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| The History of Baseball Equipment | |
| Table of Contents | |
| Introduction | |
| Those who love the game of baseball also have a special affection for the equipment used to play it | |
| The favorite glove, the special bat - they are more than objects; they are friends | |
| A Hall of Fame player like Yogi, Sandy Koufax, Ernie Banks or a more modern player can personalize that sentiment for all, setting up the premise of the book | |
| Bird's Eye View of Baseball's History An overview of the game from its early days as a derivative of cricket and rounders to the era of free agency, merchandising and the global game | |
| This chapter should stand on its own as an overview and get the reader interested in reading the entire book | |
| Baseball Rules Showing the history of the game and how the rules have evolved from the underhand pitches of the ancient game to the 100-mph gas of today's power pitchers | |
| The chapter will not only show the evolution of the game, but also show how the evolution of equipment goes hand-in-hand with the overall changes the game has experienced | |
| The Ball From a tiny, horsehide-wrapped sphere not much bigger than a golf ball, the baseball has evolved into the rock-hard, tightly seamed ball we have today | |
| With each evolution of the ball the game changed, and this chapter will track those changes | |
| Is today's ball "juiced?". Why not try to find out scientifically? | |
| The Bat It started as a big war club turned from hickory | |
| Over the years it has evolved mightily | |
| Changes have included the wood from which it is fashioned - the doubleplay combination of Hickory to Ash to Maple - as well as the shape, weight and length | |
| Does the future hold composite bats? | |
| The Glove The first baseball player wore no gloves at all | |
| Then, along the way, players determined they could protect their hands by donning gloves much like work gloves used by tradesmen | |
| From there the glove evolved into the lengthy "catching contraptions" we see today that have made the hitherto disdained one-handed catch a routine part of the professional game | |
| The "Tools of Ignorance" Catchers are interesting fellows | |
| I know since I've been one since I was seven. They find themselves in harm's way for half a ballgame every day, and their protective gear has evolved from literally nothing to outfits that make them look like RoboCop | |
| Baseball Shoes Every baseball player I know of has a fond recollection of his first pair of baseball shoes | |
| The "cleats" signified he was an inside member of the fraternity privy to all its mysticism | |
| Over 150 years those "cleats" have changed radically, but they still are a magical talisman. | |
| Table of Contents provided by Publisher. All Rights Reserved. |
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Chapter 1
Bird’s Eye View of Baseball’s History
An overview of the game from its early days as a derivative of cricket and rounders to the era of free agency, merchandising and the global game.
There is a terrible misconception among many baseball fans that the history of baseball starts in the year 1900. It’s hard to know how that notion got started, but it has had a long and powerful run. Records achieved before the beginning of the 20th Century are largely discounted, and the exploits of stellar teams and individuals of the “pre-modern era” are ignored. That is a terrible shame, because the fact is that baseball had a rich history of more than 50 years of progress and success before 1900, and the events that occurred around the turn of the 20th Century – most notably the recognition of the American League as a “major” league and the subsequent creation of the World Series – were merely manifestations of an on-going process of change.
So who established 1900 as the beginning of baseball worth considering? None of us knows for sure, but, knowing what we do know, it might have been an idea fostered by a Yankees fan because before 1900 the much-vaunted and self-congratulatory Yankees didn’t exist. In fact, they weren’t even a charter member of the upstart American League, but instead were the result of a shift of the Baltimore Orioles franchise to Gotham in 1903. So starting baseball history at 1900 gives the Yankees a boost by denying the rich history of those dominant teams that came before – teams like the Boston Red Stockings, Chicago White Stockings (today’s Cubs), Brooklyn Bridegrooms and Boston Beaneaters, among others. Of course, it is also tempting to blame the Yankees for this injustice, because the down-their-nose looks Yankees fans give to fans of other teams often become too much to bear.
We won’t commit the horrible sin of dropping into baseball history somewhere in the second reel of its feature-film-length run. To do that would be to overlook so much that is charming and illuminating about the world’s greatest game. And the first thing to consider is how baseball got started in the first place.
In 1905 a special blue ribbon commission, instigated by early baseball star and sporting goods magnate Albert Goodwill Spalding and chaired by Abraham G. Mills, the fourth president of the National League, was convened to do just that, and, after much consideration, they came to exactly the wrong conclusion. In fact their conclusion was so off-base, if you should pardon the allusion, that it is hard to imagine it was not the result of a deliberate conspiracy instead of misguided scholarship. The commission’s final report, issued at the end of 1907, found that the game of baseball had sprung from the head of Civil War general Abner Doubleday on Elihu Phinney’s cow pasture in upstate Cooperstown, New York, in the year 1839.
Now General Doubleday did have a few claims to fame. He was said to have fired the first shot in the defense of Fort Sumter at the onset of the Civil War, and subsequently he had a key role in the Union victory at Gettysburg. After the war he migrated to San Francisco, where he is credited with patenting the city’s fabled cable cars. But he sure as hell never invented baseball, and what’s more he never claimed he did. Apparently the key testimony that convinced the commission that Doubleday was their guy was made by a fellow named Abner Graves, who wasn’t just a well-known prevaricator, he also brutally murdered his wife and was committed to an institution for the criminally insane for the rest of his life, the second part of which differs him from a certain former NFL running back.
Despite the shakiness of its principal witness, the commission’s finding took on the appearance of fact, and thus when it came time to establish a National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum, Doubleday’s home town of Cooperstown was selected as the site. The fact that his family had moved from the picturesque little burg before that grand day that baseball was invented there and the fact that the redoubtable soldier was a cadet at West Point the entire year of the purported invention seem to have done little to quell the misconception. These days, if TV talk show host Jay Leno were to ask people of the street, “Who invented baseball?” one might well hear the name Abner Doubleday along with the random Babe Ruth, Mickey Mantle and Vin Scully.
Two names that you won’t hear on the Jay Leno “Jaywalking” segment are the names of men who, more than any others, codified and publicized the game of baseball, transforming it from a pickup game with rules as fluid as the Mississippi River to something approximating a genuine sport. These two luminaries are Alexander Cartwright, a member of the Knickerbocker Base Ball Club of New York, and Henry Chadwick, a British-born but New York-based journalist, writer and statistician.
But baseball had traveled a long way before it got to those two men. People had been playing games with balls and sticks since the dawn of civilization and perhaps before. By the time of Shakespeare, the 16th Century, the English were playing two very similar stick-and-ball games – rounders and townball – that involved hitting a ball with a stick and then running around a pre-determined course outlined by stakes or stones in the ground. The “striker” was “out” if his or her struck ball was caught in the air or on the bounce. Further, once the “striker” became a “runner,” he or she could be retired by being hit (“plugged”) with a thrown ball. Though its origins are shrouded in the mist as well, cricket is thought to have evolved on a parallel track to these other pastimes, but it took hold in Britain in the 18th Century and by 1800 was England’s national sport.
Though rounders and townball (or town ball) gained popularity and some degree of documentation, baseball’s background is a bit murkier. In 1744 A Little Pretty Pocket-Book, a British volume by John Newbery, gave a brief, rhymed description of “base-ball.” The intriguingly titled book features an illustration of boys playing "base-ball” on a playing field not all that dissimilar from today’s baseball field, though posts substitute for bases, as they do in rounders. As you can imagine with such a provocative title, the book was a big hit, prompting numerous reprintings in America in the late 18th Century.
Though there is not a great deal of documentary evidence to prove it – and that, after all makes sense; for instance, look for the documentary evidence to prove that you played Little League baseball when you were nine – it seems that Americans were playing a game many of them called baseball (or “base ball” or “base”) through at least the latter half of the 18th Century and on into the 19th Century. George Washington’s soldiers were said to have passed the grim time in winter encampment at Valley Forge, Pennsylvania, “playing at base.” In 1787 Princeton College forbade its students from “play with balls and sticks” on the campus common, and in 1791 the municipality of Pittsfield, Massachusetts, passed a statute that prohibited the playing of “baseball” within 80 yards of the town’s new meeting house.
Across the Atlantic Ocean, writer Jane Austen penned a passage about children playing “base-ball” in her novel Northanger Abbey, which was written between 1798 and 1803 but not published until 1818. (She must have been a bit perturbed with her agent by then.) Shortly after that, the British The Boys’ Own Book contained a description of the sport of rounders that demonstrated the game had evolved significantly from the 16th Century version to something much more like baseball. Two major differences between rounders and our game of baseball were that the batter was out not only if the ball were caught on the fly but also if the ball were caught after one bounce (tennis anyone?) and instead of being tagged or forced out runners were put out by hitting them with a thrown ball.
Despite the fact that the average folk were not meticulous about documenting the trifling games of their leisure hours, there is ample evidence that by 1825 Americans throughout the Northeast portion of the country were playing variations of a game referred to as “town ball,” “goal ball,” “base,” or “base ball.” Further, that game had so much in common with the English game rounders that a person viewing it might have said they were one and the same.
This is where Alexander Joy Cartwright and the New York Knickerbocker Base Ball Club came in. By the early 1840s many New Englanders and New Yorkers were passing away idle hours playing the then-current version of “base ball,” which closely resembled the then-current version of rounders. Starting as spring rolled into the summer of 1842, Cartwright and his fellows began to gather informally each weekend for a “choose-up-sides” game of casual base ball, not unlike something that goes on in various neighborhoods across the United States today. On September 23, 1845, Cartwright was a leading light in making this pickup game a bit more formal by establishing the New York Knickerbocker Base Ball Club, named in honor of the volunteer fire department that counted Cartwright as a member.
Unlike other clubs of the day, the Knickerbockers seemed intent upon making base ball a better game. Thus Cartwright convened with fellow Knickerbocker, physician Daniel Lucius Adams, imaginatively nicknamed “Doc,” and the two of them set down on paper a set of rules for what became known as the “New York game.” The rules called for the placement of the bases 42 paces apart and established foul territory to the left of the third base line and to the right of the first base line. No specific distance was set from the pitcher to home plate, but that didn’t matter much since it was not the job of the pitcher to try to retire the striker (batter) but merely to pitch the ball in such a way that the striker could hit it. Rather than allowing the striker an unlimited number of swings as in rounders, the striker was retired (“out”) after three swings and misses. Perhaps the most important rule was the 13th: “A player running the bases shall be out if the ball is in the hands of an adversary on the base or the runner is touched with it before he makes his base; it being understood, however, that in no instance is the ball to be thrown at him.”
Though Cartwright might not have realized it at the time, the “three-strikes-and-you’re-out rule” and the rule that defined force out and tag outs while prohibiting throwing the ball at the runner to achieve an out transformed the game. They not only made the game more civilized and more rapid, but they enabled the use of a much harder and easy to throw ball, since the ball would thereafter not be thrown at runners. Most important, the Kickerbocker rules set the stage for pitching to become a key defensive weapon, although that undoubtedly was not the intention of Cartwright or Adams at the time.
Using the new rules, the Knickerbockers are thought to have played some intra-club games during 1845, but by the spring of the following year the stage had been set for one base ball club to play another in a game. Thus it was that on June 19, 1846, at the Elysian Fields in Hoboken, New Jersey, the Knickerbocker Base Ball Club took on the New York Base Ball Club in the first recorded base ball game between two separate teams using the Kickerbocker rules. Oddly, the Knickerbockers were soundly trounced 23-1. (In fact, the score is doubly odd, since not only would one think that the Knickerbockers would have been more familiar with the game than their rivals, but also because the rules stated the game should be played until one team scored 21 “aces” or runs.)
From there the new game began to spread through the greater New York area, and it got a huge boost in prominence by Chadwick, a cricket reporter for the New York Times. Covering a cricket match on the Elysian Fields, he happened upon a base ball game being played between the Gotham and Eagle base ball clubs and immediately became enamored of the pastime. A man with no small ego, he decided that he could take the new sport and turn it into America’s “national game in word and in truth,” as he put it.
By 1857 Chadwick had changed newspapers but he had not changed his love for the game. He continued to promote it through the columns of his widely reprinted news stories, and in this cause he perfected the “box score” that still summarizes baseball games in the vast majority of American newspapers and the in-game scoring system that includes the enigmatic use of the letter “K” to denote a strikeout.
As not simply a reporter but also an ambassador of base ball, Chadwick spread the gospel of the “New York game” to other cities, like “town ball” hot beds Boston and Philadelphia. He became the chief writer of the popular Beadle Dime Base Ball Book, which helped spread the sport throughout the United States. Meanwhile Cartwright, who had contracted “gold fever” and taken off for California, was an evangelist for the game on the West Coast and then, when gold panning didn’t appeal to him, he moved on to Hawaii, where he became an influential businessman and missionary of base ball.
By 1864, Cartwright was out of baseball’s mainstream and out of the country, since Hawaii was then an independent kingdom, but Chadwick continued on as a forward-thinker in refining the rules of the game. After a long campaign, he was able to eliminate the rule that a batter was out if a fielder caught a ball on one bounce, and later he helped establish a set distance from the pitcher’s “box” to home plate and to allow pitches delivered sidearm and, eventually, overhand.
With all this going on, it is fair to say that the game exploded in popularity during the pre- and Civil War years. An 1854 rules revision specified the size and weight of the baseball itself, a significant step in standardization, and baseball’s first nationwide organization, the National Association of Base Ball Players, was formed three years later, helping to make the “New York game” predominant. Base ball was spreading quickly, and, in fact, in 1856, it had already been referred to in the press as “the National pastime.” In the midst of the Civil War, William Cammeyer, a canny Brooklyn, New York, promoter, saw the public’s interest in baseball as a likely source of profit, so he constructed a baseball stadium, arranged for games between clubs and charged the public admission to see them.
Of course, baseball at the time was still, on the face of it at least, an amateur sport. When the first post-Civil War baseball convention was called in 1865, it attracted representatives from 91 teams. Baseball was being played on an amateur basis from Maine to California and in virtually all cities and towns in between. But as public attention grew greater and as the pressure to put a winning team on the field increased, many clubs resorted to semi-professional tactics, including paying individual players “under the table” and/or having a friendly businessman hire skilled players but not actually require them to work. At the same time, the public interest in the sport quickly led to wagering on baseball and that, in turn, prompted the unscrupulous to offer bribes to individual players to “fix” ballgames. Sadly, dumping ball games proved to be a lucrative source of income for many “amateur” ball players of the day.
That began to change in 1869 when Harry Wright, the son of a renowned cricket player, fielded the first avowedly professional baseball team, the Cincinnati Red Stockings. Each of the Red Stockings was paid and each appeared worth it, since the team went undefeated in its first season, recording 65 victories. The following season the Red Stockings had run up their winning streak to 92 games when they were finally beaten by the Brooklyn Atlantics in an epic game that was said to have drawn the unheard-of crowd of 15,000 people.
Professional baseball was off to the races. The contingent who wanted to keep baseball a “pure,” amateur sport could see the tide turning against them. They withdrew from the National Association of Base Ball Players in 1871, and the organization took on the new title of the National Association of Professional Base Ball Players. It also assumed the role of the first “major league,” and teams from Boston; Chicago; New York; Philadelphia; Washington, D.C.; Cleveland; Fort Wayne, Indiana; Troy, New York; and Rockford, Illinois, competed for the league’s first championship.
Though the sport was still gaining popularity, problems dogged the new league. Instead of establishing a set schedule at the beginning of the season, the league simply required the teams to play one another a pre-determined number of times, and this fostered chaos when some teams failed to meet their obligations. Teams that were weak financially folded in mid-season and individual players in search of better financial deals would often jump from team to team, adding to the chaos. But the biggest issue the new league had to deal with was the routine suspicion that gamblers were controlling the outcome of baseball games. The Boston Red Stockings won the National Association crown four of the five years the league existed, and there was little doubt that Harry Wright’s transplanted Cincinnati crew played to win, but several players on other teams were highly suspect. The situation was primed for a change.
The agent of that change was a Chicago businessman named William A. Hulbert, who was the controlling partner of the Chicago White Stockings. In 1876, he was the guiding force in the establishment of the National League of Professional Baseball Clubs, which is today’s National League. His goal was to make the league a truly big league. He insisted that each team in his eight-team league be a well-financed company representing a substantial-sized city. He addressed the scheduling chaos that was driving all to distraction, and he took a firm stand against the gambling interests that threatened the public’s belief in the sport. While he was at it, he also lured away several players from the Boston Red Stockings, including incomparable pitcher Albert G. Spalding, and as a result his Chicago White Stockings, who played their first National League game just a few weeks before General George Armstrong Custer met his fate at the Little Big Horn, won the initial National League pennant.
Hulbert proved to be an able leader, taking difficult stands that put the league on an ever-sounder footing with the public. When the Philadelphia and New York teams, who were hopelessly out of the pennant race, decided to try to save money by not finishing their schedule of games at the tail end of the 1876 season, he unceremoniously booted them from the league, although the loss of those big markets was a blow to the league’s overall fortunes. The following year the six-team National League faced an even bigger hurdle when a scandal broke implicating four Louisville Grays players in a plot to throw the 1877 pennant. Hulbert immediately barred all four players for life. The final piece of the puzzle in establishing a league that would flourish came in 1879 when team owners first put a clause in players’ contracts reserving their services for the following season. At first many players were happy with the arrangement, since it helped give their careers some continuity, but quickly the “reserve clause” became synonymous with involuntary servitude, because it essentially bound a player to his team until the team decided to release him.
This set the stage for a period of unprecedented growth in professional baseball in the 1880s. Led by Adrian “Cap” Anson, the Chicago White Stockings were the best team in baseball for the better part of the decade, capturing National League pennants in 1880, 1881, 1882, 1885 and 1886. The game was so established in the American public’s heart that a new “major league,” the American Association, came on the scene representing cities that had been shut out of the National League or those, like Cincinnati, which had been expelled for having the temerity to play baseball on Sundays and sell patrons beer.
In this ripe period of growth two other leagues achieved brief status as “major leagues.” In 1884 the 13-team Union Association contested its solitary season. Its organizers hoped its stance against the “reserve clause” would be enough to lure the country’s top players, but that proved to be a miscalculation, and the league shut down. Six seasons later a players revolt led by John Montgomery Ward, a star New York shortstop and head of the Brotherhood of Professional Base Ball Players, resulted in the creation of the Players League, but, though it attracted many of the top stars from both the National League and American Association, it didn’t prove to be viable.
Albert G. Spalding had succeeded Hulbert as the National League’s prime mover, and he guided it through the financially ruinous 1890 season in which three major leagues vied for the fans’ dollars and on into the following turbulent season in which the two surviving leagues tried to absorb the refugees from the Players League. This led to the collapse of the American Association, a heavy blow to beer drinkers everywhere. When the dust settled, the National League took on the four strongest American Association franchises, bought out the others and charged into the 1892 season as the lone major league.
Like the “fact” that baseball history begins in 1900 is another “fact” that Jackie Robinson was the first African-American to play major league baseball. While nothing should detract from Robinson’s tremendous achievements and minimize the horrible hardships he went through to establish a principle that should have been established from the beginning of the “national pastime,” the incredibly talented and strong-willed Dodger infielder was not the first African-American to appear in a major league game. That distinction goes to Moses Fleetwood “Fleet” Walker, who, like Robinson, was a man of both the highest character and commendable patience. Walker was a catcher for the 1884 Toledo Blue Stockings of the American Association, hitting .263 in 152 at-bats with the club. His brother, Welday Walker, also appeared in a handful of contests that year for Toledo.
Three years later the International League, regarded to be just one step below the major leagues, boasted at least five African American players – Fleet Walker and George Stovey (who were widely renowned as the “African battery,”) pitcher Robert Higgins and infielders Bud Fowler and Frank Grant, who many believe was the finest black baseball player of his generation. Despite their presence in the “high minors” and despite the fact that about two dozen African Americans were playing at various levels of “organized baseball” a string of circumstances was conspiring against black players. Some of it was simple and ugly bigotry, but other obstacles to African American players came from the current players and managers of major league clubs who didn’t want to upset a status quo that was favorable to them. “Cap” Anson of the Chicago White Stockings could be counted among them, because on several occasions he refused to let his Chicago White Stockings play exhibition games with teams that included an African American player and did all he could to dissuade the New York Giants from signing George Stovey. It should also be pointed out that, though vilified in some circles, black players were often championed by white teammates, fans and white-owned newspapers, and the stance of Anson and others who lobbied against the inclusion of blacks was widely disparaged.
In an attempt to “mainstream” African Americans into organized baseball, a black minor league – the League of Colored Base Ball Clubs – was organized in 1887, but initial attendance was so poor for its ball games that it collapsed after just one week in operation. From there things went from bad to worse for African Americans who desired to play professional baseball, because a horribly ill-named “gentlemen’s agreement” that came soon after the collapse of the Colored League effectively barred the signing of black ballplayers for the following 50 years – a horrendous blight on the grand game.
In other respects, though, baseball was a grand game that reflected the spirit of late 19th century America. And enthusiasm for the still relatively young game ran extremely high across the country from the green mountains of New England to the arid plains of the Midwest to the deserts of Southern California. Prospectors headed to the Alaska gold fields played baseball, as did the American soldiers who occupied and then liberated Cuba. (That island, by the way, had established its first organized baseball league way back in 1878.) So not only was the professional game of baseball on a very sound footing, but amateur baseball at the grassroots level was being played by school children, cowboys, industrial workers, clerks, tradesmen…just about everyone who could swing a bat or pull on a glove.
All of this brings us to 1900 when some would tell you baseball history really begins. For the 1900 season the National League decided to retrench to just eight teams, jettisoning the woeful (20 win-134 loss) Cleveland Spiders, Louisville Colonels, Baltimore Orioles and Washington Senators. This created a National League that would be familiar to present-day fans with teams in Boston, Brooklyn, Chicago, Cincinnati, New York, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh and St. Louis. Yes, the team nicknames would soon change. For instance, the Boston Beaneaters became the Boston Doves, Rustlers and finally the Braves. The Brooklyn Superbas became the Dodgers. And the Chicago Orphans became the Chicago Cubs. But in this configuration the National League would remain until 1953, when the Braves moved to Milwaukee, starting a series of franchise shifts and expansion that continued through much of the subsequent three decades.
Perhaps the National League establishment was smug as the 1900 season approached, but, if so, it was not reckoning on the force of a determined man named Byron “Ban” Johnson. Johnson ran the Midwest-based Western League, and when he saw the National League’s plan for contraction to eight teams in 1900, he renamed his league the American League and sought permission to fill in some of those blanks with new or shifted Western League franchises. The National League seemed to have no problem with the move of the Grand Rapids, Michigan, franchise to Cleveland, and, surprisingly, it also okayed a shift of the St. Paul club to Chicago, a stanch National League city, where it would purloin the name White Stockings and then become the White Sox. But the National League did have big problems with the establishment of teams in Baltimore and Washington, D.C., two cities it had just abandoned.
Fed up, Johnson declared that his American League was a “major league,” and a war ensued between the two leagues, since Johnson authorized his franchises to feel free to raid National League rosters, abrogating the “National Agreement.” More than 100 National League players “jumped,” including future Hall of Fame stars like Denton “Cy” Young, Sam Crawford, Rube Waddell and Napoleon Lajoie. By 1902, the American League was a strong eight-team league with franchises in Philadelphia, St. Louis, Boston, Chicago, Cleveland, Washington, Detroit and Baltimore. The biggest missing piece was a New York team, and that was remedied the following season when the Baltimore Orioles transferred to Gotham to become the Highlanders and, later, the Yankees.
With American League attendance up and players jumping to the new league right and left, the National League was under tremendous financial pressure, and after two years of strife, the two leagues declared a truce. Each would remain independent, but each would respect the other’s players’ contracts, putting a quick end to the escalation of salaries that had taken place over the previous couple of years. Baseball would be ruled by a three-member National Commission that included American League president Ban Johnson, Cincinnati Reds owner Garry Herrmann and new National League president Harry C. Pulliam. The truce also led directly to the inaugural World Series, which was contested in the first two weeks of October 1903. The American League Boston Pilgrims defeated the National League’s Pittsburg Pirates five games to three in the best-of-nine event.
That wasn’t the last time the American League would get the best of the National League, at least when it came to behind-the-scenes dealings either. Though the three members of the National Commission were supposed to have equal voting power, it turned out that the forceful Johnson was much more equal than the other two. He would rule major league baseball for the next 17 years.
Neither the powerful Johnson nor the more obsequious Pulliam could persuade manager John McGraw to lead his National League champion New York Giants in what would have been the 1904 World Series against the World Champion Boston Pilgrims. The haughty “Pugsy” McGraw claimed the AL club wasn’t a worthy opponent, though he had been one of the first National players to jump to the new circuit just a couple of years earlier before he jumped back to take the helm of the Giants. The following year, again the National League champions, McGraw and his Giants changed their minds, and they defeated Connie Mack’s Philadelphia Athletics four games to one in a best-of-seven World Series.
In 1906 the Chicago Cubs began a run of success that rivaled that of their predecessors, Cap Anson’s White Stockings in the 1880s. The Cubs won 116 games in ’06, losing just 36 for the major league’s best winning percentage of all time. Though they lost in the World Series to the cross-town White Sox that year in baseball’s first “subway series,” they then went on to capture National League pennants and World Championships in 1907 and 1908. The ’08 season also featured the hotly disputed “Merkle’s boner” game, which led to a one-game “playoff” between the Giants and Cubs for the National League pennant. In that game Cubs pitcher Mordecai “Three-Finger” Brown out-dueled the Giants’ Christy Mathewson to win the flag and prompt the Cubs’ World Series win.
The Merkle controversy plus other stresses had an unfortunate effect on National League president Pulliam, who was being hammered in the press for being under the thumb of Ban Johnson. Pulliam’s ruling to replay the Merkle game was the right decision but terribly unpopular in New York, and he grew increasingly erratic, took a leave of absence from his duties and then shot himself to death on July 28, 1909. Baseball had not only become America’s sport of choice, it had also become Big Business, and the pressures were enormous.
By 1910 major league baseball had set a course that it would travel for the next 50 years with only the occasional blip and bump along the way. In 1914-15 the National and American leagues shrugged off the threat of yet another independent “major league” competitor. The Federal League did persuade some big names to jump, but it could not sustain itself and folded after the 1915 season. The only remnant it left to major league baseball was the Chicago ballpark that housed its Whales franchise. Then known as Weeghman Park for the owner of the Chi-Feds, it is now known as Wrigley Field.
Sadly, Wrigley Field was not the site of the 1918 World Series even though the Chicago Cubs, who played there, and the Boston Red Sox, who called Fenway Park home, were the league leaders when Ban Johnson and the National Commission decided to end the season early because public sentiment was running against such frivolities as baseball with World War I dragging on in Europe. Because the White Sox’ home Comiskey Park was bigger, the Cubs played their home World Series games there, facing the Boston buzz saw.
The Red Sox were enjoying a terrific decade, having won pennants in 1912, 1915 and 1916, and their 1918 squad featured an imposing pitching staff that included Carl Mays, "Sad" Sam Jones and "Bullet" Joe Bush. Oh, and a guy named George Herman Ruth, who had won 13 games while losing just seven during the regular season, and who also played some outfield that year because he was reputed to be a pretty good hitter. Largely behind the near-perfect pitching of Ruth, Boston won the closely contested classic to run their World Series record to 5-0.
World War I ended at 11 am on November 11, 1918, so it looked like baseball was primed for its best season ever in 1919. And through the regular season it was just that. Cincinnati, led by the skills of batting champion Edd Roush, pulled away from the Giants to win the National League pennant, and the Chicago White Sox, who had won the world championship in 1917, regained their form to capture the American League pennant. Sporting a lineup that included hitting stars like “Shoeless” Joe Jackson and Eddie Collins, plus a pitching staff that featured Ed Cicotte and Claude “Lefty” Williams, the White Sox were strong favorites to win the series, but unfortunately the long odds against the Cincinnati Reds attracted the attention of gambling interests. And those interests, in turn, attracted the attention of eight White Sox players, who agreed to throw the series.
The conspiracy wasn’t just heinous, it was botched from the start, as word leaked out to the “smart money” that the Sox might tank. This sent the odds in the Reds direction, limiting the gamblers eventual profits. Many of the eight White Sox involved with the conspiracy turned in schizophrenic performances in the series. Cicotte lost two games, including a dreary performance in the opening game, but he also was the winner in game seven when a loss would have given the Reds the Series title. Jackson hit .375 to lead all players from both teams, but later admitted he had let down in certain situations. Buck Weaver hit .324, and Chick Gandil, reputed to be one of the ringleaders, had two hits that keyed winning White Sox rallies. Finally, in the eighth game of the best-of-nine affair the Sox succumbed as Williams took his third loss in as many tries. By the time it was over, several Chicago sportswriters were convinced that the Sox had thrown the series, but they had no proof until the tail end of the 1920 season, when the whole ugly business became public.
Americans were outraged at what came to be known as the Black Sox scandal. As F. Scott Fitzgerald later summed it up in The Great Gatsby, the men who fixed the Series played with the trust of the American people as coolly as criminals robbing a bank. The eight White Sox players were put on trial in Chicago, and, despite the fact that many had confessed, they were found not guilty by a sympathetic jury. But club owner Charles Comiskey suspended them anyway, and newly installed Commissioner of Baseball Kenesaw Mountain Landis, a former federal judge who had just been given extraordinary powers to improve the public image of the game, went him one better.
“Regardless of the verdict of juries, no player that throws a ball game, no player that entertains proposals or promises to throw a game, no player that sits in a conference with a bunch of crooked players and gamblers where the ways and means of throwing games are discussed, and does not promptly tell his club about it, will ever play professional baseball,” he ruled. Cicotte, Jackson, Gandil, Weaver and the rest were banished from baseball for life.
After riding so high, vaulting its way to become America’s most beloved sport, baseball was suddenly in terrible straits. The Black Sox scandal prompted additional investigations into gambling that brought to light some damaging information about several popular stars. Suddenly the sport was at a low ebb. But the good news was that antidote to all this negativity was already playing major league ball.
On the day after Christmas in 1919 New York Yankee fans, the few of them that there were, received a present that still brings joy nearly 90 years later. On that date Boston Red Sox owner Harry Frazee consummated a deal with the Yankees in which he would receive $100,000 in cash, and the Yankees would receive the contract of former pitcher and current outfielder George Herman “Babe” Ruth. It was, in today’s parlance, a “game-changer.”
At that point in baseball history the Yankees were a nowhere franchise, a dreary number three among the trio of New York teams that also included the Giants and the Brooklyn Robins, who had appeared in the World Series in 1916 and would do so again in 1920. Lost in the shuffle of history are two other Red Sox-Yankees transactions that helped send the Yankees on their way to greatness – the acquisition of disgruntled pitcher Carl Mays for two players and $40,000 also in 1919, and the acquisition of pitcher Waite Hoyt and catcher Wally Schang in a multi-player trade in 1920.
All three players were key building blocks as the Yankees went to their first World Series in 1921 (they lost to the Giants), to their second a year later (again they lost to the Giants) and finally a world championship – their first -- in 1923. Even then the Giants were still considered by many to be the premier New York team, since they had appeared in four consecutive World Series between 1921 and 1924. But with World Series appearances in 1926, 1927 and 1928, and championships in the last two of those years, the Yankees were well on their way to becoming a legendary franchise. And the ticket-buying public, buoyed by the engaging antics of Babe Ruth, who not only won championships but also set home run records, forgot all about the scandals and embraced the game of baseball as never before.
During the same decade, technology also had a hand in making baseball bigger than it had ever been. Commercial radio began to gain popularity in the 1920s, and the rhythms of baseball seemed especially suited to the medium. The first broadcast of a major league baseball game took place in Pittsburgh in 1921, but though it was well-received, baseball owners were generally reluctant to authorize broadcasts of their games and apparently not bright enough to realize that they could get radio stations to pay for the privilege. (Since they didn’t charge newspapers to cover their games, at first they didn’t figure they could charge radio stations to broadcast their games either.) On the other hand, the ownership of the Chicago Cubs welcomed radio broadcasting of all its contests, and they found that it increased interest and attendance rather than detracting from it. By the end of the decade daily radio coverage of major league baseball games was common. In 1923 the World Series was first broadcast nationally, and no fee for the rights was charged until 1934, when Ford Motor Company paid $100,000 for the privilege. Future President Ronald Reagan got his show business start re-creating Chicago Cubs games from reports delivered via telegraph ticker for Iowa station WHO.
Certainly the Depression years took their toll on the nation, but baseball provided the good, clean fun for very little money. And, of course, the radio broadcasts were free. Night baseball swept the minor leagues with the onset of the Depression, giving the working man a chance to see a game after quitting time. At first the major leagues resisted the innovation, but after general manager Larry MacPhail had lights installed in Cincinnati’s Crosley Field in 1935, the dam burst. (Only the Cubs held out for day baseball, not playing their first home night game until August 9, 1988.) Ruth, now teamed with fellow Yankee slugger Lou Gehrig, continued to lead the Yankees to championship after championship. During his tenure with the team, the Yankees captured seven American League pennants and four World Series titles, so it is easy to see why Yankee Stadium is referred to as “the house that Ruth built.”
But even after Ruth’s skills faded and he was palmed off on the hapless Boston Braves, the Yankees continued to dominate. From 1936 through 1939 they won four World Series in a row, neatly transitioning from a team led by Ruth to one led by Gehrig to one led by Joe DiMaggio, a San Francisco product who was one of the most fearsome yet graceful baseball players of all time. To give some indication of DiMaggio’s overall effect on his teammates, consider this statistic: DiMaggio played 15 years of major league baseball, and in 10 of those 15 years the Yankees were in the World Series, winning World Championships nine times.
DiMaggio’s tenure spanned the World War II years. Instead of shutting down baseball, as had been done toward the end of World War I, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt decreed that baseball should continue through the war, recognizing the sport’s iconic spot in Americans’ hearts. Many major leaguers, like Boston Red Sox great Ted Williams, went off to serve their country, sending the overall quality of the baseball played during the years 1942-45 into a decline. But the sport endured.
When VJ day finally brought World War II to a close, baseball was primed for another explosion in popularity. But there was one important bridge to be crossed – the rescinding of the “color barrier” that had been erected in 1889. The man who would make this happen – Branch Rickey -- was an innovative baseball executive, who back in the 20s and 30s had established the kind of “farm system” of affiliated minor league clubs that is standard practice today. He reasoned that he could grow his own stars and, at the same time, earn extra revenue by developing additional ballplayers whom he could sell to other clubs. The innovation worked, and the Gashouse Gang St. Louis Cardinals he built became a successful club in the 30s and into the 40s.
But the creation of the traditional farm system was not nearly as important as putting an end to baseball’s refusal to let African American players participate. That refusal had led to the creation of the Negro Leagues, which were reasonably successful in the 30s and 40s, though the quality of both play and pay were sometimes erratic. But the existence of segregated leagues did nothing to mute the injustice of barring blacks from the highest rungs of professional baseball, and Rickey was out to change that. In 1943 he left the Cardinals to take over general managerial duties with the Brooklyn Dodgers, and with the death of Commissioner Landis and the end of World War II, he saw his chance to break the color barrier. Happily, he had just the right player in mind -- Jack Roosevelt “Jackie” Robinson, who was not only a four-sport star at the University of California Los Angeles, but also an Army second lieutenant during World War II.
In August 1945, Robinson signed a minor league contract with the Montreal Royals, the Dodger affiliate in the International League. Ironically that was the same league in which Fleet Walker had played during the 1880s when his presence had spurred the creation of the color barrier. Robinson excelled with the Royals, as Rickey had expected, and for the 1947 season Robinson joined the Brooklyn Dodgers as a starter. Throughout the season Robinson endured catcalls, jeers, hate mail and worse, but he persevered to propel his team into the World Series, winning the Rookie of the Year award in the process. His success speeded the desire of major league baseball to integrate, and most clubs quickly began signing established players from the Negro Leagues as well as younger black prospects.
In the wake of the chaos of baseball’s first fifty years, complete with the rise and collapse of leagues and teams alike, the fifty-year era from 1903 to 1953 was remarkably tranquil. All the major league teams were reasonably prosperous, and all of them stayed put. But that changed in 1953 when the Boston Braves left the city for what they expected to be greener pastures in Milwaukee, which hadn’t hosted a major league club since 1901. This shift spurred an additional pair of teams stuck in two-team markets – the Philadelphia Athletics and the St. Louis Browns -- to move as well. The Athletics settled in Kansas City, while the Browns changed their name to the Orioles and alighted in Baltimore.
Those moves were shocking enough, but not nearly as shocking as what would happen in May of 1957. The Brooklyn Dodgers and the New York Giants, two of the country’s proudest and most successful franchises, both sought permission from the National League to move to the West Coast, and that permission was granted. The Dodgers, now owned by the influential Walter O’Malley, a man some said was the defacto commissioner of baseball, prepared to re-settle in Los Angeles, while the Giants headed toward San Francisco. The grief in New York, and especially in Brooklyn, was overwhelming. The Dodgers had come to represent that proud borough as far more than just a baseball team, so to have it depart when it was drawing well and winning pennants was a horrible blow. Many Brooklynites haven’t forgiven O’Malley, the architect of the move, to this day.
Though vilified in Brooklyn, O’Malley and his Dodgers were quickly embraced by the Los Angeles fans. Another transplant team, the Milwaukee Braves, played in their second consecutive World Series in 1958, the year the Dodgers and Giants moved west, but the following year the Los Angeles Dodgers captured the first pennant to fly over a West Coast stadium, and they punctuated that by winning the World Series.
So after fifty years of stasis, five years in the mid-Fifties changed the face of the game in a dramatic way. And when Branch Rickey and some associates threatened to create an independent third major league – the Continental League – in 1959, the owners decided to make a pre-emptive strike by expanding their leagues by two teams each, changing it still more. Thus the Los Angeles Angels were created; Calvin Griffith moved his perpetual also-ran Washington Senators to the twin cities of Minneapolis and St. Paul, and a new Washington Senators franchise was created to fill that gap. The new clubs began to play in 1961, and at the same time the owners moved from a 154-game schedule to a 162-game slate (more games, more revenue.) While average fans didn’t notice the expanded schedule when it was instituted, they were certainly aware of it by the end of the season, because with just a few games to go a Yankee outfielder named Roger Maris, who up until that time had enjoyed a largely non-descript career, was knocking on the door to eclipse Babe Ruth’s single-season home run record of 60. The pressure on the sensitive outfielder was stifling, but on the final day of the 1961 season Maris got the homer he needed.
The following season the National League matched the American League in numbers by expanding to 10 teams, adding the New York Mets and the Houston Colt .45s. Since they were bringing National League baseball back to New York, the Mets were greeted warmly, but the club was awful for most of the decade, until surprisingly nearly everyone by winning the National League pennant and World Series in 1969. Houston, meanwhile, changed its name to the Astros and became more widely recognized for its enclosed stadium – the Astrodome – than the quality of baseball played inside it.
Based partly on the strength of a pitching staff led by Sanford Braun “Sandy” Koufax and Donald Scott “Don” Drysdale, the Los Angeles Dodgers were one of the most renowned teams of the 60s, in what proved to be a more ecumenical decade than many that had come before it with teams like the Minnesota Twins, Baltimore Orioles, St. Louis Cardinals, Cincinnati Reds and Detroit Tigers all getting a World Series chance. The 60s also set the stage for ownership-management strife of a kind unlike any that had been seen since the Players League experiment of 1890. A former United Steelworkers union official named Marvin Miller was the catalyst when he became head of the Major League Baseball Players Association.
The game expanded again in 1969 with the addition of the San Diego Padres and Montreal Expos in the National League and the Seattle Pilots and Kansas City Royals in the American League. The Pilots would last only one year in the Northwest before moving to Milwaukee to fill the void left by the Braves, who had continued their wandering ways by going to Atlanta in 1966. The Expos would enjoy several successful years and become known as a developing ground for great players who went on to careers with other teams before moving to Washington, D.C. to become the Nationals in 2005.
Meanwhile, the rift between owners and ballplayers became a major issue in the game, prompting strikes or lockouts in 1972, 1981 and 1994. Many fans began to be disillusioned with baseball, feeling that greedy players were disrupting the game in their desire for higher salaries, apparently not caring that the team franchise owners were reaping windfall profits. The situation was exacerbated in 1975 when an arbitrator named Peter Seitz ruled the Andy Messersmith and David McNally, two prominent pitchers, were free to negotiate with any and all of the clubs after playing the previous season without a contract. This ruling essentially struck down the century-old “reserve clause” that was a standard item in players’ contracts, and it turned the baseball world on its earflap. With players largely free to negotiate with any club, given certain parameters, ballplayer salaries went through the roof; players changed teams like they were changing sanitary socks; and some fan disillusionment set in. It was predicted that the “rich” teams in large cities – New York Yankees, New York Mets, Los Angeles Dodgers -- would be able to take advantage of this player movement to monopolize talent at the expense of the “smaller-market” clubs, but it didn’t really happen. In fact, a wide variety of teams had their days in the sun during the 70s, 80s and 90s.
Owners tried to bolster their revenues by authorizing new baseball franchises, so the American League Seattle Mariners and Toronto Blue Jays were born in 1977. But the National League didn’t follow suit, marking yet another time when the two leagues did not see eye-to-eye. (Perhaps the most prominent instance of this came in 1973 when the American League instituted the rule that the pitcher was not required to bat and could be replaced in the batting order by a batter who was not required to play the field. This “designated hitter” rule still separates the brand of baseball played in the American League from that in the National League.)
In 1993 the National League finally caught up with the American League in team numbers by authorizing the addition of the Colorado Rockies and the Florida Marlins. The Rockies, once ensconced in a retro “old-school” ballpark (Coors Field) instead of a dreary multi-purpose baseball-football stadium, saw attendance go through the roof. This, and the success of Baltimore’s Camden Yards, prompted a frenzied round of ballpark building. Meanwhile, the Marlins played in a football stadium, but went from nowhere to a World Series Championship in just their fifth season.
But prior to the Marlins’ miracle came a cataclysmic event that many predicted would end baseball as we had come to know it – the strike of 1994. Certainly there had been baseball work stoppages before, and certainly each one had eroded a bit of the public’s regard for the game. The length of the 1994 strike and the acrimony it created was seen by some as a potential deathblow to baseball as a major sport in the United States. While other strikes and lockouts had been relatively short, this one lasted 232 days from mid-August 1994 until April 1995. It abruptly ended the 1994 regular season and prompted the cancellation of the World Series – the first World Series cancellation since John McGraw had refused to let his Giants play Boston in 1904. More than that, it turned many fans against the game.
When play resumed in 1995 attendance was spotty and television audiences were down. Again, as after the Black Sox scandal of 1919, it took home runs to have a home-run effect on the baseball box office. In 1998 St. Louis Cardinal Mark McGwire and Chicago Cub Sammy Sosa not only battled it out for the major league home run title but also threatened Roger Maris’ longstanding single season record of 61 homers. Eventually, in a competition marked by great sportsmanship and camaraderie between the two rivals, McGwire won the duel with an astounding total of 70, while Sosa with 66, also eclipsed Maris’ record and led the Cubs into the playoffs. The duel sparked fan interest and baseball was back on track.
1998 also marked the latest, but likely not the last, round of expansion and franchise shifts in major league baseball. Team owners authorized the creation of two new teams – the National League Arizona Diamondbacks and the American League Tampa Bay Devil Rays – and at the same time they moved the Milwaukee Brewers from the American to the National League, the first time a Major League team had switched leagues since the National League had taken in American Association clubs in the late 1800s.
Since the turn of the new millennium baseball has still had its issues to deal with, most markedly controversy revolving around the use of performance-enhancing growth drugs and hormones involving some of the game’s top players. And certainly other sports have come to challenge baseball dominance, and one of them, professional football, might arguably have reached similar status. But to many Americans, the summer game, the game of their youth, the game of a thousand fond remembrances – baseball – is the game they hold most dear. And as long as little kids still try to ht a round ball with a round bat, and hit it square, that will remain the case.
Excerpted from The History of Baseball Equipment: More Than a Century of Balls, Bats, Gloves, and Gear by Jack R. Nerad, Bob McCord, Robert McCord
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