Take Me Back to the Ball Game
It's like déjà vu all over again.
— Yogi Berra
One hundred years ago this October, the Boston Americans faced the Pittsburgh Pirates
in Baseball's first World Series. It would be natural to assume that much has changed in
the tumultuous century since the National Pastime played its first true championship. But,
as Louis P. Masur's enjoyable new book Autumn Glory reminds us, baseball a
century ago was actually much like baseball now, with a few notable exceptions. Chief
among them: 100 years ago, teams from Boston actually played in the postseason.
Masur's book is a hybrid of historical scholarship and popular storytelling; he has combed
the colorful newspapers of the period for a mind-boggling array of details, which give
Autumn Glory a particularly vivid account of the baseball world in 1903 and the
first World Series in particular. Chapters with nearly pitch-by-pitch accounting of each of
the Boston-Pittsburgh games alternate with descriptions of the competing National and
American leagues, summaries of the 1903 season as a whole, and brief excursions into
the personalities, and antics, on display during the first World Series.
A few players will be familiar to contemporary fans: Hall-of-Famers Honus Wagner and
Cy Young make frequent appearances, Wagner at shortstop for the Pirates and Young on
the mound for Boston. But even Baseball aficionados will raise an eyebrow at the rest, a
rogues gallery of names that would be at home in an Atlantic City chorus line: Claude
Ritchey, Ginger Beaumont, Deacon Phillippe, Chick Stahl, Candy LaChance, Patsy
Dougherty. Off the field, Mike McGreevey is, you guessed it, an Irish barkeep, whose
raucous Royal Rooters followed the Boston team to Pittsburgh, hiring local orchestras to
accompany their cheers while in the stands and carousing with the players after the
games.'
In Masur's account, the most remarkable feature of the 1903 series is that it happened at
all. As 1903 dawned, the American League and the National League were two separate,
warring baseball entities. While the National League dated back to 1876, and enjoyed a
near-monopoly on talent from 1891 onward, the American League sprang up in 1900 and
immediately began raiding National League teams for players. The new league was so
successful in getting players to switch -- 45 of the 46 players sought made the change --
in large part because American League owners were shrewd enough to recognize
baseball's first labor union. Higher salaries in the American League drew the stars of the
era, which, in turn, lured fans to rapidly constructed ballparks. In the first three years of
its existence, the American League launched teams in National League cities -- including
Philadelphia, St. Louis, Chicago, Boston and New York -- and drew more fans in each
place. Masur's description of American League officials arriving at cities under the cover
of darkness to recruit players, and leaving before dawn to avoid National League
enforcers, is a representative delight.
The conflict ended in January 1903, when owners from both organizations agreed to
honor existing player contracts and settled the awkward situation of some fifteen
entrepreneurial players who had agreed to play for teams in both leagues. Masur delves
into considerable detail here, eventually unearthing magnanimous quotations from
baseball owners like Cincinnati's Gary Hermann, who hosted the reconciliation: "I am
here for peace, not because it is to the advantage of the Cincinnati Club from a financial
standpoint, but because the people's pastime should be placed on a higher plane." Both
leagues would adopt the same National Commission in August of that year.
The chapters on the World Series games are at once informative, poignant, exciting and,
alas, repetitive. A distinct feature of sports writing is its inability to capture the grace and
spontaneity of the athletic contests it records. Add one hundred years to the mix, and
things can get stale:
Jimmy Sebring led off the bottom of the seventh with a single to right, and
Ed Phelps followed with a poke past second. The fans awakened and hoped that, at last,
the lethargic Pirate bats had done the same. Leever was due up, and Clarke must have
thought about pinch-hitting for him, but he had no reliable reliever to bring into the game.
Leever did his job by grounding to first and advancing the runners into scoring position.
Joyce, or even Jack Buck, it's not. Still, Masur's efforts to render the series tangible are
valiant. He is good at finding the right source:
The fans could not contain themselves. They prayed. They pleaded. They
screamed. Frank M'Quiston observed that "men who could write their checks in six
figures stood on chairs along side of the day laborer and yelled until black in the face."
People "were slapping one another on the backs, jumping up and down, and carrying on
like a lot of maniacs, and such yelling was enough to put any twirler up in the
air."
The amount of research necessary to offer descriptions of each game of the 1903 World
Series should not be underestimated. Still, it is curious why Masur offers so much about
these games themselves, and comparatively less about the broader context in which they
took part. Time and time again, we get tantalizing details that would have made good
chapters unto themselves. Women appear in the stands on occasion, and Boston socialite
Marian Lawrence Peabody gushes to her diary that Honus Wagner resembles a "plain
Greek god," but, other than that, we have little idea how many women attended games
regularly. The struggle of African-American baseball players against the color barrier
doesn't even get mentioned in Masur's book. While the fist Negro League was not
established until 1920, Black ballplayers had been active in the game's minor leagues
since the 19th century. It's an especially problematic omission given the fact that Masur
is eager to wax philosophic about the civic spirit of the game: "Baseball was democracy
at work, a game open to anyone." In the words of Yogi Berra, take this whitewashing
with "a grin of salt."
Still, you can't strike out on a foul ball. Though we may hope for even-handedness in
baseball writing, there is only so much room for logic in baseball. Thus the game's mystic
qualities have been mined endlessly for metaphors of America as a place where, as on the
baseball diamond, one man can change the fate of many. William Randolph Hearst even
went so far as to suggest that the superiority of the American fighting man was the result
of his having played baseball in his youth. Masur doesn't go far as to link the course of
empire with the baseball diamond, but he does find something else in the game:
redemption. After revealing that baseball originally conflicted with establishments of
religion, particularly in regard to the necessity of playing games on Sunday, the author
concludes that the end result was the engulfing of one by the other. He cites an unnamed
source, who boasted: "There are three subjects which are not reducible to reason: politics,
religion and baseball; and the greatest of these is baseball."
Amen, brother.
— 17 September 2003
