 1945, 565 players of 607 were fighting the war. For many older players the interruption for military service meant the end of their baseball careers, but 1941 stars Hank Greenberg, Joe DiMaggio, Bob Feller, Stan Musial, and Ted Williams all resumed their careers following the war. On the baseball field the Saint Louis Cardinals won the first of three consecutive pennants in 1942 and then went on to defeat the New York Yankees in the World Series; the Boston Red Sox's Ted Williams won the triple crown with a .356 batting average, 36 home runs, and 137 RBIs. As the 1943 season approached and the ranks of the able-bodied disappeared from the baseball diamond, owners turned to veterans whose age kept them out of the service. Players such as Spud Chandler, Joe Kuhel, Dutch Leonard, and Johnny Niggeling extended their careers, sometimes into their forties, because of the war. Marginal players also got their chance. Nick Etten, who had been in the majors since 1938 but could boast of only one good season, led the American League in homers with 22 in 1944 and led the league in RBIs with 111 in 1946. The most notable indication of the lack of players was one-armed outfielder Pete Gray, signed by the Saint Louis Browns in 1945. Gray played seventyseven games for the Browns, hitting .218. When he caught the ball in the outfield, he would throw the ball up in the air, throw the glove off his left hand, catch the ball, and throw it into play.

Roosevelt's "Green Light" Letter

As the war effort demanded more and more professional players, the baseball executives, the press, and the public began to wonder whether the sport should continue during the war years. In response President Franklin D. Roosevelt wrote a letter to Baseball Commissioner Kenesaw Mountain Landis on 15 January 1942, urging him to keep baseball alive during the war and forming an unusual pact between two powerful men. Roosevelt's "green light" letter affirmed the importance of baseball as a recreation for hardworking Americans. But in return for allowing baseball to continue, Roosevelt stipulated that all players of military age should, without question, enter the armed forces. The president trusted Landis to ensure that all players eligible for the draft would enter the service. When J. G. Taylor Spink, owner of The Sporting News, asked Roosevelt in 1944 for special draft exemptions for baseball players, Landis intervened. Landis wrote the director of the Selective Service, saying that baseball did not want special treatment in the draft since this would break his agreement with Roosevelt and cause "bitter public resentment" that would damage the integrity of the game. Keeping baseball alive during the war years was financially crucial to the game's future. It kept fan interest alive and franchises operating to set the stage for full resumption after the war. As the president pointed out, baseball also did, indeed, provide an important diversion and morale booster to both workers in defense plants and soldiers overseas, who followed the major leagues closely. Recognizing the role of baseball in America, the Japanese took extraordinary steps to jam broadcasts of the World Series. For the soldier, whether his team was winning or losing, the continuity of baseball represented business as usual on the home front in a time of crisis.

Breaking the Color Barrier

Many factors throughout American culture set the stage for the integration of major league baseball in 1947. Thousands of black Americans migrated to northern National League cities from the rural South before and during World War II In the 1940s, for the first time urban blacks formed an identifiable voting bloc and consumer market to be reckoned with by politicians and businessmen alike. The war itself caused a reassessment of American racial attitudes, as the Nazi ideology of racial supremacy discredited American ideas of white superiority. World War II also raised the aspirations of blacks, eager to take their place in the American dream.

Branch Rickey and the Brooklyn Dodgers

Branch Rickey, the general manager of the Brooklyn Dodgers, knew how to seize a moment. Rickey was known in the sports world as the "Mahatma," since he combined "God, your father, and Tammany Hall leader." He was moved by postwar agitation over baseball's segregation, and in 1945 he took it upon himself to integrate major league baseball. A pious Methodist, Rickey remembers, "I couldn't face my God much longer knowing that His black creatures are held separate and distinct from His white creations in the game that has given me all I own." Rickey planned his moves carefully. He consulted historians and sociologists on race relations in order to anticipate reactions to the great experiment he planned. These consultants convinced him, idealistically, that if Americans were brought together in the common goal of integration, they would be able to overcome their racial prejudices. But because of the opposition to blacks in baseball, Rickey had to act deviously. He announced that he was going to establish a new all-black league, financed and run by the Dodgers. Everyone knew Rickey's fondness for the dollar, so the announcement was accepted at face value by the baseball world. One of the teams in the proposed league was to be in Brooklyn. Under that cover Rickey interviewed Jackie Robinson in August 1945. Robinson was an outstanding athlete. He had been the first man to letter in four varsity sports at UCLA, including baseball, basketball, football, and track and field, and he had been a good shortstop for the Monarchs in 1945, his first year in the Negro Leagues.

The Deal

Robinson went to his interview with Rickey believing the cover story about a new league. Rickey, on the other hand, wanted to be sure that Robinson was the right player for his bold plan. He needed to find a man with superlative skills as a ballplayer who also had sufficient self-control to endure with dignity the torment and abuse he would suffer. The most famous players in the Negro Leaguea—Josh Gibson, Satchel Paige, Buck Leonard, and Cool Papa Bell—were past their prime. Robinson, at twenty-six, was coming into his best years, and he seemed to possess the character for which Rickey was looking. Rickey interviewed Robinson for three hours. During that time he challenged Robinson to say how he would react, for instance, if he were spiked by an opposing player and then called racial names. Robinson remembered saying, "Are you looking for a Negro who is afraid to fight back?" Rickey answered, "I'm looking for a ballplayer with guts enough not to fight back." Robinson's first step toward the major leagues was a season for the Montreal Royals in 1946. He was paid a $3,000 signing bonus and $600 a month, more than his Negro League contract called for and enough to allow him to get married. He opened the season with a home run his first time at bat and finished the day with four hits in four trips to the plate and two stolen bases. That year he led the International League in hitting with a .349 average. A year later, on 15 April 1947, Robinson played first base for the Brooklyn Dodgers against the Boston Braves at Ebbets Field, becoming the first black player in major league baseball.

The Reaction

Although Rickey took great pains to ensure the success of the experiment, it created enormous controversy. His own team threatened a mutiny; his fellow owners worried that black fans would drive away white fans and destroy the game of baseball. Some teams said they would refuse to play against Robinson. Members of the Saint Louis Cardinals secretly planned to strike. National League president Ford Frick moved quickly. He told the players involved that they would be suspended if they went through with their proposed action. "You will find that the friends you think you have in the press box will not support you, that you will be outcasts," Frick said. "I do not care if half the league strikes. Those who do it will encounter quick retribution. They will be suspended, and I don't care if it wrecks the National League for five years. This is the United States of America, and one citizen has as much right to play as another." Once Robinson played for the Dodgers, black attendance reportedly increased as much as 50 percent in some cities, causing owners to fear that too much black attendance would "threaten the value of Major League franchises." The nation watched, fascinated. In a patronizing address to middle-class black leaders in 1947, Rickey appealed to the black community not to call too much attention to Robinson's presence. "The biggest threat to (Robinson's) success is the Negro people themselves.…You'll strut. You'll wear badges, you'll hold Jack Robinson Days.…You'll get drunk. You'll fight. You'll be arrested.…You'll symbolize his importance into a national comedy…and an ultimate tragedy." The Chicago Defender warned, "Let's not make him a race problem; he's just a ballplayer." Through it all Robinson kept quiet, just doing his job on the field. He had a good year, batting .297 and winning the Rookie of the Year award. When there were enough blacks in the league for Robinson to shed his role as pioneer, he became a highly vocal player. Throughout his career Robinson hit .311 over ten years. His best season was his third, 1949, when he led the league with a .342 average and thirty-seven stolen bases, winning the Most Valuable Player award.

MR. RICKEY

Baseball innovator Branch Rickey was instrumental in shaping the modern game, forming farm teams, recruiting black players and introducing solid business practices. In 1913, Rickey helped introduce Ladies' Days with the Saint Louis Brown and took the idea across town in 1917 to the Saint Louis Cardinals, raising the caliber of fans and earning his salary of $15,000 a year. In spring training, he introduced innovations such as batting cages, blackboard drills, and sliding pits. In 1927, he authorized the first radio broadcasts of major league baseball games. By far his most important contribution to Saint Louis and later the Brooklyn Dodgers was the development of the farm system. By establishing a chain of teams to feed players to the major leagues, the Cardinals became competitive with the wealthier teams of the era. Rickey moved to Brooklyn in 1942 to become president and general manager of the Dodgers, a team best known for their bonehead plays and mediocre record. There he created a sound farm system and won pennants in 1947 and 1949. He eventually purchased the club with Walter O'Malley and John L. Smith. Brilliant and quotable, Rickey's name will always be linked to the signing of Jackie Robinson in 1947 that integrated the major leagues. In later years, he sold his Dodger stock for $1 million, attempted to organize a third major league that inspired the established league to create the New York Mets, Los Angeles Angels, Houston Colt 45s and the new Washington Senators.

The Result

In 1948 Rickey signed black catcher Roy Campanella, and the preseason exhibition tour that year was easy for the Brooklyn Dodgers, and lucrative. Everyone, it seemed, wanted a look at Branch Rickey's Negro sensations. In Fort Worth, Texas, the Dodgers drew 7,563 customers, then more than doubled that total the next day with 15,507 fans—an all-time park record. In Dallas the turnout was 11,379, including 6,800 blacks. In Oklahoma City, 10,137 people showed up to gawk—half black, half white. In seven games, from Fort Worth to Asheville, North Carolina, the Brooklyn Dodgers played before 63,398 people.

Slow Progress

Integration was a bumpy road, but Jackie Robinson's pioneering step paved the way for more black players in the major leagues in the 1940s. Pitcher Don Newcombe joined the Dodgers in 1949. The New York Giants signed Hank Thompson and Monte Irvin in 1948. Much of the excitement of the National League in the 1950s and 1960s revolved around players such as Willie Mays, Hank Aaron, Willie McCovy, Bob Gibson, and Maury Wills—all black. But racial progress was far slower in the American League. Only three blacks were signed in the American League in the 1940s: Larry Doby, Satchel Paige, and Luke Easter, all of whom played for the Cleveland Indians under the leadership of Bill Veeck. It took twelve years after Robinson's first game with the Dodgers for the Boston Red Sox to integrate; they were the last all-white team. Between 1947 and 1959 blacks made up only a small percentage of the major league. But the black players were outstanding performers, winning nine of the National League's Most Valuable Player awards, with Campanella winning three times and Ernie Banks winning twice. Black players also won nine Rookie of the Year awards during that period.

Changing of the Guard

The death of Kenesaw Mountain Landis in 1945 ushered in a new era in baseball, as control shifted from the baseball commissioner to the team owners for the first time since 1919. Following the disgrace of the Black Sox scandal during the World Series of 1919, the sixteen major league baseball club owners cringed under the iron-handed rule of their self-appointed commissioner and employee, Judge Landis. The scandal had allowed Landis to exercise near-dictatorial powers, and he used them to restore the image of the national pastime. His death marked major changes to the rules the major leagues lived by, from the disposition of his successor, former Kentucky governor Albert B. "Happy" Chandler. The commissioner would no longer be allowed personal interpretation of the rules and spontaneous introduction of his own laws; the commissioner's decisions could be taken to court; and rules and joint actions of the major leagues could no longer be vetoed because the commissioner held them to be "detrimental to baseball." Happy Chandler signed a seven-year contract that paid him $50,000 annually. With the owners back in charge, he earned every dime, wrestling with the problems, financial and otherwise, associated with an America returning from the war: the role of blacks in baseball, the creation of new teams, the challenge of a rival Mexican Baseball League, the pooling of revenues, the emergence of player unions, and the rising cost of doing business in that transitional era.

Baseball after the War

Played before an enthusiastic and appreciative postwar crowd, baseball in the closing years of the decade rarely lacked excitement. Baseball's best players were back from the war, and America was ready for anything. In 1946 Bob Feller returned from four years in the navy to reestablish himself as one of the game's finest pitchers, winning twenty-six games for the Cleveland Indians, ten by shutout. Led by Stan Musial, the Cardinals beat the Dodgers in the first pennant play-off since 1908, then edged the Red Sox in a tense seven-game World Series. In 1947 Ted Williams excited the American League with his hitting, winning the triple crown (leading the league in batting average, home runs, and runs batted in) for the second time, but lost the Most Valuable Player award to the "Yankee Clipper," Joe DiMaggio. The New York Yankees returned to baseball dominance that year, beating the Dodgers in a World Series considered to be the best of the decade. After losing the first two games the Dodgers came back to tie the series. In the fourth game Yankee Bill Bevens was one out away from a World Series no-hitter with a 2-1 lead when he put two men on and then allowed Cookie Lavagetto to double, losing his no-hitter and the game to the Dodgers. Fittingly, 1947 was the first year of televised baseball games.

1948 and 1949

In 1948 the Cleveland Indians, featuring pitchers Bob Feller and Satchel Paige, won their first pennant since 1920, and the Boston Braves captured their first National League title since 1914 in a year known for power hitting. Ralph Kiner and Johnny Mize each hit forty home runs. Stan Musial had one of his best seasons, batting .376 with thirty-nine homers. The Indians won the 1948 World Series as baseball's popularity boomed. The fifth game of the World Series was played before 86,288 in Cleveland Stadium. In 1948 two traditional rivals, the New York Yankees and the Brooklyn Dodgers, both reasserted themselves. For the Yankees it was the beginning of the Casey Stengel era. He led the Yankees to the world championship in 1949, a year in which more than 20 million fans paid to see major league and minor league games.

"COOL PAPA BELL"

After the war, James "Cool Papa" Bell, one of the Negro Leagues' fastest and most exciting players, was offered an opportunity to play for the Major League's St. Louis Browns, when his skills were declining and opportunities for black baseball players were improving. Instead, he took a job a professional scout, helping to pave the way for other black players to make the major leagues. Bell took credit for promoting the career of Dodger great Jackie Robinson, Chicago Cubs star Ernie Banks, and Yankee Elston Howard. Once known as the "black Ty Cobb," Bell was elected to the Hall of Fame on 13 February 1974 at the age of 70.

Sources:

Martin Appel and Burt Goldblatt, Baseballs Best: The Hall of Fame Gallery (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1977);

Glenn Dickey, The History of American League Baseball Since 1901 (New York: Stein & Day, 1980);

Dickey, The History of National League Baseball Since 1876 (New York: Stein & Day, 1979);

Jim Kaplan, Golden Years of Baseball (NewYork: Crescent, 1992);

Milton J. Shapiro, The Year They Won the Most Valuable Player Award (New York: Messner, 1966).

BASEBALL

BASEBALL. Contrary to the myth that Abner Doubleday originated the sport in 1839 in Cooperstown, New York, a form of baseball was played in the 1820s, if not before. The sport probably originated in England from games like cricket and rounders, in which players struck a ball with a stick and ran to a base. In 1748, an English woman recorded that the family of the Prince of Wales played baseball. George Washington's army at Valley Forge played a game of "base." By the 1840s, different types of baseball had developed in Pennsylvania, New York, and New England. In 1845, Alexander Cartwright, a New York bank teller, proposed rules borrowed from these various forms to organize the sport for middle-class gentlemen. Unlike today, pitchers threw underhand, the winning team had to score twenty-one runs, and batters were out if hit by a thrown ball or when a hit was caught on one bounce. But Cartwright's rules did require play on a diamond-shaped field with bases ninety feet apart, nine players on the field, and three outs to an inning.

By the Civil War, baseball was a popular sport with men from both the middle and working classes and had spread to the Midwest and California. Newspapers already reported on it regularly. In fact, one newspaper in 1856 described baseball as "the national pastime," a claim that soon became true and remained so at the beginning of the twenty-first century, no matter how clichéd the phrase itself has become. Henry Chadwick, an English immigrant and sportswriter, did much to popularize baseball by creating the box score in 1860, by calculating batting averages, and by promoting the game as an enjoyable sport to play and to watch. From the start, as Chadwick discerned and generations since have discovered, base-ball's statistics have proved to be a subject of debate and fascination, more so than in any other sport.

After the Civil War, baseball's popularity spread to the South, and growing numbers of fans throughout the country encouraged more intense competition and brought money into the sport. The first professional team was the Cincinnati Red Stockings, founded in 1869. While the quality of play steadily increased and amateurs rarely won against professionals, disputes over salaries, gambling, alcohol abuse, and rowdy fans also began to plague professional baseball by the early 1870s.

Players organized the first professional league in 1871 but it collapsed in 1875. A year later, William Hulbert, owner of the Chicago White Stockings, helped create the National League with teams from other cities in the Midwest and East. While this league also saw many franchises fail over the years, it did survive. The rival American Association was formed late in 1881. By 1887, at a time when the country accepted the practice of Jim

Crow segregation, players and owners agreed not to employ African Americans in baseball. The owners also agreed to the reserve clause, which at first limited the number of players eligible to switch teams. By 1889, the reserve clause blacklisted any player who broke his contract, thus keeping players' salaries low and ensuring the owners' survival. It also prevented players from marketing their talents freely. A century later, the reserve clause would be broken and players' salaries would explode.

By the late 1880s, baseball resembled the modern game. Baseball parks began to be built, and the two leagues played a series to determine the world champion. The distance between the mound and home plate lengthened to fifty feet; overhand pitching became the norm; four balls, not seven, made a walk; a strike zone was de-fined; and most players wore gloves, thus reducing errors. Players like Cap Anson and King Kelly had become stars, popular culture celebrated the sport in poems such as "Casey at the Bat," and periodicals devoted exclusively to baseball, such as The Sporting News, appeared. In 1890, players rebelled against the salaries imposed by the owners and formed a union and a new league. However, the players' league lasted only one year and helped kill the American Association.

Lack of competition in the twelve-team league, the dominance of pitching, and the poor reputation of players like John McGraw hurt baseball in the 1890s and attendance declined. But in 1893 the distance between home plate and the pitcher was increased to its present sixty feet six inches and as a result hitting improved. In 1899, Ban Johnson, a former sports editor who influenced baseball until the 1920s, transformed a minor league into the American League. It won acceptance as an equal from the National League in 1902, creating a rivalry that has endured. The first modern World Series was held in 1903. Major stars, such as shortstop Honus Wagner of the Pirates, and superlative teams—like those managed by McGraw in New York and Connie Mack in Philadelphia—arose. After 1909, ten ballparks were either built or remodeled, replacing wooden structures prone to fire with steel, and were located near public transit stations to attract the growing urban middle class. Wrigley Field and Fenway Park, for example, were built during this period. In 1910, in a reflection of the importance of baseball, President William Howard Taft threw out the first ball of the season, establishing a tradition that has continued ever since.

Despite the play of stars like Ty Cobb, Christy Mathewson, Grover Alexander, and Walter Johnson, attendance began to decline in 1909, for no clear reason. Even so, baseball continued to attract wealthy investors, and in 1914 the Federal League was founded. Although the new league lasted only two years, it lured away many players from the other two leagues, doubled many players' salaries, and hurt most owners. Attendance revived in 1916, but World War I reduced baseball's appeal and more than two hundred players went into the service. The 1919 season might have been cancelled had the war continued. Baseball rebounded well from the war and doubled the attendance of the previous year as the nation embraced a return to normalcy. In addition to enjoying fine pennant races, baseball audiences were thrilled by Babe Ruth, a superb pitcher for the Red Sox, who, after being moved to the outfield, hit twenty-nine homers, a record that had stood since 1884.

Yet in retrospect, 1919 proved to be a disastrous year for baseball when in 1920 it was found that eight White Sox players had conspired with gamblers to lose the 1919 World Series to the underdog Cincinnati Reds. Rumors of a fix appeared even before the series began, but White Sox owner Charles Comiskey, who underpaid his talented players, ignored them. Five of the eight players were clearly guilty of throwing the series. The newly appointed baseball commissioner, Judge Kenesaw Mountain Landis, banned all eight for life. The ban included Shoeless Joe Jackson, a marvelous hitter, who was probably not involved. Landis's autocratic rule, which lasted into World War II, helped save baseball, as did the outlawing of trick pitches like the spitball.

Another factor that restored popularity to the game was Babe Ruth's superlative performance as a New York Yankee during the 1920s. The slugger, from a Baltimore home for wayward boys, hit fifty-four home runs in 1920 and transformed the game. While he also hit .376, it was Ruth's power and personality that attracted millions of fans. His personal home run total was greater than the team totals of all but one of the fifteen other teams and his slugging percentage was the best ever until Barry Bonds broke his record in 2001. The next year, he hit fifty-nine homers. It was not until the 1970s that Henry "Hank" Aaron broke his home run total record. The Yankees became the first team ever to draw one million fans in a season and did so six more times in the 1920s, allowing them to build Yankee Stadium in 1922. More generally, baseball's new emphasis on the home run, as opposed to a dependency on pitching and defense, changed the game dramatically. Pitchers won thirty or more games seventeen times between 1900 and 1920, but not once in the 1920s. In addition to homers, eight players hit over .400 between 1920 and 1930. Only Ted Williams, in 1941, has done so since.

The era from 1920 through 1930 was a great one for baseball. The Yankees began one of their many dynasties, the Philadelphia Athletics under Connie Mack may have been the best team ever, and Branch Rickey, through his invention of the farm system, made the Cardinals a strong franchise despite not having much money. There were also many stars besides Ruth, including Lou Gehrig, Al Simmons, George Sisler, Hack Wilson, and Rogers Hornsby, probably the greatest right-handed hitter ever.

Not surprisingly, the Great Depression and World War II hurt baseball severely. Attendance declined so much that many teams faced collapse, often selling off good players just to survive, while many stars had to serve in the war. Hard times, however, bred innovation to maintain fan interest. The All-Star game, the Hall of Fame, and the Most Valuable Player award were invented in the 1930s. Night baseball, pushed by Larry MacPhail, and radio broadcasts, especially with Red Barber in Cincinnati, became popular. Among the great players of the 1930s, Hank Greenberg, a Jew, and Joe DiMaggio, an Italian American, illustrate the important role minorities have played in baseball. African Americans, however, were conspicuous by their absence.

Blacks, of course, had continued to play baseball at all levels after whites barred them from organized baseball in the 1880s. But none of the black leagues lasted very long until the 1920s, when Andrew "Rube" Foster, formerly a great pitcher, helped establish the Negro National League with teams in the Midwest and East. A rival league survived for only five years. As with the majors, black teams did well in the 1920s but only a few prospered in the 1930s. By World War II, the idea of integration had surfaced, largely from a desire to exploit black talent and interest in baseball. While most African Americans wanted baseball to integrate, many realized it would kill the Negro leagues, an integral part of their society. In 1945, Branch Rickey, now of the Brooklyn Dodgers, signed the twenty-six-year-old Jackie Robinson to a contract with the minor-league Montreal Royals, thus breaking the color barrier. In 1947, Robinson played for the Dodgers and won the Rookie of the Year award. Later in the same year, Larry Doby of the Indians integrated the American League, but it lagged behind the senior circuit in signing black players until the 1960s.

The end of World War II, the return of baseball's stars, and good pennant races increased attendance dramatically up through 1949. To exploit this success, the Mexican League tried to lure players away with large salaries in 1946 but the effort failed. Prompted by talk of a players' union, the owners established a minimum salary and a pension plan in 1946, halting unionization for another twenty years. Baseball faced other problems by the late 1940s, however. The Dodgers, Giants, and Yankees, with stars like Robinson, Mickey Mantle, and Willie Mays, proved too dominant up through 1956 for the sport's health. Television hurt attendance, particularly in the minor leagues, and owners feared using it to broadcast games. And baseball had not followed the population flow into the South, West, and the suburbs; franchises had not moved out of the East and Midwest for almost a century.

In 1952, the Boston Braves decided to move to Milwaukee, thus beginning a shift of franchises that has consistently annoyed the cities, such as Boston and then Milwaukee, which were abandoned, enthralled those that got teams, and led to a dilution of talent. Soon the St. Louis Browns became the Baltimore Orioles, the Athletics moved to Kansas City and then to Oakland, and the Dodgers went to Los Angeles and the Giants to San Francisco. In the early 1960s, expansion occurred in Washington, D.C., Los Angeles, New York, and Houston, followed in 1969 by the first international team, the Montreal Expos, then eight years later by the Toronto Blue Jays. Having more teams prompted baseball to divide the league into divisions in 1969, with playoffs to determine World Series opponents.

Sports became a phenomenal business in the 1960s. Baseball's attendance increased by more than 60 percent during the decade, even as basketball and football grew tremendously, competing for both athletes and customers. The influx of great black athletes into baseball began to slow in the 1960s, partly replaced by an expansion in the number of Hispanic players, such as Roberto Clemente, Orlando Cepeda, Juan Marichal, and Tony Oliva. Baseball itself also changed after the pitcher's mound was raised in 1962; defense, pitching, and speed came to dominate, with players like Maury Wills, Sandy Koufax, Bob Gibson, Denny McLain, and Lou Brock replacing the sluggers as heroes. In addition, relief pitching became more important, further weakening the offense. In 1973, to increase run production and attendance, the American League introduced the controversial designated hitter, who could replace the pitcher as a batter.

Money proved the most significant problem for baseball, however. After World War II, the owners controlled both baseball and the commissioner. In 1966, the players' association hired Marvin Miller, formerly of the United Steel Workers of America, to help them bargain. Often helped by weak commissioners and inept owners, Miller and the players changed labor relations dramatically. After a brief strike in 1972, their pension plan greatly improved and they won the right to arbitration in disputes with the owners. In 1975, five years after the Cardinals' Curt Flood unsuccessfully challenged the reserve clause, two players, with Miller's counsel, successfully evaded the clause by letting their contracts lapse. Thereafter, players could become free agents and bargain for higher salaries, which they quickly did. In 1981, another strike occurred as owners tried but failed to regain their control of baseball.

Regardless of labor difficulties, baseball enjoyed great success from the late 1970s into the 1990s, with competitive races and great players like Reggie Jackson, Mike Schmidt, Tom Seaver, George Brett, Nolan Ryan, Tony Gwynn, Wade Boggs, and Cal Ripken Jr., who broke Gehrig's consecutive game record. Until later in the decade, when the Yankees prevailed, no team dominated. As attendance rose, with increased leisure time, expansion continued even as franchises became incredibly expensive. Strikeouts increased dramatically as more players tried for home runs and the importance of relief pitching increased. In 1955, only three players struck out 100 times; in 1998, seventy-three players matched that total. But home runs also increased and spectacularly so in 1998 and 1999, when Mark McGuire hit 70 and 65 and Sammy Sosa 66 and 63 to shatter Roger Maris's mark of 61 in 1961. In 2001, Barry Bonds surpassed McGuire's record by hitting 73. For his part, Sosa hit over 60 for the third time, becoming the first player ever to achieve such a feat.

Labor troubles also remained part of baseball with another strike in August of the 1994 season. It was a bitter struggle that wiped out the World Series and only ended at the start of the 1995 season, with both sides far apart and the public angry. Attendance dropped by 20 million from 1993 and was regained only by 2000. The appeal of baseball remained, however, as enthusiasm for minor league teams revived and new parks in Baltimore, Seattle, Chicago, San Francisco, and Cleveland renewed interest. But baseball faced serious problems, such as increased competition for the entertainment dollar, high ticket prices, excessively long games, declining television audiences, the weakness of small market teams with poor finances, and the need to import more and more talent, now from Japan, to play the national pastime.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Rogosin, Donn. Invisible Men: Life in Baseball's Negro Leagues. New York: Atheneum, 1983.

Rossi, John P. The National Game: Baseball and American Culture. Chicago: Ivan Dee, 2000.

Seymour, Harold. Baseball: The Early Years. New York: Oxford University Press, 1960.

———. Baseball: The Golden Age. New York: Oxford University Press, 1971.

Solomon, Burt. The Baseball Timeline. Rev. and updated ed. London and New York: Dorling Kindersley, 2001.

Thorn, John, Pete Palmer, and Michael Gershman, eds. Total Baseball. 7th ed. Kingston, N.Y.: Total Sports Publishing, 2001.

Tygiel, Jules. Past Time: Baseball as History. New York: Oxford University Press, 2000.

Voigt, David. American Baseball. 3 vols. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1983.

White, G. Edward. Creating the National Pastime: Baseball Transforms Itself, 1903–1953. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1996.

Zimbalist, Andrew. Baseball and Billions: A Probing Look Inside the Big Business of Our National Pastime. New York: Basic Books, 1992.

JohnSyrett

See alsoBlack Sox Scandal ; College Athletics ; Sports .

BASEBALL

The McClain Metaphor

Baseball was struggling in 1970. It had lost its innocence long ago, but now it was faced with disgrace. Public scandals, labor disputes, greed, arrogance, dissolution, and hucksterism characterized the nation's game. It took more and more spectacular plays every year to draw the fans' attentions from the pages of the tabloids to the field. At the beginning of the decade the character of the entire game seemed to be symbolized by the misfortunes of the blustery Detroit Tigers pitcher Denny McClain. He had won thirty-one games in 1968—the first pitcher since Dizzy Dean in 1934 to win over thirty—and he had twenty-four wins in 1969. He was at the top of the game, and then he self-destructed. First he was suspended from baseball for two months for his involvement with professional book-makers. He turned from insufferable braggart to self-pitying apologist overnight, explaining that his association with gamblers had resulted from financial misfortunes and that he had been taken advantage of by unscrupulous men. When he returned contritely to the mound, he had lost his brilliance, and he was too thin-skinned to take the criticism of sports reporters. He was suspended from the team for a week by manager Mayo Smith when he angrily threw ice water on two sports reporters. He floundered after his second return, winning fourteen of twenty-eight games before he was finally suspended again, for carrying a gun in violation of the commissioner's probation set after the first suspension. Two years later McClain was pitching in the minor leagues. The image of baseball suffered similar disgrace.

Financial Woes

In the 1970s baseball owners had to defend their business practices in court. After he was traded from the Saint Louis Cardinals to the Philadelphia Phillies against his will, Curt Flood challenged baseball's reserve clause, which defined players as property. It was a challenge that cost Flood his career and baseball its reputation, and the case dragged on throughout the decade, finally reaching the Supreme Court. The baseball umpires went on strike for more money just before the playoffs began, and the Seattle Pilots declared bankruptcy, claiming to have lost $1 million in the past year with no profits in sight.

1970

On the field the Cincinnati Reds and the Baltimore Orioles reminded fans what the game was about. The Reds fought a close battle with the Chicago Cubs for the National League pennant and won behind the solid play of Johnny Bench, Pete Rose, Lee May, Tony Perez, and Bobby Tolan. The Orioles brought solid defense to the series. Pitchers Mike Cuellar, Dave McNally, and Jim Palmer—all twenty-game winners—had support in the field and at bat from Boog Powell, Frank Robinson, and the superb fielding of Brooks Robinson. The Orioles won in five games in a series that brought particular joy to Oriole fans, who had expected a series victory a year earlier.

Bad Business

Better profit potential was the reason given for moving the Washington Senators to Dallas, where they became the Texas Rangers. The move under-scored the fact that baseball was business, pure and simple. In an overview of the 1971 season, Bill Braddock of The New York Times wrote that "Washington, the nation's capital, wound up the year without a baseball team but with more men in position to alter the structure of the game than any city with a ball club." The Supreme Court agreed to review the Curt Flood case, and people began openly questioning the wisdom of exempting professional baseball from antitrust laws. Fans expressed their dissatisfaction with the state of the game by staying at home. By midseason, attendance had fallen to distressing lows, and observers speculated that lack of excitement on the field was only part of the reason; fans were fed up with the off-field image of baseball. Oakland pitcher Vida Blue provided some interest when he won his first ten games of the season, but Blue cooled in the second half of the season and ended with a respectable twenty-four wins, well short of record-threatening excitement. In the American League Baltimore dominated, winning its division by twelve games, and beat Oakland in three straight to win the pennant. The Giants survived an end-of-season charge by the Dodgers to win their division but faltered in the play-offs against Pittsburgh. In the series Pittsburgh prevailed in seven games after losing the first two. Pirate hitter Roberto Clemente hit .414.

1972

Gil Hodges, a star from the glory days of base-ball and the manager who had led the amazing Mets to their first World Series win, died during spring training for the 1972 season. The players were on strike at the time, demanding that the owners contribute more to the players' pension funds. More than eighty games were canceled during the strike before the owners gave in, and still there was no peace. Too many business issues remained unresolved, free agency chief among them. As the leagues struggled to institute new rules intended to resolve the issue, matters only became more complicated, and it was at times necessary for courts to issue orders before it was clear which players would take the field in major league games. Despite Blue's holdout through much of the season in a contract dispute, the Oakland Athletics dominated the American League. Twenty-game winner Jim ("Catfish") Hunter, ace reliever Rollie Fingers, hitters Reggie Jackson and Joe Rudi, and base stealer Bert Campaneris joined manager Dick Williams in an unusual display of familylike unity to win the World Series over the Cincinnati Reds in seven games. The handlebar mustaches, sported by half the A's, were a throwback to baseball's simpler days and provided a temporary nostalgic illusion for the fans.

Roberto Clemente

The year 1972 ended with a tragedy that immortalized a hero and brought fans together, if briefly, to mourn him. On the last day of the season, Pittsburgh Pirate star Clemente got his three thousandth career hit. Two-and-one-half months later, when Nicaragua was rocked by a devastating earthquake, Clemente mounted a relief drive and was on his way to oversee distribution of the money and goods he had collected when his small aircraft crashed into the Pacific Ocean. The governor of his native Puerto Rico declared a threeday period of grieving for him, and baseball players and owners put aside their greed, all too briefly, to reflect on the charitable model Clemente had provided.

Free Agents

But the greed returned quickly enough. In 1972 the Supreme Court ruled that the agreement to exempt major league baseball from antitrust laws was legal, and Curt Flood lost his challenge to the reserve clause. But player-rights negotiator Marvin Miller had already begun a more effective means of subverting the hated clause. He began chipping away, little by little. First he crafted an agreement in 1973 between owners and players by which they would agree to arbitration to settle salan' disputes. Then he got the owners to agree that players with ten years in the major leagues and five with the same team could veto a trade involving them that they did not like. Finally, in 1975, he found a loop-hole in the reserve clause. An arbitrator upheld the players' association's contention that if a player worked for a year without a contract, he could declare himself a free agent and market his services to the highest bidder. Twenty-four players took advantage of the ruling in 1976. As the American League added teams in Seattle and Toronto, twelve of the new free agents signed con-tracts for more than $1 million. Baseball had entered a new era.

Onerous Owners

Team owners garnered as much publicity as the players. George Steinbrenner, the meddling owner of the New York Yankees, was suspended in 1974. Charlie Finley of the Oakland Athletics was reprimanded and overruled by Commissioner Bowie Kuhn in 1976 when he tried to sell Blue, Rudi, and Fingers, the heart of his team, for $3.5 million. Ted Turner, the flamboyant owner of the Atlanta Braves, was suspended in 1977 when he tried to evade the free-agent rule; and, failing to learn by example, San Diego Padres owner Ray Kroc was fined $100,000 for the same offense in 1979. Meanwhile, the American League, in an attempt to inject more excitement into the game, instituted a designated hitter rule so that a pitcher's turn at bat could be taken by a pinch hitter. The change seemed to work.

Fiery A's

In 1973 the New York Mets added some excitement to the game by rallying to win a National-League pennant, motivating players and fans with the slogan "You Gotta Believe." Belief was not quite enough to win the World Series against the more talented A's, however. Reggie Jackson hit .310, including a key home run in the last game, and Rudi hit .333 as the A's narrowly won the Series in seven games. Oakland owner Charles O. Finley drew a fine and a reprimand from Commissioner Kuhn when he fired second baseman Mike Andrews for making two errors in the second game of the series, which Oakland lost in twelve innings. When the hapless player was ordered back onto the team, fans cheered his return. After the season manager Dick Williams had had enough of Finley. Finley left the Athletics and was replaced by Al Dark, who led the talent-packed A's to their third straight World Series title. In 1974 the A's beat the youthful Los Angeles Dodgers in five games, ending a season that had reached its high point in the performances of veterans: Hank Aaron of the Atlanta Braves broke Babe Ruth's career home-run record of 714; Saint Louis Cardinal Bob Gibson struck out his three thousandth batter, and Cardinal Lou Brock stole a record 118 bases.

Sox vs. Reds

Baseball seemed to have worked out its business difficulties by 1975—as far as the fans were concerned, at least. Over seventy million fans watched the World Series on television. It was an exciting match between the Boston Red Sox and the Cincinnati Reds in which the overmatched Red Sox scratched out victories when they needed them most. The sixth game at Fenway Park was a baseball classic. It went twelve innings before Carleton Fisk hit a home run to win the game 7-6. The seventh game seemed a continuation of the sixth, as the gritty Red Sox broke out on top, scoring three runs in the third. The Reds scored two in the sixth and another in the seventh to set up the dramatic last inning. The teams were tied 3-3 going into the ninth. Joe Morgan of the Reds drove in the winning run with a Hooping single, and the Red Sox were unable to answer.

BARELY WINNERS

By 1969 both the American and National leagues had expanded to twelve teams. The owners had by that time a clear sense of the importance of television to the future of their sport, and they were aware of the additional television audience that postseason play—restricted to the World Series until then—attracted. So they instituted a playoff season. Each league was divided into two divisions, and the division winners played one another in a five-game series to determine the pennant winner.

Revenues aside, it was not a perfect system, as the New York Mets proved in 1973 by becoming arguably the worst team in history to almost win the World Series. The Mets ended the season in a near three-way tic in the weak National League Eastern division, and only clinched the title on the last regular-season game. But the Mets had seven-teen fewer wins than the National League Western division winner, the Cincinnati Reds. Relying on strong pitching, the Mets managed to get through the playoffs to meet the Oakland Athletics in the World Series. That was the year Charles O. Finley fired his second baseman for making two errors in the second game, dampening his team's spirits. The Mets took the scries to seven games and lost the final game 4-3 when Reggie Jackson and Bert Campaneris hit the A's first home runs of the scries. The Mets finished the season having won only 50.9 percent of their games.

Money Can't Buy Happiness

The Cincinnati Reds were the first National League team in fifty-four years to win back-to-back World Series titles. Johnny Bench's two home runs in the final game were the highlight of the 1976 series. The Reds won in a four-game sweep against the New York Yankees, but the Yankees had returned to prominence, to the dismay of fans both in and outside of New York who hated owner George Steinbrenner. They considered it outrageous in 1977 that the Yankees had a team payroll of $3.5 million and that eleven players had annual salaries of over $100,000. They were the best team money could buy, as critics claimed, and they were good enough to win three straight pennants and two straight World Series before egotism did them in.

The Prize

In 1977 the Yankees beat their former cross-town rivals, the Dodgers, in six games. The win did not come without a struggle, but most of the difficulty was in off-the-field bickering. Contentious manager Billy Martin fought with Steinbrenner, with star slugger Reggie Jackson (bought from the Oakland Athletics) and with anyone else who dared to cross him. He claimed he deserved the Nobel Peace Prize for holding the team together; some wags suggested that a jail sentence for inciting to riot might be more appropriate. Nonetheless, the Yankees were New York, and the city gave their world champions a ticker-tape parade after the last game of the series.

Yankee Perils and Rose's Lament

At midseason in 1978 the Yankees were fourteen games behind the Red Sox in the American League East. Then Martin suspended Reggie Jackson for bunting when he was instructed to hit away. Jackson retaliated by defaming his manager in the newspapers, and Martin answered similarly. Steinbrenner called them both liars and fired Martin, whose replacement, Bob Lemon, led the team to a pennant. The Dodgers won the National League race again and promptly established a two-game advantage in the series. At that point the Yankees quit fighting and began playing. They were the first team in World Series history to win four straight games after losing the first two. The baseball year was like a soap opera. The other highlight was the hitting streak of Cincinnati Red Pete Rose, who set a National League record of hits in forty-four consecutive games and set his sights on one of the most respected records in the game, Joe DiMaggio's 1941 major league mark of hits in fifty-six consecutive games. After he failed to hit in his forty-fifth straight game, against Atlanta pitchers Larry McWilliams and Gene Garber, Rose whined that they "pitched me like it was the seventh game of the World Series." But he got his reward. He became the first baseball player in history to sign a contract for $1 million a season when he took advantage of the free-agent ruling to sign with the Philadelphia Phillies in 1979.

Pops

The Yankees finally self-destructed in 1979, finishing fourth in the American League East. That year, the series focused on a more inspiring group, the Pittsburgh Pirates, who won a hard-fought seven-game series against the Baltimore Orioles. Led by thirty-eight-year-old Willie Stargell, called "Pops" by his younger team-mates, the Pirates came back from a three-games-to-one deficit to win the series. Stargell hit .400 during the series, with a home run in the seventh game. He won every most-valuable-player award available to him.

Baseball

Tale of Two Extremes

Major league baseball went from the depths of despair to the heights of joy, from disheartenment to jubilation, during the final decade of the twentieth century. Felipe Alou, coach of the Montreal Expos, said, "Sometimes, something has to almost die, like baseball did, for the miracle to take place." Greed and money nearly caused the downfall of the sport. Strikes and work stoppages were nothing new to professional sports, and baseball had experienced its share of both, befitting its rank as the eldest of major league athletic enterprises in the United States. But never before had a World Series been canceled, as it was in 1994 because of a 272-day strike by players that forced the cancellation of 920 games. The contest between owners and players focused on salary caps and revenue sharing. When baseball finally resumed, it did so amidst fan animosity directed at players, owners, and baseball in general.

New Iron Man

Salvation came, specifically, on 6 September 1995 at Camden Yards in Baltimore, Maryland, when Cal Ripken Jr., one of the most respected baseball veterans, broke Lou Gehrig's long-held, much-cherished record for consecutive games played. Everything came together to make his attempt to break the standard a media event of the first rank. Unlike a new record that pops up randomly (for example, six home runs hit in one game), Ripken's assault on the Iron Man's historic mark of 2,130 consecutive games played, which Gehrig had achieved during the 1925-1939 baseball seasons, created the perfect opportunity for a national countdown. For even more dramatic effect, the record was not actually bested when Ripken stepped on the field or when the umpire yelled, "Play ball." The game needed to be played for at least four and one-half innings in order to be official and recorded for posterity. Simply exiting the dugout and doffing his cap after breaking the record would not pacify the fans, so Ripken trotted the circumference of the field, shaking hands and touching fans in the stadium for a half-hour while play was halted, and America rejoiced at this revalidation of its favorite pastime. The play-by-play announcers had the good sense to be silent and let the drama speak for itself. Parents called their children to the

THE BUSINESS OF SPORTS

Sports merchandising at the end of the century bore little resemblance to sporting-equipment sales in earlier decades. Hardware stores used to be the primary source for hunting and fishing gear. Department stores, such as Sears, sold footballs, baseballs, and four-wheeled roller skates. Baseball cards were bought, mostly for the gum in the packages, at local candy and corner stores. Golf equipment was purchased at the golf course Pro Shop and surfboards were found at shops near the beach. Coaches were responsible for obtaining team equipment, so helmets, pads, nets, and all the other accouterment of organized athletic enterprises were available only through a select group of sales representatives and catalogues with narrow professional circulation.

In the 1990s, however, locally owned shops and boutiques for specialty sports niches, from team clothing to exercise apparel, could be found in half the strip malls in the United States. Stores and products were also advertized in the Yellow Pages and on the Internet. An entire industry for sports memorabilia, ranging from traditional cards to figurines to autographs, tapped into the baby-boom interest in nostalgia. Sports bars, physical fitness centers, and sports medicine clinics proliferated. Of course, purchases of sports-related items could still be made at traditional department and discount stores.

In addition to the smaller specialty shops, a new institution arrived—the megastore, such as Sports Authority, Jumbo-Sports, and Sports Warehouse. In these cathedrals to athletic capitalism, entrepreneurial owners were utterly unconcerned with the traditional venues of sports: Fenway Park, Augusta National, Churchill Downs, and the Superdome. Instead of promoting the observation of sporting events in which only a few athletes were engaged, they made available a wide range of paraphernalia for hands-on sporting activity. University of Oklahoma coach Bud Wilkinson's quip that a football game is eighty thousand people desperately in need of exercise watching twentytwo athletes desperately in need of rest was finally being heard as a serious commentary. In response to his call for more exercise and athletic activity, Americans created an economic boom. In the cavernous warehouses of athletic obsession, one could purchase almost anything related to sports: darts and yo-yos, bowling balls and badminton birdies, bicycle accessories, surfboards, skateboards and skis, hunting gear, toys, books, magazines, and videos. A treadmill might be available—at nearly $1,600. Packs of sports cards ranged in price from $1 to $10. Clothes with almost any conceivable relationship to sports could be purchased—camouflage shirts for hunting or merchandise advertising a favorite team—as well as hats, helmets, and goggles. In some of these giant stores customers could even participate in simulated sporting events such as rock climbing, skiing, and kayaking.

For those individuals disinclined to leave home, Internet shopping allowed consumers an even broader choice of products. On the Sports Authority website, tor instance, the options were prodigious. One could purchase a wide range of apparel, shoes, exercise equipment, golf and tennis gear, games, and cycling accessories. Outdoor enthusiasts could find everything they needed for hunting, fishing, camping, hiking, boating, diving, and other activities (such as wake/knee boards and in-line skates). For those more interested in sports memorabilia, one could click on to an auction site and bid for treasures. A typical offer might be $13 for a "Peyton Manning Rookie Playoff Moment" card.

Sports-related items could also be found at the local convenience store. One could purchase mugs featuring stock car racers—even as one filled their gas tank with the "official fuel of NASCAR." Cups depicting favored wrestlers, baseball caps, and "high performance driving and sports eyewear" (with styles named "Aviator" and "Pit Stop") were prominently displayed on front counters. Along with milk and bread, a customer could pick up PovverAde or Gatorade drinks, as well as energy bars to keep themselves competitive. Sporting magazines, from Baseball Weekly to local recruiting reports, filled the racks formerly reserved for entertainment and tabloid publications. Under the cap of a favorite soda one might win a free trip to the NBA All-Star game or the Super Bowl. It seemed that at the turn of the millennium, one could not get away from sports merchandising; but that worked out well, since most Americans craved the paraphernalia of sports.

television set and Americans watched as one man—by sheer perseverance, goodwill, and charm—single-handedly revived a sport that had been deathly ill. He also hit a sixth-inning home run, to dispel any notion that his streak was an act of generosity or a public-relations ploy on the part of management. Ripken eventually played in 2,632 straight games, ending the streak only when he benched himself on 19 September 1998, during which a total of 266 players were utilized by the Baltimore Orioles. An American League starter in every All-Star game since 1984, Ripkin held the record for career home runs by a shortstop (402) at the end of the decade. He was voted league Most Valuable Player (MVP) in 1983 and 1991.

Home Run Derby

Ripken may have been a savior of baseball, but he got an assist from the Great Home Run Chase of 1998. Mark McGwire of the St. Louis Cardinals and Sammy Sosa of the Chicago Cubs lit up the score-boards of the National League by each hitting more home runs in a single season than any other person in history. During the chase for the record, 70,589,505 fans attended games, many of them filling ballparks for the specific purpose of cheering McGwire and Sosa. People even came early to watch the two players, especially McGwire, in batting practice. McGwire did not just hit balls out of the field, he knocked them out of the ballpark—tape-measure feats that awed spectators. Tom Verducci, a senior writer for Sports Illustrated, conservatively estimated that the fans brought in by McGwire generated nearly $25 million in extra revenue at ballparks where he played. What McGwire and Sosa gave to the game in terms of goodwill is immeasurable. One of the most revered records in baseball was Babe Ruth's sixty home runs in 1927 and Roger Maris's sixty-one in 1961. The Babe's mark had seemed invincible, until Maris, in one of the most underappreciated displays of athletic prowess in sports history, topped it. Then, for thirty-seven years, Maris's mark stood; no one had even come close to breaking it. Willie Mays once hit fifty-two home runs (1965), as did George Foster (1977). Some people felt that Maris's record was a fluke, an aberration that would never be paralleled. Then, in 1997, McGwire and Ken Griffey Jr. gave fans a hint of the future. McGwire hit fifty-eight homers, while Griffey hit fifty-six. McGwire's figure was no fluke, as he had hit fifty-two home runs in 1995, powered by a six-foot-five-inch, 250-pound frame with arms sporting nineteen-inch biceps. He was the first player since Ruth to have back-to-back seasons with fifty homers. In 1998 the league expanded into two new markets, Tampa Bay and Arizona, and with long-ball friendly Coors Field in Colorado, the stage was set for a home-run derby. Such expansion inevitably dilutes the quality of pitching and McGwire, Griffey, Sosa, and Greg Vaughn took advantage of their opportunity. Sosa set a major league record in June 1998 by hitting twenty home runs, the most ever by a player in a single month. His eleven multiple home-run games tied the major league record. He led the majors in runs batted in (RBIs) and in total bases taken, and was later honored as the MVP of the National League. During this amazing season, Sosa hit more home runs (sixty-six) than anyone else—except McGwire, who pelted the five-ounce sphere out of the ballpark a stupendous seventy times. The race heated up when McGwire set the new mark of sixty-two on 8 September 1998, with his shortest home run of the season. Sosa then became the first major league player to hit sixty-six homers in a season on 25 September, but he held that record for only forty-five minutes because McGwire hit five home runs in his last nineteen swings. Throughout the season both men displayed pure class, with Maris's family demonstrating equally amazing grace in the process of relinquishing their father's crown. McGwire did all the right things, acknowledging Maris and his family, hugging his own son, and basking in the glory that he had earned. Sosa showed remarkable poise as well, running in from the outfield, as the fates had him playing on the same field that magical day, to bear hug the man who had been his rival.

New Baseball Homes

Many people claimed that 1998 was the greatest baseball season ever. Baseball, the national pastime, had righted itself. The decade also brought a return to sanity in ballpark architecture. Rather than the generic, anonymous, symmetrical stadiums of the 1960s and 1970s, the opening of Camden Yards in 1992 introduced a delightful decade of interesting, fan-friendly venues for watching baseball. Other beautiful parks included the Ballpark at Arlington, Texas (Texas Rangers), Turner Field in Georgia (Atlanta Braves), the retractable-domed Bank One Ballpark in Phoenix (Arizona Diamondbacks), and Jacobs Field (Cleveland Indians).

The World Series

A half-dozen different teams claimed World Series titles during the decade, despite the series lost to the baseball strike. The New York Yankees won three championships (1996,1998, and 1999); in 1998 they won more games (114) than any other team in baseball history. The Atlanta Braves also had a good decade, getting to the World Series five times, but winning only once (1995). The most unexpected championship season was provided by the Florida Marlins, the first and only team in major league history to win the World Series (1997) from a "wild card" berth. Immediately after the victory, owner Wayne Huizenga sold off the star players of his franchise, capitalizing on their high market value, and immediately watched his team drop from first to worst, from champs to last place in their division.

Rules of the Game

During the decade there were several substantive changes in the rules of the game. For the first time ever there was interleague play during the regular season. Unlike the designated hitter rule, this change met with almost unanimous approval as fans now had the opportunity to see teams that otherwise would never have competed in their home parks. Several structural changes took place, including the movement of the Milwaukee Brewers from the American to the National League in a first effort at realignment. A total of four new teams came into the major leagues, Colorado and Florida (1993) and Arizona and Tampa Bay (1998), All but Tampa Bay joined the National League. A three-division format was introduced into each league, as was an extra tier of playoff games and a wild-card berth. Allan H. "Bud" Selig served as chair of the Major League Executive Council from September 1992 (when Fay Vincent resigned) until he was finally chosen as the ninth Commissioner of Baseball on 9 July 1998.

Sources:

MajorLeagueBaseball.com, Internet website.

Merrell Noden, Home Run Heroes: Mark McGwire, Sammy Sosa and a Season for the Ages (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1998).

Baseball

Sources

Beginnings. Notwithstanding the myth that Abner Doubleday invented baseball in 1839 in Cooperstown, New York, the modern game is not the invention of an individual but the product of an evolutionary process. American children played various versions of the game now known as baseball as early as the eighteenth century. All such games—variously known as “barn ball,” “four-old-cat,” “base,” and “base ball”—entailed hitting a ball with a stick, and most could trace their origins to the English games of rounders or cricket. The most popular version of the game in the northeastern states was derived from rounders and called “town ball,” probably because it took place on town-meeting days. Towns or villages often played against one another, and the rules varied considerably with the circumstances and the players.

Town Ball. As few as eight or nine could play on a side, but some town ball games boasted as many as twenty or thirty men on a team. The most commonly used ball was made of string, stitched down to keep it from unraveling, or else of handsewn leather stuffed with wool, bits of rubber, or string. Town-ball players wore no gloves, but the soft handmade balls rarely hurt, no matter how hard they were thrown. The game was played on a square infield without foul lines. Since any hit was fair, a batter had only to make contact with the ball to put it in play. He then had to touch the poles staked at the bases in their proper order to score a run, but the runner was allowed to run into the outfield and wait until the opposition was distracted to continue his circuit—a tactic called “lurking.” A runner could only be called out by being “plugged” or “soaked,” that is, hit by the thrown ball. Sides changed whenever someone was thrown out, but scores often ran high. Although town ball had begun as a casual pastime, by the end of the 1830s the game was becoming more serious and more competitive.

The New York Game. An important step in the evolution of baseball, or the “New York game,” as it was soon to be called, was taken in 1842, when nine prosperous businessmen and lawyers banded together to form the exclusive New York Knickerbocker Baseball Club. These men were dedicated to turning the sport into a “gentleman’s” activity. They practiced seriously, wore similar clothing—blue trousers, white shirts, and straw hats—and, led by Alexander J. Cartwright, gradually changed and codified the rules. They decided that nine players would play on a diamond-shaped field and that three outs would constitute an inning. In an important change from rounders, Cartwright described how a base-runner must be tagged and wrote “that in no instance is a ball to be thrown at him.” Other rules—such as the setting of twenty-one “aces” (runs) as the goal of the game, the requirement that the pitcher throw underhand, and calling a batter out if his hit ball was caught on the first bounce—would be changed as the game developed.

Elysian Fields. The Knickerbocker’s first baseball game against another team was played on 19 June 1846 in a meadow in Hoboken called the “Elysian fields,” where they lost 23-1 to the New York Nine. Gradually, other baseball clubs or fraternities formed in the city, composed mostly of clerks from banks, shops, and count-inghouses, but there were also clubs of policemen, firemen, schoolteachers, bartenders, actors, doctors, and clergymen. Interest in the game grew as clubs began to schedule contests against rivals. In the years 1849-1851 teams began to create their own colorful and distinctive military-style uniforms. During the 1850s these baseball clubs also organized their own social activities, such as picnics, dances, and formal dinners.

Organization. The popularity of the game led the Knickerbockers to call a convention in May 1857, where it was decided that Cartwright’s rules be modified so that nine innings rather than twenty-one runs determine the length of the game. A second convention on 10 March 1858 saw the creation of the sport’s first league, the National Association of Base Ball Players. The twenty-five-member teams would become less and less exclusive as competition intensified and gambling on games became more widespread. The first game of the National Association, between rivals from New York and Brooklyn, was also the first occasion of fans paying to see a game. Some fifteen hudnred fans paid fifty cents apiece, the gate paying for the cost of preparing the field that was the Fashion Race Course for baseball.

Soldiers. The Civil War helped to nationalize the game of baseball as New Yorkers spread the gospel of their game. On Christmas Day 1862, for example, a game between two teams organized from the 165th New York Volunteer Infantry attracted forty-thousand spectators. Soldiers often played informal games while waiting in camp for their marching orders. One private from Ohio discussed the popularity of the game in the middle of war. “Over there on the other side of the road,” he wrote home to his family, “is most of our company, playing Bat Ball and perhaps in less than half an hour, they may be called to play a ball game of a more serious nature.” Southern prisoners of war learned the game in northern prisons, and Yankees brought baseball to Confederate prison camps, where they sometimes played with their captors.

Postwar Popularity. Both Confederate and Union soldiers brought the game back home with them after the end of the war and interest grew exponentially. The annual convention of the National Association of 1867 drew representatives from 237 clubs, many of them from mid western states such as Ohio, Wisconsin, Illinois, and Indiana. Baseball was gaining in popularity on college campuses as well, and even a few women began to play. “They are getting up various clubs now for out-of-door exercise,” wrote home Annie Glidden from Vassar College in 1866. “They have a floral society, boat clubs and base-ball clubs. I belong to one of the latter, and enjoy it highly, I can assure you.” Public disapproval soon led to the disbanding of such women’s clubs.

Barnstorming. Although interest in baseball was becoming national, rivalries remained local because few amateur clubs had the resources or desire to travel beyond their regions. The first team to barnstorm the country was a group of government clerks and college students, who represented the Nationals of Washington, D.C. Leaving the capital in July 1867, they toured the Midwest, traveling some three thousand miles and trouncing many of the teams of the region. Washington suffered only one loss on the entire trip, to the Forest City Club of Rockford, Illinois. Pitching that day for Forest City was seventeen-year-old Albert G. Spalding, who had learned the game from a Civil War veteran.

The Red Stockings. One of the teams the Washington Nationals had humiliated on their tour was the Cincinnati Red Stockings. In 1869 a group of Cincinnati businessmen decided that the only way their city could have a team they could be proud of would be to field professional players. Although the practice of nominally amateur clubs surreptitiously paying a few players had been going on for years, the Red Stockings were the first avowedly professional team. Only Charles Gould, the first baseman, was from Cincinnati.

Cincinnati Reigns. The talented, well-disciplined Red Stockings were a revelation to the two hundred thousand fans who saw them that summer of 1869. They traveled nearly twelve thousand miles from coast to coast and played every prominent club without losing a game. The one blemish on their record resulted from their game with the Haymakers of Troy, New York, who quit in the sixth inning with the score knotted at seventeen because of an argument about a foul tip. When the Red Stockings returned to Cincinnati with a record of sixty-five wins and one tie, club president Aaron Champion declared, “I’d rather be president of the Cincinnati Reds than of the United States!” The Red Stockings continued their winning streak into the next season as they toured the deep South. It was finally snapped at ninty-two by the Brooklyn Atlantics, who beat them 8-7 in eleven innings—perhaps the first extra-innings game.

The National Association. The success of the Red Stockings created an appetite among fans for professional play. In a 17 March 1871 meeting in a New York saloon, the representatives of ten teams established the first professional league, the National Association of Professional Baseball Players. The original members included the Boston Red Stockings, Chicago White Stockings, Cleveland Forest Citys, Fort Wayne Kekiongas, New York Mutuais, Philadelphia Athletics, Rockford Forest Citys, Washington Nationals, and the Washington Olympics. The Brooklyn Eckfords, who had attended the meeting, on reflection decided that the new league was too unstable and not worth the $10 required for membership. However, when the Fort Wayne Kekiongas dropped out during the first season, Brooklyn replaced them. Each team was to schedule a best three-of-five series with the others, the team with the best record winning the honor of flying the championship streamer, or “whip pennant,” at its ballpark for the next year. The National Association lasted five years, with the Boston Red Stockings dominating the last four seasons after the Philadelphia Athletics claimed the first pennant.

The National League. With the National Association fast losing public support because of gambling scandals, disreputable fan behavior, and its inability to enforce discipline on its member clubs, Chicago businessman William A. Hulbert saw an opportunity for reforming professional baseball. In 1875 Hulbert had accepted the presidency of the Chicago White Sox of the National Association and set about contracting the best players from the eastern clubs to play for his team, most notably Albert G. Spalding, then the star pitcher for Boston. In discussions with Spalding, Hulbert became convinced that the National Association was too undisciplined to survive and decided to propose a National League of Professional Base Ball Clubs, which could exercise much firmer control over the game. Calling a meeting of National Association teams at noon on 2 February 1876 at his suite in the Grand Central Hotel in New York City, Hulbert laid out his plans for a stronger, more disciplined organization: the entrance fee was raised from $10 to $100; membership was limited to cities with populations of at least seventy-five thousand to ensure adequate gate receipts; liquor and bookmaking were banned at ballparks; there would be no tolerance of players involved with gambling. The era of Major League Baseball had begun.

The Early Years. The first years of the National League were especially difficult ones. In the inaugural season the charter clubs—New York, Boston, Hartford, Philadelphia, Chicago, Saint Louis, Cincinnati, and Louisville—played a seventy-game schedule, with Hul-bert’s Chicago team taking the pennant. The stability of the league was threatened, however, when its biggest market clubs, Philadelphia and New York, refused to make the long road trips west to play return games with the clubs that had traveled east. Hulbert saw to it that both teams were expelled. In 1877 Boston won the championship. Four Louisville players were found guilty of taking bribes from gamblers and were suspended for life. Such strong actions ensured the credibility of the National League and its long-term survival. Professional baseball was on its way to becoming a permanent fixture of American life.

CONVENIENT TARGETS

The decimation of buffalo herds by white hunters, railroad crews, settlers, and soldiers is well recorded in the annals of American history. However, the rail passenger in the Great West also contributed to the destruction, Elizabeth Custer, wife of Lt. Col. George A. Custer, described one disturbing scene while traveling by rail in the late 1860s:

I have been on a train when the black, moving mass of buffaloes before us looked as if it stretched on down to the horizon. Everyone went armed in those days, and & [it] was the greatest wonder that more people were not killed, as the wild rush for the windows, and the reckless discharge of rifles and pistols, put every passenger’s life in jeopardy. & I could not for the life of me avoid a shudder when a long line of guns leaning on the backs of seats met my eye as I entered a car. When the sharp shrieks of the train whistle announced a herd of buffaloes the rifles were snatched, and in the struggle to twist around for a good aim out of the narrow window the barrel of the muzzle of the firearm passed dangerously near the ear of any scared woman who had the temerity to travel in those tempestuous days.

Source: Geoffrey C. Ward, The West: An illustrated History (Boston: Little, Brown, 1996), p. 261.

Sources

Dean A. Sullivan, Early Innings: A Documentary History of Baseball, 1825-1908 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1995);

Hy Türkin and S. C. Thompson, The Official Encyclopedia of Baseball, eighth edition, revised by Pete Palmer (South Brunswick & New York: A. S. Barnes, 1976);

Geoffrey C. Ward and Ken Burns, Baseball: An Illustrated History (New York: Knopf, 1994).

Baseball

Sources

Early Professionalism. Since its beginnings in the 1830s, baseball had been played by loosely organized amateur clubs in the Northeast. In 1858 these teams organized the National Association of Base Ball Players (NABBP). In 1869 Harry Wright, a transplanted Englishman and former cricket player, organized the Cincinnati Red Stockings, the first publicly proclaimed professional baseball team. Wright, who earned $1,200 as a player and team captain, recruited many of the best amateur players, paying them salaries of $600 to $1,400. After completing the 1869 season with a record of 58 wins and 1 tie, in 1870 the Red Stockings lost several games and experienced great financial strain from the salaries of their top players. The team disbanded after 1870, and Wright took his best players to Boston and organized a new team. In 1871 professional teams formed the National Association of Professional Base Ball Players (NAPBBP). The formation of the NAPBBP, following the demise of the NABBP in 1870, signaled the end of the influence of amateurism on baseball in the United States, as the NAPBBP set the rules of the game and established a selection process for a national champion. In 1871 the Philadelphia Athletics defeated the Chicago White Stockings for the NAPBBP pennant. The most dominant NAPBBP team was Harry Wright’s Bostonians, who posted a record of 227 wins and 60 losses and won four consecutive pennants from 1872 to 1875.

The Rise of the National League. In 1876 William A. Hulbert, president of the Chicago White Stockings, founded the National League of Professional Base Ball Clubs. With the National League (NL) Hulbert established a profitable organization and pioneered the business and bureaucratic structures that would characterize professional team sports into the twentieth century. The NL, which consisted of teams from Boston, Chicago, Cincinnati, Hartford, Louisville, Philadelphia, Saint Louis, and Indianapolis, maximized owner profits by restricting each city to only one team and limiting the owners’ ability to trade players freely through the “reserve clause.” Originally a “gentlemen’s agreement,” the reserve clause became a set rule in 1879. The reserve clause permitted team owners to reserve their five best players from trade negotiations with other teams. By the 1880s the owners applied the reserve clause to their entire rosters. Hulbert, who served as president of the NL until his death in 1882, ruled the league with an iron hand, throwing out teams that threatened the integrity of the league and the moral image of professional baseball. He expelled Philadelphia and New York from the league for refusing to complete their final road tours in 1876, and Saint Louis and Cincinnati in 1880 for selling beer and playing games on Sunday. The top team in the NL was Hulbert’s Chicago White Stockings, led by Albert Spalding and baseball’s first superstar player, Adrian “Cap” Anson.

NATIONAL LEAGUE PENNANT WINNERS

The Challenge of the American Association. Hulbert’s NL had such a monopoly on baseball by the early 1880s that the only way new teams could emerge was through the formation of rival leagues. In 1881 sportswriters Alfred H. Spink from Saint Louis and Oliver P. Caylor from Cincinnati organized the American Association of Base Ball Clubs (AA) to challenge the National League for the baseball dollar. The American Association, with teams in Baltimore, Cincinnati, Louisville, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, and Saint Louis, catered to the working class by charging a low admission price of twenty-five cents, playing games on Sunday (the only day off for most workers), and selling beer. In 1882, after the first year of play by the American Association, the National League recognized the threat to its baseball monopoly and quickly reestablished teams in New York and Philadelphia. More important, the National League worked out a truce, the National Agreement, with the American Association and the Northwestern League, a minor league that operated in Michigan, Ohio, and Illinois, to mutually recognize the reserve clause and territorial rights of each team. Internal problems, however, undermined the stability of the American Association. Brooklyn and Saint Louis not only battled for the American Association pennant but for administrative control of the league. After a Saint Louis representative became president of the American Association in 1890, Brooklyn and Cincinnati resigned from the Association and joined the National League. After a poorly attended 1891 season, the American Association disbanded, and four teams joined the National League.

Players Revolt. In the 1880s baseball players organized for increased salaries and reform of the reserve clause. Although the 1880s were a prosperous decade for major league baseball, team owners held salaries at the levels of the previous decade and, to further maximize their profits, imposed a salary cap. The salaries of baseball players averaged $1,750 annually, nearly three times the wages of typical industrial workers. However, unlike the industrial worker who could (in theory at least) freely market his skills, baseball players were bound to specific teams by the reserve clause, and were unable to freely sell their skills to the highest bidder. In response to the players’ demands for higher salaries and reserve-clause reform, John Montgomery Ward, a star player with the New York Giants and a law graduate of Columbia University, founded the Brotherhood of Professional Base Ball Players, the first baseball players’ union, in 1885. Within two years Ward presented the National League with a player contract, which the National League accepted, but without abandoning its salary structure. In 1889 the National League imposed a salary cap of $2,500, and angry players called for a strike, but Ward advised against it, presenting the league with the ultimatum that it abandon its salary cap or face competition from a brotherhood league in 1890. That year he formed the Players’ League (PL), with teams in seven of the cities with National League teams. Players and owners shared the wealth in the Players’ League. Despite limited success in luring some players away from the National League, including the entire Washington team, the Players’ League collapsed after the 1890 season, with the National League buying back many of its former stars. Moreover, the National League assured the failure of the Players’ League through threats and bribes to its financial backers.

SEGREGATED BASEBALL

During the late nineteenth century major league baseball became racially segregated. In 1867 the National Association of Base Ball Players (NABBP), which governed amateur baseball, barred African Americans, maintaining that only whites could uphold baseball’s “gentlemanly character.” Owners of professional teams in pursuit of winning records, however, signed contracts with skilled African American players. While the first African American professional baseball player was John “Bud” Fowler in New Castle, Pennsylvania, in 1872, the first to play in the major league was Moses Fleetwood Walker, who joined Toledo of the International League in 1884. Unfortunately he and his brother Welday only played one season. Racial tensions hit baseball in 1887, when a white player for Syracuse (International League) refused to stand in the team picture with an African American teammate. Afterward International League owners decided to discontinue signing African Americans, but permitted existing players to remain on the teams. Also that year Adrian “Cap” Anson, manager of the Chicago White Stockings, refused to let his team play an exhibition game against Newark (International League) because its starting pitcher, George Stovey, was an African American. This event led major league owners to release their African American players and agree not to sign any more to contracts. African Americans formed their own professional baseball teams and leagues, with the first being the Cuban Giants in New York in 1885. The team chose the name Cuban Giants because they wanted the public to think they were Cuban rather than American. In 1887 the League of Colored Baseball Clubs organized, with teams in Boston, New York, Philadelphia, Washington, Pittsburgh, Norfolk, Cincinnati, Baltimore, and Louisville, The Cuban Giants defeated the Pittsburgh Keystones in the first Colored Championships of America in 1888.

Sources: Arthur R. Ashe Jr., A Hard Road to Glory: A History of the African-American Athlete, 1619-1918 (New York: Amistad Press, I 1988);

Benjamin G. Rader, Baseball: A History of America’s Game (Urbana &. j I Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1992);

David Quentin Voigt, American Baseball: From the Gentleman’s Sport to the Commissioner System (University Park London: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1983).

National League Troubles. Despite the demise of both the Players’ League in 1890 and the American Association in 1891, the 1890s brought more troubles to the National League. As a result of buying out many of the players and teams of the Players’ League and the American Association, the National League accumulated great debts, which the league could not settle because of a national economic depression, poor attendance, public disillusionment with the game, and increased competition from other forms of public entertainment. Fans refused to attend games at home or on the road involving teams with poor records, such as Louisville and Saint Louis, which consistently occupied last place in the final standings. Even the New York Giants, the mainstay of the National League, failed to field a strong team in the 1890s. To increase fan interest and profitability, the team owners wrestled with the decision to reduce the number of teams or form two six-team divisions. In 1899 the league returned to an eight-team circuit comprising of Boston, Brooklyn, Chicago, Cincinnati, New York, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, and Saint Louis. Moreover, the NL navigated the troubled 1890s without a leader, as Albert Spalding, who led the league against the Players’ League in 1890, had retired as president of the Chicago White Stockings. Indeed the National League’s troubles would continue into the twentieth century, until a new agreement in 1903 created a stable league structure.

Sources

Benjamin G. Rader, Baseball: A History of America’s Game (Urbana & Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1992);

Harold Seymour, Baseball: The Early Years (New York: Oxford University Press, 1960);

David Quentin Voigt, American Baseball: From the Gentleman’s Sport to the Commissioner System (University Park & London: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1983).

Baseball

Background

The baseball traces its origin to the game of the same name. Modern baseball evolved from the English game of "rounders" in the first half of the 19th century. Alexander Cartwright of New York formulated the basic rules of baseball in 1845, calling for the replacement of the soft ball used in rounders with a smaller hard ball.

Despite its uncomplicated appearance, the baseball is in fact a precision-made object, and one that has often been the subject of heated controversy throughout its history. Although baseballs have changed very little in this century, either in terms of their physical dimensions or raw materials, some observers have suggested that the balls have secretly been "juiced up" to increase the output of crowd-pleasing homeruns during periods of lagging attendance at major league baseball games. The manufacturers of baseballs and Major League Baseball have steadfastly denied such allegations, however, and no proof of any covert alterations in the ball's design or composition has ever been produced.

An official Major League baseball consists of a round cushioned cork center called a "pill," wrapped tightly in windings of wool and polyester/cotton yarn, and covered by stitched cowhide. Approximately 600,000 baseballs are used by all Major League teams combined during the course of a season. The average baseball remains in play for only five to seven pitches in a Major League game. Each ball must weigh between 5 and 5.25 ounces (141.75-148.83 grams) and measure between 9 and 9.25 inches (22.86-23.49 centimeters) in circumference to conform to Major League standards.

Such uniformity was nonexistent in the early years of baseball's history, when balls were either homemade or produced on a custom-order basis as a sideline by cobblers, tanners and other small business owners. In 1872, the modern standard for the baseball's weight and size was established. The production of balls became more consistent during the remainder of the decade, thanks largely to the demands made on manufacturers by the newly formed National League, the first professional baseball league.

At the turn of the century, the baseball had a round rubber core. This gave way in 1910 to the livelier cork-centered ball, which was itself replaced two decades later by the even more resilient cushioned cork model. The baseball has undergone only one significant change since that time, when a shortage in the supply of horses in 1974 prompted a switch from horsehide to cowhide covers.

Raw Materials

A baseball has three basic parts: the round cushioned cork pill at its core, the wool and poly/cotton windings in its midsection, and the cowhide covering that makes up its exterior.

The pill consists of a sphere, measuring 13/16 of an inch (2.06 centimeters) in diameter, made of a cork and rubber composition material. This sphere is encased in two layers of rubber, a black inner layer and a red outer layer. The inner layer is made up of two hemispheric shells of black rubber that are joined by red rubber washers. The entire pill measures 4-⅛ inches (10.47 centimeters) in circumference.

There are four distinct layers of wool and poly/cotton windings that surround the cushioned cork pill in concentric circles of varying thickness. The first winding is made of four-ply gray woolen yarn, the second of three-ply white woolen yarn, the third of three-ply gray woolen yarn, and the fourth of white poly/cotton finishing yarn. The first layer of wool is by far the thickest. When wrapped tightly around the pill, it brings the circumference of the unfinished ball to 7-3/4 inches (19.68 centimeters). The circumference increases to 8-3/16 inches (20.77 centimeters) after the second winding has been applied, 8-3/4 inches (22.22 centimeters) after the third, and 8-% (22.52 centimeters) after the fourth.

Wool was selected as the primary material for the baseball's windings because its natural resiliency and "memory" allow it to compress when pressure is applied, then rapidly return to its original shape. This property makes it possible for the baseball to retain its perfect roundness despite being hit repeatedly during a game. A poly/cotton blend was selected for the outer winding to provide added strength and reduce the risk of tears when the ball's cowhide cover is applied.

The baseball's outer cover is made of Number One Grade, alum-tanned full-grained cowhide, primarily from Midwest Holstein cattle. Midwest Holsteins are preferred because their hides have a better grain and are cleaner and smoother than those of cattle in other areas of the United States. The cover of an official baseball must be white, and it must be stitched together with 88 inches (223.52 centimeters) of waxed red thread. Cowhides are tested for 17 potential deficiencies in thickness, grain strength, tensile strength and other areas before they are approved for use on official Major League baseballs.

The Manufacturing
Process

The production of a baseball can be viewed as a process of placing successive layers of material (rubber, fabric and cowhide) around a rubbery sphere not much bigger than a cherry. These materials are placed around the small sphere in three distinct ways: the rubber is molded, the fabric is wound, and the cowhide is sewn. The placement of materials around the sphere is done under carefully controlled conditions to ensure that consistent size, shape and quality are maintained.

Baseball," wrote Mark Twain (Samuel L. Clemens), "is the very symbol, the outward and visible expression of the drive and push and rush and struggle of the raging, tearing, booming nineteenth century." Baseball initially evolved into a favorite American sport because it was faster paced and more physical than its English predecessors, cricket, town-ball, and rounders. Though cricket was played wherever English immigrants congregated in the United States, Americans seemed to prefer the more aggressive character of baseball. Initially played by gentlemen in fashionable clothing, the game and its equipment—and its popularity—began to change once rules were written down in the 1840s. In particular, the game gained tremendous popularity after the Civil War. The ball itself was changed at least twice in that century: the first ball was too lively (scores sometimes exceeded 100 runs); the second was too dead (a scoreless 24-inning game convinced many that hitters were disadvantaged).

A. G. Spalding made headline news in 1888-89 when he led a widely popular tour of American baseball players that played demonstration games in countries around the world. By the turn of the century, Spalding was marketing four baseballs in boy's size and eight in regulation size, each costing from four cents to one dollar.

William S. Pretzer

Molding rubber

• 1 Two hemispheric shells of black rubber, each approximately 5/3 of an inch (.39 centimeter) thick, are molded to a sphere of rubberized cork measuring %, of an inch (2.06 centimeters) in diameter. The two small openings that separate these shells are sealed with red rubber gaskets.
• 2 Next, a layer of red rubber roughly 3/32 of an inch (.24 centimeter) thick is molded to the black rubber encasement. The entire "pill" is then molded into a perfect circle weighing approximately ⅞ of an ounce (24.80 grams) with a circumference of roughly 4-⅛ inches (10.48 centimeters). Once the pill has been molded, a thin layer of cement is applied to its surface. This layer keeps the wool yarn in place on the pill at the start of the first winding operation.

Winding fabric

• 3 Wool yarn, stored under controlled fabric temperature and humidity conditions, is wound around the pill. This is done by computerized winding machines that maintain a constant level of very high tension to eliminate "soft spots," and create a uniform surface. After each step in the winding process, the ball is weighed and measured by computer to assure that official size requirements have been met. The wool yarn is wound so tightly that it has the appearance of thread when a baseball is dissected. Three layers of wool are wound around the baseball: the first, 121 yards (110.6 meters) of four-ply gray yarn; the second, 45 yards (41.13 meters) of three-ply white; and the third, 53 yards (48.44 meters) of three-ply gray.
• 4 A layer of 150 yards (137.1 meters) of fine poly/cotton finishing yarn is wrapped around the ball to protect the wool yarn and hold it in place. The wound ball is then trimmed of any excess fabric and prepared for the application of the external cowhide covering by being dipped in an adhesive solution.

Sewing hide

• 5 The cowhide covering is cut into two figure-8 patterns. Each pattern covers half the wound ball. Before they are stitched to the wound ball, the cowhide coverings are dampened to increase their pliability. The insides of the coverings also receive a coating of the same adhesive that was applied to the wound ball.
• 6 The two figure-8 coverings are stapled to the wound ball, then they are hand-sewn together using 88 inches (223.52 centimeters) of waxed red thread. There are 108 stitches in the sewing process, with the first and last completely hidden. An average of 13 to 14 minutes is required to hand-sew a baseball.
• 7 After the covers have been stitched together, the staples are removed and the ball is inspected. The ball is then placed in a rolling machine for 15 seconds to level any raised stitches. The baseballs are then measured, weighed and graded for appearance. Acceptable baseballs are stamped with the manufacturer's trademark and league designation.

Quality Control

A statistically representative sample of each shipment of baseballs is tested to measure Co-Efficient Of Restitution (COR), using Major League Baseball's officially sanctioned testing procedures. Essentially, the COR is an indication of the resiliency of a baseball.

The COR test involves shooting a baseball from an air cannon at a velocity of 85-feet-a-second (25.90-meters-a-second) at a wooden wall from a distance of eight feet (2.43 meters), and measuring the speed with which the ball rebounds off the wall. Major League COR specifications stipulate that a baseball must rebound at 54.6 percent of the initial velocity, plus or minus 3.2 percent.

A baseball must also retain its round shape after being hit 200 times by a 65-pound (29.51 kilograms) force. As proof of its strength, a baseball must distort less than 0.08 of an inch (.20 centimeter) after being compressed between two anvils.

The Future

The size of baseballs and the raw materials used to make them are likely to remain unchanged in the foreseeable future. Also, few, if any, changes are expected in the process by which baseballs are manufactured.

Attempts have been made to automate the process of sewing cowhide covers on baseballs, but none has been successful. Automated machines that have been experimented with have exhibited two serious problems: first, they have been unable to start or stop the stitching process without manual assistance; and second, they have been unable to vary the tension of their stitches, something that is essential if the two figure-8 coverings are to fit securely on the wound ball without tearing.

It is also probable that the controversy about juiced-up balls will continue as long as the game of baseball is played and fans seek an explanation for fluctuations in the homerun output of favorite teams and players.

Where To Learn More

Books

Cleary, David Powers. Great American Brands. Fairchild Applications, 1981.

Danzig, Allison and Joe Reichler. The History of Baseball. Prentice Hall, 1959.

James, Bill. The Bill James Historical Baseball Abstract. Villard Books, 1986.

Seymour, Harold. Baseball: The People's Game. Oxford University Press, 1990.

Thorn, John and Bob Carroll, eds. The Whole Baseball Catalog. Fireside Books, 1990.

Periodicals

"Batter Up for a Baseball Factory Tour," Southern Living. November, 1989, p. 34.

—Suzy Fucini

BASEBALL

Although certain laws have protected citizens from various forms of monopolistic practices for decades, the legal decisions surrounding "America's favorite pastime" have allowed it to remain exempt from most forms of government intervention. Through the years, Major League Baseball (MLB) has escaped measures that would have ended its exclusive control over contracts and copyrights and its all-around monopoly on professional U.S. baseball. Meanwhile, as contracts and team expenditures have come to run well into the millions of dollars, many have come to see baseball as less of a sport than a business—and a business that should be regulated. The United States still reveres baseball, but fans, players, and owners all hope that government decisions will save it from labor strikes and a host of other ills. The government, however, continues to do little other than let baseball remain a special, nationally protected institution.

The professional growth of baseball—and some of its headaches—followed a natural economic progression. Much of the sport's origin is shrouded in myth, but it is thought that it got off to its humble start sometime in the nineteenth century. The first organized contest probably happened on June 19, 1846, between two amateur teams: the New York Nine and the Knickerbockers. In 1869, the Cincinnati Red Stockings, a professional team, paved the way for other franchises to come into existence. In 1871, the National Association of Professional Baseball Players was born. The ensuing days belong to popular remembrance. Abner Doubleday formed the National League in 1876, and baseball has existed somewhere between game and profitable enterprise ever since.

From its early days, the courts have failed to see baseball as posing a threat to the laws of business. The monumental sherman anti-trust act of 1890 (15 U.S.C.A. § 1 et seq.)—a statute prohibiting monopolies—forbids undue restraint of trade on commerce between states. In 1920, an appeals court ruled that the fact that baseball operates on an interstate level was part of its unobjectionable nature as a sport (National League of Professional Baseball Clubs v. Federal Baseball Club of Baltimore, 50 App. D.C. 165, 269 F. 681). It stated, in general reference to other forms of trade and commerce, that "the Sherman Anti-Trust Act … does not apply, unless the effect of the act complained of on interstate commerce is direct, not merely indirect or incidental." Baseball, the court found, did not pose a threat to the economy of the world of sports.

The National League case stemmed from allegations made by the Federal League's Baltimore Terrapins. In the early 1900s, the struggling Federal League had sought to become a venture of the major leagues and had competed with other major league franchises. But the National and American Leagues bought out many of the Federal teams, sometimes player by player, with offers they could not refuse. The Terrapins, one of the last surviving vestiges of the Federal League, sued the National League. Representatives of the Terrapins argued that MLB owners had treated the Terrapins with scorn, offering them only $50,000 in settlement for damages incurred by the buyouts. In court, the Terrapins argued that MLB had violated antitrust laws and had participated in monopolizing ventures.

The case made it all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court (National League, 259 U.S. 200, 42 S. Ct. 465, 66 L. Ed. 898 [1922]). In 1922, the Court made a classic decision. In an opinion written by Justice oliver wendell holmes jr.,

the Supreme Court declared baseball to be, first and foremost, a sport and not a business. In Holmes's words, baseball activities were "purely state affairs." The decision gave baseball the unique status of being the only official professional sports organization to be exempt from antimonopoly laws. In effect, the decision protected baseball as a national treasure.

The National League decision was reaffirmed in 1953 with Toolson v. New York Yankees, 346U.S. 356, 74 S. Ct. 78, 98 L. Ed. 64. In a brief statement, the Court ruled against the plaintiff, minor league player George Toolson. Toolson's arguments were based on the complaint that baseball was a monopoly that offered him unfair contract deals. The Court said Congress alone had been given the right to exercise powers that could break up the structure of baseball's professional organization.

The controversial issue in Toolson was baseball's reserve clause. This clause stood as the earliest symbol of the sport's underlying business nature. It stated that once a player had accepted a contract to play for a certain team, the player was bound to serve that team for one year and must enter into a new contract with the same team "for the succeeding season at a salary to be determined by the parties to such contract." It

was agreed that if a player violated the reserve clause, the athlete would be guilty of "contract jumping" and would be ineligible to serve in any club of the leagues until formally reinstated.

The reserve clause guaranteed players little more than an income. Players attacked it. In the 1970s, Curtis C. Flood, center fielder for the St. Louis Cardinals, brought charges against Bowie K. Kuhn, acting commissioner of baseball. The issue was a player's free agency, which Flood had requested and Kuhn had denied. Free agency is the freedom to negotiate a contract with any team, basically a release from the reserve clause. Taking his case to the Supreme Court, Flood argued that the reserve clause unfairly prevented him from striking deals with other teams that would pay him more for his services. The Supreme Court decided on June 19, 1972, that it did not have the authority to act (Flood v. Kuhn, 407 U.S. 258, 92 S. Ct. 2099, 32 L. Ed. 2d 728). Only baseball's acting commissioner could designate free agency.

Player discontent, as a reaction to the decision, set the stage for more free agency bids, and arbitration between players and owners began in 1973. In January 1976, Andy Messersmith's success in obtaining free agency ushered in a new era of high stakes: players could now dictate certain terms of employment, and hence came the dawn of multimillion-dollar contracts.

Money was also at issue in a case related to another aspect of the game. After more than a century of professional play, in 1986, televised broadcasts of baseball and the copyright laws surrounding them came into question. Players felt that the terms of their employment did not include their performances for television audiences. They insisted that the telecasts and the profits being derived from them were being made without their consent. In Baltimore Orioles v. Major League Baseball Players Ass'n, 805F.2d 663 (7th Cir. 1986), major league clubs sought a declaratory judgment that they possessed an exclusive right to broadcast games. The major league players argued that their performances were not copyrightable works because they lacked sufficient artistic merit. Refusing to cut into the control of MLB over the airwaves, the federal appellate court ruled that the telecasts were indeed copyrightable works and that clubs were entitled to the revenues derived from them.

Throughout these cases, decisions about the economy of baseball have been left to the players and owners. For this reason, baseball has been referred to as an anomaly in relation to the nation's antitrust laws, and its exemption has been called "an aberration confined to baseball" (Flood). The push for congressional action to eliminate this exemption reached a fever pitch with the baseball players' strike of 1994–95. The strike left many in baseball, including fans, disenfranchised. Senator Howard M. Metzenbaum, an Ohio Democrat who headed the subcommittee on antitrust laws, led the fight to remove the antitrust exemption from baseball. However, the 234-day strike ended in an agreement between owners and players, in which owners promised to pay "luxury taxes" on clubs with high payrolls. Congress was spared the necessity of acting.

Local communities, however, faced the possibility of losing their MLB franchises as the economics of baseball changed dramatically in the late 1990s. Major market teams, many of them now owned by corporations rather than wealthy individuals, drove up player payrolls. This hurt smaller market teams and teams owned by individuals who either lacked resources or the desire to match salaries. The Minnesota Twins, unable to secure a new, publicly funded baseball stadium, threatened to move to another state in 1997. The state of Minnesota sought unsuccessfully to probe the team's finances and that of MLB, but in the end the Twins could not secure a sale or move of the team.

Unable to stem rising costs, the baseball league proposed contracting two teams before the 2002 season. Under contraction, MLB would buy out the owners and distribute the players to other teams through a draft. The league argued that contraction would strengthen the financial well-being of the sport. The owners, however, needed to move quickly if contraction was to happen before the 2002 season.

The Montreal Expos and the Minnesota Twins were rumored to be the teams selected for contraction. In Minnesota, the operators of the Metrodome, where the Twins play their home games, sued the Twins and MLB, asking a state court to order the Twins to play the 2002 season. They sought to either win on the merits or delay contraction for a year. The judge issued a preliminary injunction and the Twins appealed, arguing that they did have an obligation to pay the rent for the season, but they could choose whether or not to play the season. The Minnesota Court of Appeals, in Metropolitan Sports Facilities Commission v. Minnesota Twins Partnership, 638 N.W.2d 214 (2002), upheld the injunction, which meant that contraction became impossible for the 2002 season. The baseball league later abandoned the concept of contraction, at least for the near future.

further readings

Burk, Robert F. 1994. Never Just a Game. Chapel Hill, N.C.: Univ. of North Carolina Press.

Helyar, John. 1994. Lords of the Realm. New York: Villard Books.

Kovaleff, Theodore P. 1994. The Antitrust Impulse. New York: Sharpe.

Lewis, Michael. 2003. Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game. New York: Norton.

Sands, Jack, and Peter Gammons. 1993. Coming Apart at the Seams. New York: Macmillan.

U.S. Congress Subcommittee on Economic and Commercial Law. 1993–94. Baseball's Antitrust Exemption: Hearing before the Subcommittee on Economic and Commercial Law. Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office.

Zimbalist, Andrew S. 1992. Baseball and Billions: A Probing Look Inside the Big Business of Our National Pastime. New York: Basic Books.

Zimbalist, Andrew S., and Bob Costas. 2003. May the Best Team Win: Baseball Economics and Public Policy. Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution.

cross-references

Sports Law.

BASEBALL

Yankees Dominance

If box scores were the only clue to what happened in Major League Baseball during the 1950s, then one would have to conclude that baseball had changed little. The American League's New York Yankees remained the class outfit of the big leagues and continued their winning ways. Although by the beginning of the decade it was clear to all who followed the sport that the career of the great Joe DiMaggio, whose brilliant hitting and fielding had dazzled fans at Yankee Stadium in the Bronx, was coming to an end, the team had an abundance of pinstriped talent to pick up where he left off. But, despite the Yankees' continued tradition of winning, America's favorite pastime was changing in the 1950s, and the changes were drastic in their social and cultural impact.

Baseball's Watershed Decade

Baseball had begun to integrate in 1947, and fans in the 1950s witnessed a migration of black players from the Negro leagues and toward the big-league cities. Baseball itself migrated: in 1957 the Brooklyn Dodgers, the pride of Flatbush, did the unthinkable and headed west to Los Angeles; the New York Giants followed the Dodgers west and landed in San Francisco. Other teams had already abandoned their tired-looking East Coast ballparks, where attendance was falling, and had gone to faraway places such as Kansas City and Milwaukee, where there were many more fans who craved professional baseball—and much more money to be made. The increasing number of televised games meant potentially lucrative television contracts for baseball owners, but baseball players were still owned, bought, and sold by their bosses and began looking into ways to change the system.

The Shot Heard 'Round the World—and the Few Who Heard It

The third game, played on 3 October, in the 1951 best-of-three National League playoff between the Dodgers and the Giants is considered one of baseball's greatest games; at the time it also seemed to confirm what even Dodgers fans believed in their hearts: "da Brooklyn Bums couldn't win the big one." Holding a three-run lead going into the bottom of the ninth inning, the Dodgers appeared to have a lock on the National League pennant. Before Giants third baseman Bobby Thomson stepped to the plate, his teammates had managed to cut into the Dodgers' lead by a run and put two men on base. Needing two more outs to escape the inning and holding one strike on Thomson, Dodgers pitcher Ralph Branca threw a fastball up and in, and Thomson connected, driving the bail over the Polo Grounds left-field fence to score the winning run. Across the country, baseball fans following the game on television and radio roared, as did the fans in the bleachers who numbered 34,320—nearly fifteen thousand short of Polo Grounds capacity.

DODGERS SMASH ATTENDANCE RECORDS

Until 1959 the Cleveland Indians, playing in their huge stadium, held Major League attendance records, but in 1959 things changed. The Los Angeles Dodgers, while waiting for their new stadium to be built, played some of their games in the Los Angeles Coliseum. For their home games in the 1959 World Series against the Chicago White Sox, the Dodgers drew crowds of 92,394; 92,560; and 92,706. Gate receipts totaled $277,600, a three-game record.

Baseball Attendance and the Dawn of the Television Era

The relatively small crowd on hand to witness Thomson's "Shot Heard 'Round the World," reflected a trend continued throughout the decade: fewer people were making the trip to the ballpark. Dwindling attendance, however, did not mean that baseball's popularity was fading during the decade. Baseball was as popular as ever—if not more so, since the entrance of black ballplayers into the majors meant an increasing number of black fans. Many people simply preferred staying home and watching the game for free. In New York, for instance, all home games played by the city's three big-league ball clubs were being televised by 1950. Television was still a new and exotic medium at the beginning of the decade, and knowing that fans would be increasingly drawn to the flickering black-and-white images of baseball being played, many club owners were quick to cash in. By 1955 the Dodgers organization had raked in $787,155 for local television and radio rights—a handsome amount that was $250,000 more than the Dodgers' player payroll.

The Perfect Game

In 1955 the Dodgers finally managed to beat the Yankees in the World Series. In 1956 the Dodgers and Yankees again met in the World Series, and in the fifth game played on 8 October, with the series tied at two games each, the Yankees' Don Larsen pitched a perfect game, allowing no hits or runs scored and no man to reach first base—the ultimate pitching feat in baseball and the only one thrown in World Series play. Larsen's perfect game was especially extraordinary considering that he was a relatively obscure figure in baseball who had a poor World Series record, had won only eleven games during the 1956 season, and had been out drinking until four o'clock in the morning the night before the fifth game. The Yankees went on to win the series for the seventh time in eight years, but the era in which New York's crosstown rivalries dominated headlines in baseball news was coming to an end.

Baseball Moves West

Prior to the 1950s Saint Louis was the only city west of the Mississippi River with major league baseball. Establishing a big-league team any further west was unfeasible and uneconomical because of the time and cost of railroad travel. As commercial airlines proliferated and began to expand their travel routes, however, club owners began to set their sights on potential western markets. In 1953 the Boston Braves moved to Milwaukee and set a National League attendance record of 1,826,397 in their new home—an increase of 1.5 million over their 1952 attendance. In 1955 the Philadelphia Athletics followed suit and moved to Kansas City and drew 1,393,054 fans, approximately a million more than the ball club had attracted in Philadelphia in 1954. The rest of the American League showed a combined attendance loss of 64,000; the National League losses for 1955 were even steeper, having dropped off by 340,000. Dodgers president Walter O'Malley and Giants president Horace Stoneham took notice. Both men presided over aging ballparks. At the end of the 1957 season New York's two National League teams headed west—the Giants to San Francisco and the Dodgers to Los Angeles—in search of bigger stadiums and fatter television contracts. The end of an era had arrived: Jackie Robinson had retired after being traded to the Giants, the rivals he had learned to hate; an aging Yankees team was beaten by the Milwaukee Braves in the 1957 World Series; and baseball, with teams on both coasts, truly became the nation's pastime.

MAJOR LEAGUE SALARIES

Big Money.

Baseball fans nationwide were stunned when in 1949 Ted Williams of the Boston Red Sox became the first major leaguer to earn $125,000 for a season. During the 1950s three players would join him in topping the $100,000 mark: Stan Musial of Saint Louis and two Yankees, Joe DiMaggio and Micky Mantle. Although a 1957 survey revealed that 75 percent ot major-league ballplayers earned between $10,000 and $25,000, the decade witnessed the dawning of the big-money era in baseball. Many of the prewar players had reached retirement, and team owners scrambling to snatch up young talent often gave fat signing bonuses as an incentive. Braves $15,000-a-year pitching great Johnny Sain looked on with dismay as his team shelled out a $75,000 bonus to benchwarmer Johnny Antonelli. Sportswriters worried in their columns that all the money would turn the new generation of major leaguers soft. Dodgers star Duke Snider shocked and angered many of his fans when he admitted that he played for money.

Players Demand More.

Although the DiMaggios and the Mantles—and the young Antonellis—of the baseball world were enjoying fat paychecks, there were many players who were fighting to keep above the game's minimum salary of $5,000. In 1951 Brooklyn Democratic congressman Emanuel Cellar, chairman of the congressional sub-committee investigating monopolies, convened hearings to investigate accusations that baseball owners were conspiring in fixing salaries. Although the hearing did reveal collusion among owners, the $5,000 minimum remained unchanged. In 1953 the Major League Baseball Players Association, still in its infancy, requested a minimum salary of $8,000. In 1955 the owners grudgingly raised it to $6,000; however, in real dollars the salary was actually less than what it had been in the late 1940s.

Sources:

Lee Lowenfish, The Imperfect Diamond: The Story of Baseball's Reserve System and the Men Who Fought to Change It (New York: Stein & Day, 1980);

David Quentin Voigt, American Baseball: From Postwar Expansion to the Flectronic Age (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1983).

Sources:

The Baseball Encyclopedia: The Complete and Official Record of Major League Baseball, revised edition (New York: Macmillan, 1974);

Roger Kahn, The Era, 1947-1957: When the Yankees, the Giants, and the Dodgers Ruled the World (New York: Ticknor & Fields, 1993);

David Quentin Voigt, American Baseball: From Postwar Expansion to the Electronic Age (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1983).

Baseball. Americans had played bat‐and‐ball games for decades when, in 1845, Alexander Cartwright of New York devised the rules—foul lines, nine innings, three outs, ninety‐foot basepaths—that created modern baseball. Cartwright's game quickly became popular with young clerks and urban craftsmen. By 1860, baseball had spread throughout the Northeast, and by 1870 to the rest of the nation.

The first teams were amateur, organized by men's clubs, the games ending with dinner and drinks. Some players earned good money from ambitious clubs, which charged admission in order to pay the players. The first wholly professional team was the Cincinnati (Ohio) Red Stockings of 1869, whose manager, Harry Wright, hired every player. Taking advantage of the burgeoning railroad system to tour the country, they challenged and defeated all teams they faced that year. In 1876, entrepreneurs formed the National League (NL), with salaried players and profit‐seeking owners.

Baseball exploded in popularity in the 1880s as Irish and German immigrants embraced it. A new American Association (AA) challenged the NL with cheap tickets, Sunday games, and liquor. From 1884 to 1891 the champions of the NL and AA staged an early “World Series” featuring such luminaries as Cap Anson of the Chicago White Stockings, King Kelly of the Boston Red Stockings, and Charles Comiskey of the St. Louis (Missouri) Browns. Minor‐league clubs proliferated, newspapers covered baseball avidly, and sporting‐goods companies prospered manufacturing baseball equipment. Baseball now became what club owners and equipment manufacturers called it, the national pastime. Wanting their fair share, players formed a union and then, in 1890, the Players League. Both the Players League and the AA soon collapsed, however, leaving the NL standing alone through the 1890s, able to keep salaries low and players tied to their teams through a reserve clause.

In 1900, as player discontent grew and fan interest revived, a regional organization, the Western League, renamed itself the American League (AL). With such former NL greats as Comiskey, John McGraw, and Connie Mack as managers or owners, the AL stole dozens of NL players, including the era's greatest hitter, Napoleon Lajoie. By 1903, when the modern World Series was inaugurated, the new league was well established, as was a professional agreement to control players' movements and major‐minor–league relations. Pitchers dominated this so‐called dead ball era. Christy Mathewson of the New York Giants and “Three‐Fingered” Brown of the Chicago Cubs hurled their clubs to repeated pennants. Connie Mack's Philadelphia Athletics, with the goofy left‐hander Rube Waddell, and the Boston Red Sox, led by the brilliant young pitcher George Herman (“Babe”) Ruth, dominated the AL. Other stars included Detroit's hard‐hitting Ty Cobb, the game's fiercest competitor, and the Pittsburgh shortstop Honus Wagner.

Two developments ushered in the “golden age” of the 1920s. First, eight members of Comiskey's Chicago White Sox conspired with gamblers to lose the 1919 World Series. The resulting trial and publicity sullied the reputation of baseball, whose owners created the office of baseball commissioner and filled it with the strong‐willed judge Kenesaw Mountain Landis. Landis banned the eight “Black Sox” for life and ruled organized baseball with an iron hand for three decades. Second, Babe Ruth, now a full‐time outfielder with the New York Yankees, started to hit home runs as no one ever had. As the Yankee owner Jacob Ruppert built a championship team around Ruth and a huge new stadium for his fans, the Yankees became a dynasty. Lively baseballs, sluggers, and big ballparks lifted baseball's popularity to new heights. Ruth retired in 1935 after setting career and season home‐run records. The 1930s witnessed the first All Star Game, the first major‐league night game (in Cincinnati), the opening of the Baseball Hall of Fame at Cooperstown New York, and Branch Rickey's creation of a “farm system” for the St. Louis Cardinals. In 1936, Joe DiMaggio first appeared in the Yankee outfield, continuing the dynasty.

Organized baseball had been segregated since the 1880s, forcing African Americans to form the Negro National and American Leagues. These leagues had such Hall‐of‐Fame players as the pitcher Satchel Paige and the catcher Josh Gibson, but playing conditions were poor and paychecks uncertain. All this changed when Branch Rickey moved from St. Louis, where his farm system had produced champions, to the Brooklyn (New York) Dodgers during World War II. Rickey found talent in the Negro leagues, signing UCLA athlete Jackie Robinson, who became the first black major leaguer in 1947 and led the Dodgers to six NL pennants in ten years. By 1960, the Negro leagues had collapsed, and every major‐league club had black players on its roster, including Willie Mays, the brilliant New York Giants centerfielder, and Hank Aaron of the Milwaukee (Wisconsin) Braves, who hit more career homers than Babe Ruth. The 1950s also witnessed the first franchise movements in decades, including, with the advent of jet air travel, the move of the Brooklyn Dodgers and New York Giants to California, and televised baseball, which seriously damaged the minor leagues. Meanwhile, the Yankees rolled on. Hall of Famer Mickey Mantle replaced DiMaggio; manager Casey Stengel raised relief pitching and platooning to new heights; Roger Maris broke Ruth's season home‐run record; and the catcher Yogi Berra was the AL's most valuable player three times. New York won a staggering fourteen pennants and ten world championships in seventeen years.

Several developments highlighted baseball's evolution after 1970. First, clubs discovered a new source of talent in Latin American players, including such greats as Juan Marichal and Felipe Alou of San Francisco. Second, clubs built parks with artificial turf, which made line‐drive hitters and speedsters such as Cincinnati's Pete Rose and St. Louis's Lou Brock more valuable. Third, the players formed a strong union, achieving, among other things, free agency, or the right to market themselves to the highest bidder, and salary arbitration, which drove salaries sharply higher and distributed talent more evenly among clubs. Owner‐union clashes also produced the sport's first strikes. Finally, more clubs moved and more cities gained franchises, necessitating intraleague playoffs to determine pennant winners.

By the 1990s, television—including “superstations” broadcasting local games nationwide, and television advertising— had come to influence baseball, as had competing sports, making franchises astonishingly valuable and producing a shift to corporate rather than family ownership. A team with superstation revenues, the Atlanta Braves, dominated the NL in the 1990s, not least through the efforts of Greg Maddox, the greatest pitcher of the decade. Live attendance flourished as well, thanks partly to the construction of “old‐fashioned” stadiums with suburban amenities. Fans were rewarded in 1998 by the New York Yankees, who won 114 games, a new regular‐season AL record, and Mark McGuire of the St. Louis Cardinals, who crashed seventy home runs, shattering Roger Maris's home‐run record and besting the Chicago Cubs' Sammy Sosa, whose sixty‐six homers also broke Maris's record.

More Latin American players entered the major league as the twentieth century ended, and baseball won fans in Japan with the success of stars like Hideo Nomo of the Los Angeles Dodgers and Ichiro Suzuki of the Seattle Mariners. But the sport faced problems as well, some of its own making. Its fan base eroded as professional football and basketball gained in popularity, and in 1989, Pete Rose, holder of the all‐time major‐league hitting record (4,191), was barred from the sport for life by Commissioner A Bartlett Giametti for gambling on games, including games of his own team, the Cincinnati Reds. In 2002, charges that many players were using steroids and other performance‐enhancing drugs further disillusioned fans.
See also Sports.

Bibliography

Harold Seymour , Baseball, 2 vols., 1960–1971.
Jules Tygiel , Baseball's Great Experiment, 1983.
Lawrence Ritter , The Glory of Their Times, 1985.
Daniel Okrent , Nine Innings, 1989.
Joseph L. Reichler, ed., The Baseball Encyclopedia, 1990.
Andrew Zimbalist , Baseball Billions, 1992.

Ronald Story

Paul S. Boyer

BASEBALL

Hitters Go Wild

In 1930 the National League batting average was just over .300, with almost 900 home runs. Chicago's diminutive powerhouse Hack Wilson hit 56 homers and 190 RBIs. Bill Terry of the Giants became the last National Leaguer to hit over .400. Even the last-place "Futile" Phillies batted .315 as a team. The American League overall hit less well, but the New York Yankees and Philadelphia Athletics matched the older league in most respects. Some folks insisted that the ball was juiced up. Whatever the reason, fans loved it and came to the ballparks in record numbers. The following year the ball was deadened with a looser covering and higher stitching. As a result, what Ring Lardner (in a 1930 New Yorker piece) called "B'rer Rabbit Ball" came to an abrupt end. Averages and run production dropped markedly (run-scoring sacrifice flies were now counted as a time at bat, though, too) and so did attendance. Fans not only missed the great hitting but also began to feel the effects of the Depression. So did the owners, who used the national economic crisis as well as the 1931 drop in batting averages to lower salaries.

Red Ink

From a high of 10.1 million in 1930, attendance dropped to 8.1 million in 1932 and 6.3 million one year later. The American League lost more than $2 million in a three-year period. Major-league salaries were cut overall by a million dollars between 1929 to 1933, and even by 1939 the average major-league salary was $200 below the 1929 figure. Weaker clubs suffered the most, having to sell their best players to financially healthier clubs. Organizations with deep, well-developed farm systems (such as Branch Rickey's Saint Louis Cardinals) could unload their player surplus or begin rotating minor-league talent to the parent club. As the farm system burgeoned in the 1930s, the rich teams got richer—and better. And there was always money to be made by renting out ballparks to Negro League teams. Night games, radio, and a brighter economic outlook for the country starting in 1935 also eased some of the burdens.

BASEBALL'S HALL OF FAME

Though the historical evidence was dubious at best, Baseball's Centennial Commission accepted the findings of the Mills Report of 1907 that Abner Doubleday was the founder of baseball in 1839 in Cooperstown, New York. In 1936 the Hall of Fame was founded in that quaint community, and the first inductees were selected by the Baseball Writers Association of America commission and a special veterans' committee. Players inducted in the 1930s were as follows:

1936:
Ty Cobb
Honus Wagner
Babe Ruth
Christy Mathewson
Walter Johnson

1937:
Cy Young
Tris Speaker
Napoleon Lajoie
Morgan G. Bulkeley
Ban Johnson
Connie Mack
John McGraw
George Wright

1938:
Grover Cleveland
Alexander Cartwright
Henry Chadwick

1939:
Cap Anson
Eddie Collins
Charles Comiskey
Candy Cummings
Buck Ewing
Lou Gehrig
Wee Willie Keeler
Charles Radbourn
George Sisler
Albert G. Spalding.

Black Ball

Baseball was America's favorite sport, and the major leagues achieved a rare level of stability, with no significant rule changes and only one aborted franchise shift (the Saint Louis Browns). One consequence of that status quo, however, was the gentleman's agreement that kept African Americans from entering the major leagues. Nonetheless, black baseball was more exciting than ever, even though the Depression had virtually wiped out the organized league. While gambling once nearly destroyed Major League Baseball, tavern owner W. A. "Gus" Greenlee used money he made in the numbers racket to organize and support the Pittsburgh Craw-fords, the greatest team of the reborn Negro National League in the 1930s. The league consisted mostly of eastern teams, including "Cum" Posey's famed Homestead Grays. In 1936 the Negro American League included teams in cities in the South and the Midwest. The Crawfords could boast of a lineup including baseball immortals Josh Gibson, Satchel Paige, Oscar Charleston, Cool Papa Bell, and Judy Johnson. But the black leagues had no real stability, no reserve clause, and often no formal contracts, so players could—and did—jump from team to team whenever they got a better offer to play.

The Gashouse Gang

Young and old Cardinals combined to form the most colorful team of the mid 1930s. Managed by Frankie Frisch, the "Gashouse Gang" got its name either from its filthy uniforms or the American League belief that the team was "just a lot of gashouse ball players." Also, the team reminded many old-timers of the down-and-dirty teams of the 1890s, like the old Orioles. Several players (like Pepper Martin) had played for the 1931 championship squad, but young stars like Dizzy Dean and Joe Medwick turned the team into a legend in 1934. The zany Dean won thirty games and saved seven that year, and the Cardinals won the pennant in seven games, defeating a Detroit team featuring Mickey Cochrane, Charlie Gehringer, and Han k Greenberg. Dean and his brother Paul (called "Daffy") won all four games. In game five Dizzy Dean was knocked unconscious. Myth has it that one newspaper headline announced: "X-RAYS OF DEAN'S HEAD SHOW NOTHING."

The Yankees Rule

The Yankees, managed by Joe McCarthy, were again the dominant team in the American League; they would win four consecutive world championships between 1936 and 1939. Babe Ruth was released by the Yankees at the end of the 1934 season and signed with the Boston Braves for 1935. He retired for good in early June. His crowning moment came in the fifth inning of the third game of the 1932 World Series when he allegedly, in the words of sportswriter Joe Williams, "went so far as to call his shot." Whether he actually did or not (and it became doubtful, even to Williams, that he did) remains the stuff of baseball lore. Lou Gehrig stepped into the spotlight through the first half of the decade and became one of the greatest and most beloved players ever to play the game. His famous uniform number 4 (numbers were a Yankee innovation in 1929) reflected his place in the lineup (other teams began issuing player numbers on the backs of uniforms in the 1930s). In 1936 twenty-one-year-old Joe DiMaggio was the full-time centerfielder, already on his way to a phenomenal career. By 1939, with veterans like Lefty Gomez, Bill Dickey, and Joe Cronin, and with the help of an excellent farm system, the team's second dynasty was under way.

HEYDAY OF SEMIPRO BALL

The 1930s were the last great days of semiprofessional, independent, and amateur baseball and in many cases produced some of the wildest baseball west of the Mississippi and in the South. There were various leagues and federations, each of which had its own rules and regulations. Most popular of all were the various tournaments—an outgrowth of the Depression—run on the local, state, and national level. The tournaments were important for a variety of reasons:

1. They were the closest reminders of what the game was like before the era of organized baseball;
2. they became a way for organized baseball to recruit young players, especially for the new minor-league farm teams. Eighteen-year old Bob Feller was playing for a Des Moines semipro club when he was signed by a major-league scout;
3. they helped keep the spirit of amateurism alive;
4. they were, for a while at least, one of the few bastions of integrated baseball. In 1934 Satchel Paige led the House of David team to victory in the prestigious Denver Post tournament against his old teammates the Kansas City Monarchs. The next year Paige pitched the semipro Bismarck club (for which he played all season) to a championship in the first national tournament of Hap Dumont's National Baseball Congress in Wichita;
5. they became dependable sources of revenue;
6. they demonstrated the possibilities of spectacle and promotion at ballparks long before the major leagues got into the act;
7. they offered substantial prize money for players during hard times;
8. they provided a diversion for unemployed men and helped them establish business contacts with industrial firms that sponsored teams;
9. they ushered in the era of international baseball, especially in Mexico, Central America, and Japan.

Source:

Harold Seymour, The People's Game (New York: Oxford, 1990).

Sources:

Robert W. Creamer, Babe: The Legend Comes to Life (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1974);

Frederick G. Lieb, The St. Louis Cardinals (New York: Putnam, 1944);

John Thorn and Pete Palmer, eds., Total Baseball, second edition (New York: Warner, 1991);

David Quentin Voigt, American Baseball: From the Commissioners to the Continental Expansion (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1983).

Baseball

Baseball, an American invention, is part of American culture and national identity and for many boys, playing baseball is a male rite of passage. Although the game of baseball as it is known today is uniquely American, it derives from the popular English children's bat-and-ball game called rounders. In the American colonies various versions of bat and ball games–chiefly popular with boys–evolved such as round ball, goal ball, one old cat, town ball, and base.

As early as the 1700s there are also references to men playing forms of baseball. A diary entry of a soldier from the American Revolution, who served under General George Washington at Valley Forge in 1778, talks about exercising in the afternoon by playing at base. A 1787 notice forbids Princeton College students from playing stick and ball games on the common.

Credit for the game of baseball as it is known today, however, goes to Alexander Cartwright, a bank clerk, who established the Knickerbocker Base Ball Club of New York in 1845 and wrote down the first official set of rules. These rules also became know as "New York rules." By 1857 there were almost fifty clubs within and around Manhattan. These baseball clubs were organized around occupational, ethnic, and neighborhood affiliations. That year, the Knickerbocker Club with fifteen other New York area clubs formed the National Association of Base Ball Players (NABBP). Many of these New York City area clubs also formed junior boys' teams. By 1860 there were enough junior boys' teams to form a national association. The era of informal boys' games had evolved into the era of formally organized clubs. Boys continued to play informal pick-up games of baseball in rural areas in open fields, in urban areas in vacant lots, and in the street.

The Civil War, rather than curtailing the development of baseball, became instrumental in democratizing and spreading the game throughout the country. Veteran soldiers, having played the game during the war, brought the game back to their hometowns. At the end of the war in 1865 the National Association of Base Ball Players membership included ninety-one clubs from ten states. The upper-class amateur gentlemen's club game of the Knickerbockers had evolved into the people's game. However, this democratization had its limits. In 1867 the NABBP banned black players, setting a precedent for segregated teams that remained in place for eighty years.

As baseball became more popular, rivalries between city and town teams placed greater emphasis on winning than sportsmanship, leading to an influx of gamblers and to star players being paid off the record. The first professional team, the Cincinnati Red Stockings, was formed in 1869. In 1869 and 1870, the team barnstormed across the country playing against local amateur teams, winning 130 of the 132 games they played. Their popularity led to the formation of other professional teams. In 1871 the National Association of Professional Baseball Players was formed and in 1881 the American Association followed. The 1880s mark the golden age of baseball and by 1890 there were seventeen white and two black professional leagues. The era of professional baseball had arrived. Although professional baseball was confined primarily to urban areas, every town and city had amateur and semi-professional teams that drew large crowds. Watching baseball games became a major form of entertainment. Professional team owners even encouraged women to come to the games in the belief that the presence of ladies would attract more male fans and curtail their rowdy behavior.

Baseball was also flourishing in the public schools. Grammar school boys often played at recess and high schools were developing their own teams. At private boys' boarding schools baseball was a part of the athletic program. By the end of the century boys at Exeter, Andover, Groton, St. Marks, and other elite schools were playing interscholastic ball. Boys also played baseball at private military academies such as the Virginia Military Institute. Even though baseball was considered a boys' game, some girls at Miss Porter's, an elite private girls' school in Connecticut, as early as 1867 also played the game.

With the development of the playground movement first in Boston in 1885 and then in other cities, baseball became a popular playground sport. Settlement houses, boys clubs, and the YMCA developed baseball programs to keep boys off the street and out of trouble. Through playing baseball it was hoped that boys would learn sportsmanship and would become good citizens. Baseball was also seen as a way to Americanize immigrant groups.

Although baseball-type games had been played at men's colleges as early as the late 1700s, it was in the 1850s and 1860s that baseball became an integral part of men's college life. The first intercollegiate game was played between Williams and Amherst Colleges in 1859. Although the general belief was that strenuous physical exercise was unhealthy for women, a few women's colleges such as Vassar, Smith, Mount Holyoke, and Wellesley allowed girls to play baseball as early as 1866. However, by the 1930s, softball had replaced baseball in girls' sports programs. By the 1980s, there were 1,600 college men's baseball programs associated with the National Collegiate Athletic Association.

In the 1900s, in the public's mind baseball represented all that was good about America. Baseball served as a model for children's moral development. Therefore the Black Sox Scandal of 1919, over the fixing of the World Series, was a national disgrace. The scandal so deeply affected the American public that when Judge Kennesaw Mountain Landis became Commissioner of Baseball in 1921, the St. Louis Globe-Democrat wrote that if Landis could keep baseball on a high ethical plane, it would be more important than anything he could do on the federal bench.

The golden era of sport in the 1920s produced baseball's first superstars, Babe Ruth, Ty Cobb, and Lou Gehrig. Games were broadcast over the radio to millions of people. It was during this time that organized youth baseball got its start. In 1925 the American Legion started their junior baseball program to give more boys an opportunity to play and as a means of teaching them good sportsmanship and citizenship. With the financial support of major league baseball, American Legion baseball competition began in 1926. In 1928 the issue of girls playing became an explosive one when it was discovered that Margaret Gisolo was a member of the Blanford, Indiana, team. Although Margaret was allowed to finish the season, the next year the rules were changed to allow boys only to play. Later leagues were careful to specify that only boys could join. In 1939 Carl Stotz founded Little League Baseball with the purpose of developing citizenship, sportsmanship, and manhood. PONY (Protect Our Nation's Youth) Baseball, Inc. was formed in 1951 and the Babe Ruth League in 1952. Not until 1974 after a lengthy court battle were girls allowed to play Little League baseball. After that the other leagues also permitted girls to play. Even with that change relatively few girls play baseball today.

American Legion and Little League Baseball continue to be popular programs. In 2000 American Legion Posts sponsored 5,300 baseball and other athletic teams throughout the United States. By 1999 Little League baseball was being played in 100 countries. Baseball became an Olympic sport in 1992.

See also: Interscholastic Athletics; Organized Recreation and Youth Groups; Sports; Title IX and Girls Sports.

bibliography

Berlage, Gai. 1994. Women in Baseball: The Forgotten History. West-port, CT: Praeger.

Crepeau, Richard. 1980 Baseball: America's Diamond Mind. Orlando: University Presses of Florida.

Rader, Benjamin. G. 1999. American Sports: From the Age of Folk Games to the Age of Televised Sports, 4th ed. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall.

Seymour, Harold. 1990. Baseball: The People's Game. New York: Oxford University Press.

Ward, Geoffrey, and Ken Burns. 1994. Baseball: An Illustrated History. New York: Knopf.

Gai Ingham Berlage

Legal Education and Professionalism

Source

Law School. The nature of legal education in the last decades of the nineteenth century changed significantly. In 1878 there were over three thousand students in American law schools; only 703 of them had college degrees. The law was viewed by many as a practical trade, not a learned profession. Justice Samuel Miller stated in 1879 that with “the accelerated pace at which modern human beings are propelled, under the influence of railroads, telegraphs, and the press, it is ... absurd to spend . . . four collegiate years in the study of dead languages and theoretical mathematics.” Most law schools did not require a college degree, and most had less stringent requirements than colleges. In 1899 Cornell required that students in its law school meet the same admission standards as students in its undergraduate college, requesting a high-school diploma for admission. Because of this reform, the entering class for that year shrank from 125 to sixty-two pupils. Many law schools required twelve to eighteen months of study, with the expectation that students would then apprentice themselves to a practicing lawyer.

The Harvard Method. Harvard University instituted the most fundamental changes in legal training. Traditionally law teachers would be practicing attorneys who would lecture on various legal principles. Under the leadership of Christopher Columbus Langdell, dean of Harvard Law School from 1870 to 1895, gradually implemented longer periods of study, eventually requiring three years to earn a degree. Langdell also replaced the teaching lawyers with full-time law professors. Instead of legal textbooks, students would read cases, and from them try to understand the underlying legal principles. Professors would not lecture but would question the students, using a Socratic dialogue to draw out the principles of the law. For Langdell and proponents of the Harvard case method, the law was a science, not a trade or “a species of handicraft.” As Harvard president Charles Eliot explained, “Langdell’s method resembled the laboratory method of teaching physical science, although he believed that the only laboratory the Law School needed was a library of printed books.”

The American Bar Association. At the same time as the case method defined law as a science, some lawyers began a move to raise the standards of their profession. In 1876 Lewis Delafield, president of the American Social Science Association, called for the formation of a professional association of lawyers. He believed that the law was a public calling, and that lawyers should have both a good character and learning. His ideal was for a student to attend law school, followed by a year of work in a law office, and finally a public examination by impartial judges before admission to the bar. In January 1878 Connecticut judge Simeon Baldwin, who taught at Yale, also proposed the establishment of a national bar organization, and on 21 August the American Bar Association was formed at Saratoga, New York. About one hundred lawyers, mainly from the eastern states, attended the first meeting, and by the end of the year the ABA had 201 members from twenty-nine states. Baldwin drafted the group’s constitution, with its object “to advance the science of jurisprudence, promote the administration of justice and uniformity of legislation throughout the union, uphold the honor of the profession of the law, and encourage cordial intercourse among the members of the American Bar.” Prospective candidates had to be nominated by full members and had to have at least five years of good standing with their respective state bar associations.

Controversy. In 1891 the ABA charged that the case method introduced by Harvard University made young lawyers focus too much on what happened in court, not enough on keeping clients out of court. To the ABA, the case method encouraged litigation, rather than settlement, of cases. By the middle of the decade, ten American law schools used the case method, while fifty-seven continued to rely on lectures and textbooks. Yale University most vigorously opposed the case method. Theodore Dwight of the Yale Law School believed that reading cases “in a haphazard way leads to mental dissipation .... Law decisions are but a labyrinth. Woe to the man who busies himself with them without a clue . . . to guide him.” It would be better, opponents of the case method argued, to present the legal principles first, and turn to the cases, if necessary, as supporting evidence.

Triumph of the Case Method. The Harvard method of studying law gradually converted the skeptics. In 1886 Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., whose criticism of the old method of teaching had helped bring on the changes at Harvard, reported that he had tried the case method with great skepticism, but “after a week or two, when the first confusing novelty was over, I found that my class examined the question proposed with an accuracy of view which they never could have learned from textbooks, and which often exceeded that to be found in the textbooks. I, at least, if no one else, gained a good deal from our daily encounter.” By 1895 Harvard had replaced Columbia as the largest American law school, with over four hundred students and ten professors. By 1920 virtually every law school in the country used the case method.

Source

Robert Stevens, Law School: Legal Education in America from the 1850s to the 1980s (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1983).

BASEBALL

Baseball, a stick-and-ball sport played with four bases arranged in a diamond, was first organized in the mid-1800s in the United States. In June 1846 two amateur teams of nine players played each other in a ball game on the Elysian Fields in Hoboken, New Jersey, just across the Hudson River from New York City. The game was umpired by U.S. sportsman, Alexander J. Cartwright (1820–1892), who established the rules of play. The game is similar in some ways to the English games of Cricket and Rounders. A legend grew up that baseball's beginnings on U.S. soil dated to 1839 when U.S. Army officer Abner Doubleday (1819–1893) invented the game in Cooperstown, New York. Though Doubleday helped popularize games resembling modern baseball, there is little evidence that he developed the game that people in the United States know today, which became a favorite pastime during the late 1800s.

The first baseball club, the Knickerbocker Base Ball Club, was organized by Alexander Cartwright (1820–1892) in 1842 in New York City. By 1845 the team developed a set of twenty rules which included specifications for where the bases are to be positioned, how runners can be tagged as out, and defined a field of play, outside of which balls are declared "foul." The so-called "New York Game" spread in popularity after the 1846 Hoboken match. By 1860 there were at least fifty ball clubs. Pick-up games were played in fields across the country. Union soldiers helped spread the game during the American Civil War (1861–1865). Its popularity increased during the last three decades of the nineteenth century.

The first professional baseball team was the Cincinnati Red Stockings formed in 1869. In 1876 the National League of Professional Baseball Clubs was founded; it included teams in Boston, Chicago, Cincinnati, Hartford, Louisville, New York, Philadelphia, and St. Louis. By the 1880s the sport became big business: an 1887 championship series between St. Louis and Detroit drew 51,000 paying spectators. The American League was formed in 1901 and two years later the American and National leagues staged a championship between their teams. In 1903 the Boston Red Socks beat the Pittsburgh Pirates in the first World Series.

During the early decades of its existence as an organized sport, baseball reflected the racism of U.S. society by excluding African American players. When one all-black team applied for admittance in 1876 the National League adopted an unwritten "gentlemen's agreement" denying entry to any baseball club with black players. For the most part this exclusionary clause was effective in segregating baseball, but African American players occasionally found positions in the minor leagues.

The unfairness of excluding excellent players solely because of their skin color occasionally led to challenges of the color line. Catcher Moses Fleetwood ("Fleet") Walker was actually the first black player to break into the major leagues. In 1883 Fleet and his Toledo teammates (Toledo then had a team that belonged to the American League) won the pennant. Still most black baseball players were relegated to the Negro leagues. Because of their limited audience, the Negro leagues had difficulty in establishing themselves. However in 1920 Rube Foster, a talented black pitcher and manager for the Chicago American Giants, formed the Negro National League. A number of African American teams and leagues were formed in the 1920s and the Negro leagues flourished for about 25 years, mostly in Mid-western cities. The Negro leagues fielded some excellent players, including Satchel Paige, Ray Dandridge, and John Henry "Pop" Lloyd. Paige was so devastating as a pitcher that he would often call his outfielders in and have them sit down in the infield while he retired the side. The color line was definitively broken when in 1947 Brooklyn Dodger Manager Branch Rickey (1881–1965) signed second baseman Jackie Robinson (1919–1972). Although he had to put up with ostracism from many of his teammates and cat-calls from the crowds Robinson eventually won acceptance and respect. Once Robinson became a hero to the general audience, African American players were signed by other major league teams, and the Negro leagues died.

The rise of organized professional sports is tied to the greater affluence that an industrialized society provided. People now had more money to spend, and an overall increase in leisure time as the workweek declined allowed baseball to become the national sport. Played on an open field, the game recalled the nation's agrarian roots. But with standardized rules, reliance on statistics, and the larger audience provided by radio and television, baseball looked forward to a modern, industrialized future.

See also: Amusement Parks, Bicycles

AMATEURISM VS. PROFESSIONALISM

Battle over Definitions

Whether sports should be played for physical wellbeing, competition, recreation, and character building, or primarily for profit and the accumulation of victories has been a longstanding debate in this country since the middle of the nineteenth century. The definition of amateur has blurred, depending upon the governing rules of the sport or of the AAU and often upon the athlete in question. Sportswriter Paul Gallico defined an amateur as "a guy who won't take a check." But many amateur athletes could earn money in a variety of other ways, including endorsing products, padding expense accounts, or cashing in the gold and silver prizes they won. Many factors, including the Depression, forced officials to look the other way; but once in a while someone got caught: Finnish runner Paavo Nurmi was barred from the 1932 Olympics because he had made a small profit on his expense account during a trip to Germany. The Missouri Valley football conference questioned Jim Bausch's job selling insurance while he was playing fullback for the University of Kansas. Jesse Owens's amateur status was put in jeopardy because he accepted a patronage job as a page in the Ohio state legislature. The public cared little about these minor infractions and under-the-table dealings, but sportswriters like Gallico and John R. Tunis were often incensed at the hypocrisy of the amateur governing bodies.

Lack of Standards

Amateur sports were often sources of lucrative gate receipts, and amateur athletes usually had to practice the same long hours as professional athletes. After Bobby Jones retired in 1930, there were few pure amateur athletes in America who could compete with—and defeat—professional athletes. Amateurs were often treated like professionals, especially if they failed to live up to contractual obligations. When Jessie Owens backed out of a track-and-field engagement in Sweden, the AAU suspended him. This often forced athletes (such as Monte Irvin in 1937) to play professional sports under an assumed name so as not to jeopardize their amateur collegiate status.

College Football and Amateurism

In the 1930s the NCAA had no restrictions concerning eligibility requirements or compensation of athletes. The 1932 Marx Brothers film Horse Feathers lampooned the manner in which college football teams cavalierly recruited players, many of whom were not legitimate students. Few schools were willing to take the step Robert Maynard Hutchins did when he abolished the long-established football program at the University of Chicago in 1939. During the first College All-Star Game in 1934, in which the best major-college players challenged the NFL champions, a great defense helped the amateurs blank the NFL Chicago Bears in a scoreless tie. As late as 1950, Army head coach Red Blaik was still convinced that college football was truer sport than professional football.

Source:

Paul Gallico, Farewell to Sport (New York: Knopf, 1938).

base·ball / ˈbāsˌbôl/ • n. a ball game played between two teams of nine on a field with a diamond-shaped circuit of four bases. It is played chiefly in the U.S., Canada, Latin America, and East Asia. ∎  the hard ball used in this game.

baseball •all, appal (US appall), awl, Bacall, ball, bawl, befall, Bengal, brawl, call, caul, crawl, Donegal, drawl, drywall, enthral (US enthrall), fall, forestall, gall, Galle, Gaul, hall, haul, maul, miaul, miscall, Montreal, Naipaul, Nepal, orle, pall, Paul, pawl, Saul, schorl, scrawl, seawall, Senegal, shawl, small, sprawl, squall, stall, stonewall, tall, thrall, trawl, wall, waul, wherewithal, withal, yawl •carryall • blackball • handball •patball • hardball • netball • baseball •paintball • speedball • heelball •meatball • stickball • pinball • spitball •racquetball • basketball • volleyball •eyeball, highball •oddball • softball • mothball •korfball • cornball •lowball, no-ball, snowball •goalball •cueball, screwball •goofball • stoolball • football •puffball • punchball • fireball •rollerball • cannonball • butterball •catchall • bradawl • holdall • Goodall