War helped consolidate the many types of ball games like Town Ball played locally. The war brought together young men from around the country to interact in these games where previously such sports were almost always local. Coincidental with the Civil War was the growth of high speed transportation with trains and steam ships, high speed communication by telegraph, and high speed printing presses. With these new technologies stable teams were established that could organize travel to compete and the results of away game could be returned by telegraph and reported in newspapers which provided them with highly desired content. To this day the sports section and its speculative analysis and drama is one of the few popular sections of the few remaining pamphlets that call themselves newspapers.
So war popularized the playing of the early forms of baseball, but it was the emerging technology which made baseball a popular commercial spectator sport, as it did for most modern sports.
And, re vaudeville and stage plays, it gave players the chance to enjoy the same lifestyle of access to booze and women as they had during the season. Much better than working in a factory or a coal mine in the off season
A team rail car may not have been economically practical, nor well accepted everywhere. The Negro League teams usually had a team bus or number of vehicles where players could spend the night if need be. However, there are stories telling us there were usually accommodations available somewhere, just not the same ones white players could use. This was the nature of ‘separate but equal’, definitely separate, not so much equal.
This problem was not resolved until the 1960s, following over time the Civil Rights Act which ended Jim Crow laws, sports were fully integrated, and social changes made it unacceptable, as well as the growing economic pressure from pro sports. Teams would no longer stay at hotels that did not accept all their players. I’m sure there were occasional incidents still occurring into the 1970s where de facto segregation still existed.
No. No one thought so, and there’s no reason to think so. Any player, no matter how great, can perform poorly over a short series.
Ruth had one bad World Series after he came to the Yankees, in 1922 when he batted .118/.250/.176. Overall, though, his performance in the Series was excellent. His slash line in ten Series was .326/.470/.744, and that includes the years when he was a pitcher.
Most historians think the best Negro League players would have done very well in the majors if they’d had the chance. Consider how well former Negro Leaguers like Jackie Robinson, Ernie Banks, Willie Mays, and Hank Aaron did in MLB.
BTW, some baseball historians consider Oscar Charleston to be the best all-around player in Negro League history.
He did a lot to save MLB after the Black Sox scandal, but he was also opposed to integrating MLB, and since he had absolute authority to do whatever he deemed to be in the best interest of baseball, he effectively kept the color line in place. I think it was a mistake to make him commissioner for life. If he’d been given, say, a ten-year contract, MLB might have integrated sooner. Realistically, though, Landis was not the only force keeping the color line in place.
Huh?!?!?!?
There were a lot of Negro League teams with “Giants” in their names. It was a kind of code word.
This was a Negro League thing and it is truly confusing; in many cases the names were scarcely different, as you’d have a league with, say, both the Chicago Giants and Chicago American Giants. I am not sure why they did that except that some of the best Negro teams were called “Giants” so I guess it became a way to sell tickets.
There was a Cuban Giants who, I am delighted to note, had no Cubans and had nothing to do with Cuba. The owner just thought it sounded cool.
Braves Field in Boston is still in use (Nickerson Field) tho not as a baseball diamond, and not with the original infrastructure.
Crosley Field in Cincinnatti has been reconstituted across the Ohio River as Blue Ash Field, with a lot of the same seats and even the same left field scoreboard, as well as the incline that was out there.
At least 1-2 other fields are still in use, just without the stadium infrastructure.
After some trivial injuries, women who had formed some university teams were discouraged from playing baseball until Wrigley started a league during WW2. He took the best softball players and taught them to play hardball. But they seem like very similar games apart from ball size, pitching distance and some minor things. So why was softball deemed okay? The women’s league ran 10 years than was stopped and major leagues banned women professionals. Why?
They show an aged Commissioner Emertius Happy Chandler singing “Take Me Out To The Ball Game” but no questions or commentary on his support of Robinson. Did he eventually suffer from Alzheimer’s?
They discuss Branch Walker being the sole owner favouring integration. I did not realize Robinson led the Montreal Royals, a Brooklyn farm team, to a minor league World Series pennant. Was Canada rough on Robinson?
Pro Baseball in Japan was, per the series, started after Babe Ruth played an exhibition game. It stopped during WW2 but was encouraged by MacArthur as promoting democracy. Who was the first Japanese MLB player?
Satchel Paige played for Cleveland, a rookie at the age of 42, and led them to a pennant. Did he really have several unique pitches, or just call them colourful names?
Williams hit .406, insisting on playing the last 3 games rather than preserve the record with asterisks. How close did George Brett get? Is it possible to hit .400 in modern baseball?
DiMaggio got a hit in 56 straight games. Pete Rose got 44 but no one has really come close. Is this record out of reach?
Watching Robinson run the bases, I was reminded of the expression “quicker than you can say Jack Robinson”. Which predates 1780. Did other people make this obvious connection?
The music played during the series is largely a million variations on “Take Me Out to the Ball Game” and American anthems. But there were two other songs. One was a female singer asking people to swing their bat, and maybe hit a home run, which seems risqué for the time. The other was about “we’re going to win this ball game” The US way against the Axis. Were these songs popular in the 1940s? Who sings them?
Some Brooklyn fans became celebrities - “Heidi is Here” with her cowbell, the cacophonous Brooklyn Sym-Phony. Any interesting stories about early “super fans”?
Were all baseball stands segregated? They seem to be mixed in some photos.
Ted Williams, in his last World Series, did badly after the opposition moved many of their players towards first base. Would it have been so difficult to exploit the empty space opened between second and third base - is it really hard to switch hitting style?
I remember the Roland’s Relief Pitcher being a thing. Are there other instances of a major sport award being sold out to a corporate bidder? The Enron Bre-X Stanley Cup?
Brett hit .390 in 1980. Tony Gwynn hit .394 in 1994, but I think he didn’t have enough plate appearances that year to technically qualify. Rod Carew hit .388 in 1977, and Larry Walker hit .379 in 1999, and I don’t think that anyone else has gotten any closer in the past five decades.
It’s obviously really hard, and teams’ approaches to pitching have changed a lot over the past few decades – five-man starting rotations instead of four, starters not staying in the game as long, more specialized relievers – and those changes probably make it harder still. Note that no one has hit even .380 in the past 26 years.
I don’t think it’s impossible, but I do think it’s pretty improbable now.
Again, improbable, but not impossible, for some of the same reasons. There have been several streaks that have gotten into the 30s in the past few decades.
The “infield shift” has become a pretty common defensive strategy over the past couple of decades. It’s not used all the time, but most teams will use it against hitters who are strong “pull” hitters – that is, a right-handed batter who tends to pull the ball towards left field when they hit, or a left-handed batter who pulls towards right field. In the case of a righty pull-hitter, the defense moves the second baseman to the left side of the infield; for a lefty, they move the shortstop to the right side.
Hitters obviously can see that they’re being shifted against, but very few appear to be able to easily switch from pulling the ball to trying to hit to the “opposite field.” So, yeah, it does appear to be difficult to switch one’s hitting style.
You don’t even need to go to other sports. Rawlings (which makes baseball gloves) sponsors the Gold Glove awards, while Hillerich & Bradsby (which makes Louisville Slugger bats) sponsors the Silver Slugger awards.
A slight correction. It was the Rolaids Relief Man Award, named for the antacid, because if you had a good relief pitcher you wouldn’t get heartburn. The award was in the shape of a fireman’s helmet.
Montreal was a much, much friendlier place than most American cities.
Masanori Murakami was a relief pitcher for the Giants in 1964-1965. He was very young - just 20 his first year - and went back to Japan because of some contractual thing I don’t really recall.
Murakami was an extremely talented young pitcher; his strikeout rate was extremely high, indicative is genuine talent. He didn’t throw that hard but had nasty breaking stuff. He pitched a long time in the Japanese Leagues, though he didn’t consistently stay healthy.
Paige certainly did not actually have a bazillion different pitches. He was very, very smart, though, and knew what pitch to throw in a given situation and what location to pitch it to.
Well, Brett was five hits short. So yeah, I guess it is.
The MLB batting average goes up and down. In the 1980 AL, it was .269; last year the AL was at .253. It is, of course, slightly likelier to happen in a year when it’s .269. I’m not saying it will happen, but it could.
That was his ONLY World Series, and again, having one bad series is not a noteworthy thing. And did the shift matter? Williams hot only four ground balls to the right side in the series, one of which was to the first baseman anyway. So no, it really didn’t - and he did bunt a single to the left side.
Changing the way you hit in the majors is AMAZINGLY hard. The difference between success and abject failure is a few milliseconds.
There’s plenty in the book on which the series was based about earlier black players.
I don’t know how “puritanical” the NL was. Any league that tolerated John McGraw and the violence (against umps and other players) and sleazy tactics he and his teammates employed can hardly be viewed as without sin.
This has been wrangled over ad nauseam, but it should be pointed out that even if as a manager you bet only on your own team, this could lead to abuses - like overusing pitchers or other players in order to clean up on a game in which a lot of your money is at stake.
Mathewson was by most accounts a well-liked, clean-cut guy who also was a terrific pitcher. A saint he was not.
“Mathewson’s own behavior did not always match his sterling reputation. He threw wicked brushback pitches at batters’ heads, chewed out umpires, and occasionally threw punches during the Giants’ many on-field brawls. Revealing his contempt for umpires, he once said: “Many baseball fans look upon an umpire as a sort of necessary evil to the luxury of baseball, like the odor that follows an automobile.” During one brawl in 1904, Mathewson reportedly knocked down a boy selling lemonade near the Giants’ bench. Contradicting his clean-cut image, he occasionally drank beer, played poker and smoked cigars, but these habits were rarely reported in the popular press.”
It’s not a direct answer, but baseball has thrived in Cuba under dictatorships.
I see little point in arguing about whether great old-time ballplayers would succeed in today’s game. They hold a deserved place in baseball history because they were great during their time, even if modern players are mostly far better athletes, in part because of what John MacDonald once ironically termed “giant strides in nutrition”.
That said, some of the old-time greats (Walter Johnson comes to mind) would do just fine in present-day MLB. And I have a suspicion that if you transported a top team from today back in time to, say, 1917 and had them play a seven-game series against a great team from that dead-ball era using the old rules, poorly-groomed fields, battered baseballs hardly ever taken out of play and screamingly abusive fans, the 1917 squad might just win the series.
Keep in mind that professional athletes were often not trusted in the 19th century. The idea was that someone who take money to win would also be willing to take money to lose. This was part of the reasoning for limiting the modern Olympics to amateur athletes, although that may have mainly been a broader class issue. Team sports were considered somewhat less suspect based on the idea that team members would be less likely to betray their teammates. The team concept itself had been based on school and social club teams where members had close personal relationships not found in professional teams. Individual sports like boxing and wrestling were highly suspect if not involving winner take all ‘prize fights’.
Basically, you’re asking why organized baseball discriminated against women. All of society discriminated against women. It still does, although things are far closer to equality than they used to be.
Women used to be discouraged from playing most sports. A lot of people had the idea that women’s bodies were too delicate for rough games. Tennis might be OK, but anything that involved physical contact was out. The rules of some sports were different for women, to make them easier (supposedly). For example, in the early days of women’s basketball, dribbling was either limited or disallowed, which made it less likely that players would run into each other.
Softball is similar to baseball, but it’s hard to throw the ball as fast (because of its size), and it doesn’t come off the bat as fast (because of its size, weight, and elasticity). Because of this, it’s perceived as a safer sport (I don’t know whether it actually is safer). Girls and women are still encouraged to play softball instead of baseball.
Women were barred from many professions, and marginalized in others. There were exceptions during World War II, when women were needed to perform jobs that had been restricted to men. But when the war was over, women were forced out of these jobs to make room for the men who were returning to civilian life.
The All-American Girls Professional Baseball League was founded in 1943, in the middle of the war, at a time when MLB was forced to make do with a bunch of cast-offs because the best players had gone into the military. Public attention returned to MLB when the really good players returned after the war. At this point, women’s baseball was just a curiosity to most people. Attendance fell off, and eventually the women’s league went out of business.
His name was Branch Rickey, not Walker.
I’m sure that playing for a Canadian team was easier for Robinson than playing for an American team would have been. Racism has always been less of a problem in Canada than in the U.S.
Masanori Murakami was the first Japanese player in MLB. He came to the San Francisco Giants from the Nankai Hawks in 1964. There was some controversy after Murakami became an MLB player. Hawks management thought Murakami had gone to the U.S. only as a temporary thing, and wanted the Giants either to send him back or pay the Hawks some sort of compensation. Giants management believed Murakami was under legitimate contract to play for them, and that they didn’t owe the Hawks anything. Japanese baseball commissioner Masanori Murakami was brought in to settle the dispute, and he decided as a compromise to allow the Giants to keep Murakami for one more full season before sending him back to Japan.
I wouldn’t say Paige led Cleveland to the pennant in 1948. He was still an effective pitcher, but other players contributed more than he did (e.g. Lou Boudreau, Bob Lemon, Ken Keltner, and Larry Doby).
I don’t think Paige really had a bunch of unique pitches. There are only so many ways to throw a baseball.
Two games, not three. It was a season-ending double-header.
Brett hit .390 in 1980. He’d have hit .401 if he’d had just 5 more hits in the same number of at-bats. That’s pretty close. Rod Carew also came close in1977, when 8 more hits in the same number of at-bats would have put him over .400.
I don’t think it’s impossible for someone to hit .400 in today’s game, but it’s very unlikely. Pitching is better than it used to be, and so is defense. There’s less emphasis on batting averages and more on home runs. It’s hard to hit for a high average when you’re swinging for the fences all the time. Ted Williams would often choke up on the bat when there were two strikes against him. No one does that any more.
Again, it’s not impossible, but it’s very unlikely. It’s always been unlikely. No one else has come close to DiMaggio’s record in the entire history of MLB. And the trends of today’s game go against breaking the record. Improved pitching and defense make it less likely, as does the emphasis on hitting home runs.
It’s very hard to change hitting style. Hitting at that level involves a set of trained reactions that have been honed over many years. A player who tried to retrain his reactions would probably enter a slump that he might never recover from.
