Baseball

by George Vecsey

  Spalding seemed to need the big-bang theory of baseball to justify his patriotism. In 1906 he appointed Abraham G. Mills, the former president of the National League and a vice president of the Otis Elevator Co., to lead a national board to investigate baseball's roots. This was the very same Mills who had hammered home the American origins of baseball during that nine-course banquet at Delmonico's in 1889, leading to grown men pounding on the table and chanting: “No rounders! No rounders! No rounders!” Mills was now back for a second tour of duty in the table-pounding department.

  The seven members of the Mills committee were all reputable but none was a scholar or a researcher, nor did they have a staff to perform even basic tasks of culling information. As unheard of as this may be in contemporary America, their sole job seemed to be justifying a set belief.

  In 1907, Spalding came up with two letters from Abner Graves, a mining engineer in Colorado, who was originally from the village of Cooperstown in upstate New York. Graves recalled Abner Doubleday stopping a marbles game in front of a tailor shop to teach baseball to the youths of Cooperstown—“Abner Doubleday being then a boy pupil of ‘Green's Select School,’” Graves added. At times, Graves was vague about the exact year of Doubleday's “invention,” but ultimately he settled on 1839, when he would have been five and Doubleday would have been twenty.

  Doubleday was born on June 26, 1819, in Ballston Spa, approximately seventy-five miles from Cooperstown, and grew up in Auburn, far west of that area. His father, Ulysses, had been baptized in Cooperstown, but there is no specific evidence of Abner's ever setting foot in the town. He entered West Point on September 1, 1838, and in 1839 he would surely have been court-martialed had he been discovered nearly 100 miles away from the academy, playing a ball game. There is no record of him leaving the academy during that time, nor is there any trace of his involvement with baseball.

  “You ask for some information as to how I passed my youth,” Doubleday once responded to a letter from a citizen, late in his military career. “I was brought up in a book store and early imbibed a taste for reading. I was fond of poetry and much interested in mathematical studies. In my outdoor sports, I was addicted to topographical work and even as a boy amused myself by making maps of the country around my father's residence, which was in Auburn, N.Y.”

  Doubleday was commissioned from the Military Academy in 1842 and served in Monterrey, Mexico. On April 12, 1861, he fired the first shot at rebel troops menacing Fort Sumter, and later he served at Bull Run and Antietam with a minor role at Gettysburg, helping to repel Pickett's fatal charge.

  Baseball had grown popular among both the blue and gray soldiers of the time, but in Doubleday's entire life there is only one single link with the sport: in 1871, when he was finishing his career in charge of an all-black regiment at Fort McKavett, Texas, he requested baseball equipment for his troops, for recreation.

  Doubleday retired from the military in 1873 and used his scientific skills to help build the first cable car railway in San Francisco. He died at the age of seventy-four on January 26, 1893, in Mend-ham, New Jersey, and was buried in Arlington National Cemetery. A decade after his death, Doubleday was advanced as the father of a game he apparently had never played or discussed.

  Ulysses Doubleday's older brother, Demas, did live in Springfield, just to the north of Cooperstown, and in 1829 he had a son, Abner Demas Doubleday, who lived around Cooperstown until after the Civil War. In his addled later years, Graves could have confused Abner Demas Doubleday with the future general, despite the ten-year gap in their ages.

  Mills's connection is complicated, in that he had been a friend of Doubleday and had served in the honor guard when Doubleday's body lay in state in New York's City Hall. The findings by the Mills commission were published in Spalding's next baseball guide in March of 1908, but were signed by only one person—Mills himself. The league presidents verified the findings but Chadwick died that spring without responding to the official linking of Doubleday and baseball.

  In June of 1924, Graves, then ninety, shot and killed his second wife, Minnie, in a dispute over the sale of their house. He died in a state asylum for the criminally insane in Pueblo, Colorado, in the fall of 1926. His troubled old age would seem to cast doubts on his flickering memories of a childhood experience in Cooperstown— but he was Spalding's star witness, his only witness, and he served a purpose. With its relatively short history, the United States was quite well served by the prospect that a prominent general had dreamed up the game in one of the thirteen original states, that the sport was a purely American invention.

  Spalding's mischief went a long way. In 1935, a distant relative of Abner Graves found a scruffy and tattered baseball in a farmhouse in Fly Creek, just outside Cooperstown. The so-called Fly Creek Ball somehow wound up being accepted as the talisman and proof of Doubleday's involvement with the game. The absolute lack of proof would not reach critical mass for many decades. In the meantime, lucky old baseball was about to gain a core, a home, a central place where everybody could celebrate the American game. The Hall would become the most popular sports museum in the country, and Albert Spalding would remain a hallowed figure, despite his strange involvement in the Doubleday myth.

  The old pitcher became a wealthy man through his sporting goods empire, which included Spalding's Official Baseball Guide, first published in 1876, plus the manufacture of uniforms, bats, balls, croquet equipment, ice skates, fishing gear, tennis racquets, dumbbells, shoes, caps, hunting goods, and bicycles.

  The Spalding name survives in the memory of generations of city children who played ball games (punchball, stickball, stoopball) with the lively pink ball manufactured by the Spalding company. Lifetime reputations were made by neighborhood heroes who could hit a pink ball the distance of three sewer manholes, or punch a pink ball off the brick wall of a grade school. In New York, when I grew up, any bouncy pink ball was called a spaldeen.

  —

  Like generations of Americans, old A.G. left Chicago and moved to a warmer clime—Point Loma, California, where he ran for the Senate, and lost. His wife, Josie, died in 1899 but he soon married Elizabeth Mayer Churchill, with whom he already had a son, who was promptly renamed Albert Goodwill Spalding, Jr.

  This second marriage, with its background of scandal, raises a connection between Spalding and Doubleday: the second Mrs. Spalding had become interested in Theosophy, a spiritual movement, and the old pitcher became president of the American Theosophical Society. In his later years, Doubleday had subscribed to the Transcendentalist journal the Dial and had attended spiritual gatherings in the White House with President and Mrs. Lincoln. At the very least, Spalding, in California, would have been aware of Doubleday through their mutual interest in Theosophy. Aside from Graves's two letters, it is unclear why Spalding settled on Doubleday as the father of baseball. Was it a cynical act or wishful thinking? We may never know. Spalding died on September 9, 1915, at the age of sixty-five, his funeral held at the Theosophy center, known as the Temple of Aryans.

  —

  The sport lucked out with the setting of the Hall, in a charming corner of Americana. The burghers of Cooperstown disregarded any questions about the Doubleday myth, and opened the Hall in time for the alleged centennial year of 1939. Members of the Baseball Writers Association of America voted in 1936 for the first entering class, with Ty Cobb, Babe Ruth, Honus Wagner, Walter Johnson, and Christy Mathewson all receiving the necessary 75 percent. The next year, Tris Speaker was chosen, along with Napoleon Lajoie and Cy Young. In 1938, Grover Cleveland Alexander was chosen, and in 1939, George Sisler, Eddie Collins, and Wee Willie Keeler were picked, among others. The same year, Lou Gehrig, whose fatal illness had just been diagnosed, was quickly installed, as the Hall bypassed its rule that a player must have been retired for five years. Chadwick was chosen in 1938 as a builder of the game and Spalding followed in 1939.

  The first induction ceremony was held on June 12, 1939, with many of the honorees in attendance, but n
ot all. Back home, working as a greeter in a bar, Alexander was quoted as saying: “The Hall of Fame is fine, but it doesn't mean bread and butter. It's only your picture on the wall.”

  Alexander's pragmatism was soon overwhelmed by the newfound passion for the Hall. Old players lived out their lives hoping to be tapped for the Hall, however belatedly. In reality, there are about five levels of the Hall of Fame, ranging from giants like Babe Ruth to friends of friends or beneficiaries of myth and sentimentality. Fans, writers, and baseball people spend years advocating old-timers who have been slighted by the selection process, first by the baseball writers or later by a panel of old-timers. For many years, Ted Williams was a huge political force on the review committee, paving the way for players he admired—most notably, his old teammate Bobby Doerr and his old rival Phil Rizzuto.

  Williams became a voice of conscience, perhaps because of his own childhood experiences with intolerance, since his mother was a Mexican-American in San Diego. During his induction speech in 1966, Williams made an emphatic request: “I hope that some day Satchel Paige and Josh Gibson will be voted into the Hall of Fame as symbols of the great Negro players who are not here only because they weren't given the chance.” People listened to the justice in Williams's thundering tones: in 1971, Paige was voted into the Hall, since followed by seventeen other Negro Leagues players— all in the main wing, as total equals. Early in 2006, the Hall held a mass election and accepted seventeen other prominent veterans of the Negro Leagues.

  For every player voted into the Hall, however belatedly, there are others who fall short of the mysterious shifting line. Hearts are broken every year when beloved hitters like Tony Oliva and Gil Hodges or durable pitchers like Tommy John and Jim Kaat are once again passed over.

  —

  For a long time, the Hall went along with the Doubleday legend but in the past generation it has become a repository not only for artifacts but for verifiable history. The Graves letters, lost but recovered in 1997, are no more enlightening than they were in Mills's time. Years ago somebody took down the sign “Birthplace of Baseball” from the Cooperstown exit off the New York State Thruway. There is still a Doubleday Field in Cooperstown, where every year two major league teams play an exhibition, in homage to the man who apparently never played the game in his life.

  The Hall keeps growing into a sophisticated, multimedia, online, year-round haven of souvenirs and records, available to serious researchers or casual tourists mainly interested in souvenir T-shirts of their favorite member of the Hall. Yet the Hall is saved from being totally Disneyfied by its location in sleepy upstate New York. The sport also got lucky because the annual induction takes place at the end of July, when little else is happening. No other sport is blessed with the living Norman Rockwell tableau of the induction ceremony: fans pile into rooming houses and bed-and-breakfasts around Cooperstown and chase down autographs from the stars; agile boys hang from tree branches and gape as the old players weep while being inducted into the Hall.

  In the evening, aging members of the Hall sit on wicker chairs in view of the classic American lake, Otsego, straight out of James Fenimore Cooper, and they tell stories about the old days. Baseball is all about stories, many of which are even true.

  V

  GROWING PAINS

  The newly established league had one gaping hole: it did not have a team in New York. And that would not do. Ban Johnson, the president, was a Midwesterner, but he knew that any outfit that dared to call itself the American League needed a franchise in the big city.

  A large man with large ambitions, Johnson had been a sportswriter in Cincinnati before he became president of the Western League in 1893. He found investors and players for his league, cracking down on gambling and crude behavior, and in 1901, Johnson changed the name to the American League, going against the westward flow of population to establish himself on the eastern seaboard.

  The twentieth century could now officially begin. Charles Comiskey's franchise was moved from St. Paul, Minnesota, to Chicago, and in 1902 the Milwaukee Brewers became the St. Louis Browns. Under Johnson's aggressive recruiting of players, his league outdrew the National League, prompting an agreement that made the leagues equals and competitors in 1903.

  Then came the move that would change the American League forever: Johnson encouraged the Baltimore team to transfer to New York, only a mile or two from the haughty Giants of the National League. Located on a plateau in upper Manhattan, the Highlanders, or Hilltoppers, would wallow in mediocrity or worse for nearly two decades, by which time the team had changed its name again. The new nickname was Yankees.

  After that flurry of musical chairs in the early years of the century, the two major leagues coalesced into a stable enterprise of eight teams apiece, starting in 1903. The American League consisted of the Highlanders, St. Louis Browns, Chicago White Stockings, Boston Puritans or Pilgrims, Detroit Tigers, Cleveland Indians, Philadelphia Athletics, and Washington Nationals, while the National teams were the Boston Braves, Brooklyn Superbas, New York Giants, Philadelphia Phillies, Pittsburgh Pirates, Cincinnati Reds, Chicago Cubs, and St. Louis Cardinals. These sixteen franchises would remain in place for a solid half century. How many institutions can say that?

  Every sport needs its rivalries. The first feud of the century was between Johnson and pugnacious John J. McGraw, who had moved from Baltimore to the Giants in 1902. A former infielder from St. Bonaventure University in upstate New York, McGraw advocated the scrappy style the Orioles had played a decade earlier, with wiry and hungry athletes slashing line drives for doubles and triples, tossing their elbows and sharpening their spikes. In the eyes of Muggsy McGraw, the home run was essentially a novelty item.

  McGraw soon took on the entire upstart American League, calling the financially challenged Athletics “white elephants.” Connie Mack, their owner-manager, proudly adopted a white elephant as his team's symbol. Willowy at six feet, one inch tall and 150 pounds, the former catcher struck a more dignified pose than McGraw. Born Cornelius McGillicuddy in East Brookfield, Massachusetts, he shortened his name to please the fans or perhaps the newspaper typesetters.

  When he was long past wearing a uniform, Mack wore a conservative suit in his dugout, just like the bankers who filed into the ballpark at closing hour. Year in, year out, he would strike his characteristic pose, rolling up a scorecard in one hand and giving signals to the men in uniform. As a former player, with no outside income, Mack did not have the luxury of considering himself a sportsman but instead was at the mercy of the attendance and his team's position in the standings. He was strapped by Philadelphia's position as the last major league city to have blue laws, which until 1934 forbade baseball games and other entertainment on Sunday. This restriction meant the Athletics often had to travel overnight to play Sunday games elsewhere. Mack would be vilified for selling off his best players, but that tactic would be used by many other cash-strapped owners over the years.

  Despite McGraw's yapping at the American League, the owners agreed on the moneymaking potential of a postseason championship series, the first since 1890. The Pittsburgh team from the National League played Boston of the American League in a best-of-nine format in 1903, starting with three games at Boston, followed by four in Pittsburgh and then returning to Boston for what turned out to be Boston's clinching in the eighth game. The Boston management was unprepared for huge crowds but was not about to turn away paying customers, even though the crowd threatened to spill onto the field. A group of fans called the Royal Rooters, led by Nuf Ced McGreevey, incessantly sang a show tune, “Tessie,” and many people felt the energy unleashed by the song had powered Boston to victory.

  The term “World Series” has an ironic ring these days, given the high level of play in some Asian and Latin American countries, but in those days the name pretty much reflected the only powerhouse in the world. As grandiose as it was, the name “World Series” fit the optimistic mood of the fast-growing republic. McGraw ratcheted up his feud with John
son and refused to let his Giants play the defending champions from Boston in 1904, but the following season McGraw was persuaded to behave and the Giants won the resumption of the World Series.

  The new century had its stars, known all over the country: Ty Cobb, the Georgia Peach; deceptively stocky Honus Wagner; the durable pitcher Cy Young, who would win 192 games for Boston in the first eight years of the American League. The most popular player of all was Christy Mathewson, out of Bucknell College in rural Pennsylvania, who kept his promise to his mother that he would not pitch on the Sabbath and soon became the first national example of the gentleman athlete, contradicting baseball's rowdy image.

  Known as Big Six—either for his height of six feet, one and a half inches, or a popular fire engine or early automobile— Mathewson threw a pitch he called the fadeaway, which broke the opposite way from the normal right-handed orbit. He pitched virtually every third game, ultimately winning 373 and losing 188.

  The composed Mathewson and the tempestuous McGraw became close friends, the original odd couple, sharing a Manhattan apartment along with their wives. Although Mathewson could be distant, the public respected him for his pitching, his high standards, and his handsome features. Then he became baseball's foremost casualty of war.

  When the Great War broke out in Europe in 1914, the United States tried to ignore it, and did not enter the conflict until April of 1917. With war dragging on, America faced a challenge to its isolationist posture. When anonymous young Americans began to die in the forests and fields of Europe, the American sport faced pressure to respond. In May of 1918, the United States adopted a “work-or-fight” policy for able-bodied men, the first time any American sport had been under public pressure to respond to a national crisis. Since baseball had postured itself as the embodiment of national values, its players were under pressure to either join a defense industry or volunteer for the military. For most of them, the war would be a brief inconvenience, but Eddie Grant, the Harvard graduate and captain of the Giants, became the only major-leaguer to die directly from combat, when he was killed in the Argonne Forest while fighting to rescue the Lost Battalion.