Baseball (TV series)

"Brooklyn Daily Eagle, 1846: In our sun-down perambulations, of late, through the outer parts of Brooklyn, we have observed several parties of youngsters playing "base", a certain game of ball...Let us go forth awhile, and get better air in our lungs. Let us leave our close rooms...the game of ball is glorious."

"It is played everywhere: in parks and playgrounds, prison yards, in back alleys and farmers’ fields; by small boys and old men, raw amateurs and millionaire professionals. It is a leisurely game that demands blinding speed; the only game in which the defense has the ball. It follows the seasons, beginning each year with the fond expectancy of springtime and ending with the hard facts of autumn.Americans have played baseball for more than 200 years; while they conquered a continent, warred with each other and with enemies abroad, struggled over labor and civil rights, and with the meaning of freedom.At its heart lie mythic contradictions: a pastoral game born in crowded cities, an exhilarating democratic sport that tolerates cheating, and has excluded as many as it has included. A profoundly conservative game that often manages to be years ahead of its time. It is an American Odyssey that links sons and daughters to fathers and grandfathers, and it reflects a host of age-old American tensions; between workers and owners, scandal and reform, the individual and the collective.It is a haunted game in which every player is measured with the ghosts of those who have gone before. Most of all it is about time and timelessness, speed and grace, failure and loss, imperishable hope, and coming home.The game’s greatest figures have come from everywhere: coal mines and college campuses, city slums and country crossroads. A brawling Irish immigrant’s son [John McGraw] who for more than half a century preached a rough and scrambling brand of baseball in which anything went so as long victory was achieved; and his favorite player, a college-educated right-hander [Christy Mathewson] so uniformly virtuous that millions of schoolboys worshipped him as 'The Christian Gentleman'.A mill hand [Shoeless Joe Jackson] who could neither read nor write who might have been one of the game's greatest heroes if temptation had not proved too great. A flamboyant federal judge [Kenesaw Mountain Landis] who at first saved baseball from a scandal that threatened to destroy it, but later became an implacable enemy of reform.A miner’s son from Commerce, Oklahoma [Mickey Mantle], who made himself the game’s most powerful switch-hitter despite 17 seasons of ceaseless pain. A tight-fisted Methodist [Branch Rickey], "a cross", one sportswriter said, "between a statistician and an Evangelist", who profoundly changed the game twice. And there were those whose true greatness was never fully measured because of the stubborn prejudice that permeated the nation and its favorite game.Two of baseball's best began life in rural Georgia: A swift and savage competitor who may have been the greatest player of all time [Ty Cobb], but whose uncontrollable rage in the end made him more enemies than friends; and another no less fierce competitor [Jackie Robinson] who, because he managed to hold his temper, made professional baseball a truly national pastime more than a century after it was born.And then there was the Baltimore saloonkeeper’s turbulent son [Babe Ruth], who became the best-known and best-loved athlete in American history."

"It's fun. That's what it is. It's fun. Baseball's more fun than anything else. You can watch it and just love it and enjoy it. I don't think there's anything tremendously philosophical about it. I don't think there's anything metaphysical. I just think it's so much fun to watch. You watch a player do something. You watch a second baseman go up in the air on a double play, and he throws the ball, and he's like a bird in flight. And he's watching to see what happens. You see a first baseman take a bad throw in the dirt and come up with stuff like that and sort of wander off the bag as if there's no problem at all. It's just delightful."

"One summer day in 1839 in Cooperstown, New York, on the shores of Lake Otsego, the local academy was playing a game of town ball against Green's Select School. The rules of town ball were so loose that every hit was fair, and boys sometimes ran headlong into one another. That day, an academy player named Abner Doubleday sat down and, on the spot, drew up the rules for a brand new game and called it Baseball. Abner Doubleday would eventually become a hero at the Battle of Gettysburg, and his game would become the national pastime. Or so the legend has it. Abner Doubleday really was a distinguished soldier, but he was at West Point, not Cooperstown, that summer, never claimed to have had anything to do with baseball, may never have even seen a professional game. Baseball's real history is more complicated."

"1786: a fine day. Play ball in the campus, but am beaten, for I miss catching and striking the ball."

"Of all baseball’s ancestors, townball was by far the most popular. Under its rules, the infield was square. Eight to 15 men played on a side—sometimes, as many as 50. The pitcher, or feeder, was the least important player. It was his job to lob the ball to the striker, who could wait and wait for the pitch he wanted. The runner was out if the ball was caught on the fly, or if he was soaked: hit with the ball while running between bases. By 1800, townball and its many variations were played nearly everywhere. On their way back from the Pacific Ocean, Lewis and Clark played a game of base with the Nez Perce Indians as they prepared to cross the Bitterroot Mountains. In the 1830s, on the western frontier of Missouri, ball was the favorite sport of Joseph Smith, the founder of a new religious sect called the Mormons. But back east in Cooperstown, New York, city fathers passed an ordinance restricting play after merchants complained about too many broken windows. Meanwhile, in New York City, they were starting to play a brand-new version of the game."

"By the spring of 1861, there were 62 member clubs in the National Association of Base Ball Players. Free Blacks in northern cities had established their own teams, and Henry Chadwick was trying to start a baseball club in Richmond, Virginia, when the new season was suddenly interrupted."

"Virginia, April 3, 1862. It is astonishing how indifferent a person can become to danger. The report of musketry is heard but a very little distance from us,...yet over there on the other side of the road is most of our company, playing Bat Ball and perhaps in less than half an hour, they may be called to play a Ball game of a more serious nature."

"In October 1867, as federal troops enforced civil rights laws in the South, the African-American Pythian Baseball Club of Philadelphia applied for membership in the Pennsylvania Association of Baseball Players. They were turned away. Two months later, the National Association took up the issue: "If colored clubs were admitted, there would in all probability be some division of feeling, whereas, by excluding them, no injury could result to anyone." Despite the ban, the Pythians became the first recorded all-black team to play a white team, the Philadelphia City Items: a group of newspapermen. The Pythians won: 27–17. Their captain, Octavius Catto, was later killed in a Philadelphia race riot that started when Blacks attempted to exercise their right to vote."

"On many summer day, I played baseball starting at 8 in the morning, running home at noon for a quick meal, and again with fielding and batting until it was too dark to see the ball. There were times when my head seemed empty of everything but baseball names and figures. I could name the players who led in batting and fielding, and the pitchers who had won the most games. And I had my opinions — about who was better than anybody else in the national game."

"Moses Fleetwood Walker, an Ohio clergyman's son who first played varsity ball for Oberlin College, was the first black to make it all the way to the majors. He joined Toledo of the American Association as a catcher in 1884 and immediately ran into a wall of bigotry. The Irish pitcher, Tony Mullane, ignored Walker's signals because, he said, he wouldn't take orders from a black man. Cap Anson himself tried to have Walker ejected from an exhibition game, threatening not to play if someone didn't "get that nigger off the field!" Anson backed down only when he realized he'd have to forfeit his pay if he really did walk out."

"In 1884, when diphtheria swept through his village, he [John McGraw] was a slight, eager eleven-year-old whose proudest possession was the battered baseball he had been allowed to order from the Spalding catalogue. He watched helplessly as, one by one, his mother and four of his brothers and sisters died. His father took out his grief and anger on his son, beating him so often and so mercilessly that at 12 he feared for his life and ran away from home."

"He [McGraw] supported himself at odd jobs until he won himself a place on the Olean [New York] professional team at sixteen and never again willingly took orders from any man. Although he was short and weighed barely 155 pounds, he held far bigger base runners back by the belt, blocked them, tripped them, spiked them—and rarely complained when they did the same to him."

"Once, early in his career, a shy young outfielder dared compliment a New York Giant for hitting a home run. "Nice hit," he said. The veteran answered, "Go to hell." The young player was Johannes Peter Wagner, "Honus" Wagner, on his way to becoming the greatest player in the National League."

"Now, Ban Johnson ordered his American League owners to have their stadiums patrolled to keep rowdiness down. Players and managers, as well as fans, were expected to behave. But there was one man who constantly challenged his authority. John Joseph McGraw, player-manager of the contentious Baltimore Orioles, had been one of the first National Leaguers to jump to the American League in 1901. But he had not liked it there. He could not bear to have anyone tell him how to play the game. When McGraw refused to stop the constant abuse of umpires—for which he was infamous—Johnson suspended him. McGraw never forgave Johnson. He returned to the National League as manager of the New York Giants, a job he would hold for 31 years, leading his team to 10 pennants and ending in the First Division 28 times."

"For African Americans, it remained the worst of times. Eight-hundred and fifty-eight Blacks were lynched during the decade. Separate but unequal laws held them in virtual bondage in the South, and helped drive thousands north to already dangerously-crowded cities in search of a better life. The National Pastime too had nothing to offer; Blacks were still barred from playing in organized white baseball."

"In 1901, a twenty-year-old elementary school teacher named Branch Rickey managed to scrape together enough money to enter Ohio Wesleyan University. His mother sent him a dollar bill each month to help him out, but he always returned it. Rickey was determined to make something of himself and to do it on his own. To pay his school bills, he helped coach the Ohio Wesleyan Baseball Team, urging his players on with a booming voice no one ever forgot. "Rickey is one of the noisiest men who ever played on the field," wrote a campus sportswriter. When the team stopped in South Bend, Indiana, a hotel manager refused to allow the team’s star, a catcher named Charlie Thomas [a black man], to register. The memory of the player’s humiliation never left Branch Rickey."

"The greatest ballplayer of all time? ... I pick the Detroit man because he is, in my judgment, the most expert man in his profession and is able to respond better than any other ballplayer, to any demand made on him. ... He plays ball with his whole anatomy — his head, his arms, his hands, his legs, his feet. ...I have never seen a man who had his heart more centered in a sport than Cobb has when he’s playing. ... I believe Cobb would continue to play ball if he were charged something for the privilege, and if the only spectator were the groundskeeper."

"Ty Cobb liked sentimentality in his opponents, because he had none himself. Baseball, he said, is something like a war."

"Every rookie gets a little hazing, but most of them just take it and laugh. Cobb took it the wrong way. He came up with an antagonistic attitude, which in his mind turned any little razzing into a life-and-death struggle. He always figured everybody was ganging up on him. He came up from the South and he was still fighting the Civil War. As far as he was concerned, we were all damn Yankees before he even met us."

"[Ty] Cobb got into trouble again in 1909. During a crucial August game between the Tigers and the Philadelphia Athletics, he was accused of deliberately spiking the third baseman, Frank Baker. Connie Mack, the normally courtly Philadelphia manager, even called Cobb "the dirtiest player in baseball," and Ban Johnson suggested that if he didn’t "stop this sort of playing he will have to quit the game." Cobb just went on playing his sort of game, snarling, swearing, shoving, spiking – while hitting .650 in sixteen games at home, and averaging one stolen base every afternoon."

"He never complained, never alibied. He was never known to criticize a teammate or call an opposing ballplayer 'lucky'. He accepted his great success modestly, and the many vicissitudes of his life in silence. He was easy to like, and hard to know."

"Baseball suits the character of this democratic nation. Democracy is government by persuasion. That means it requires patience; that means it involves a lot of compromise. Democracy is the slow politics of the half-loaf. Baseball is the game of the long season where small incremental differences decide who wins and who loses particular games, series, seasons. In baseball, you know going to the ballpark that the chances are you may win, but you also may lose. There's no certainty, no given. You know when a season starts that the best team is going to get beaten a third of the time; the worst team is going to win a third of the time. The argument, over 162 games, is that middle third. So it's a game you can’t like if winning is everything. And democracy is that way, too."

"Back in 1909, a rookie outfielder named Harry Hooper reported for spring training with the Boston Red Sox. He was a college man, and he began to keep a diary of the often-dreary life on the road:Thursday, March 25: Played the bench. Came near getting into game when [Tris] Speaker got hit sliding home, but stayed in the game. Harry Wolter and myself take in moving pictures in evening.Friday, April 16: Walk to top of Washington Monument with Nickerson.... Play left field in afternoon.... Get two hits in four, one single, 3 [putouts, and] one assist to plate.Monday, April 19: President Taft sees game.Monday, April 26: Doc Powers [catcher Mike Powers], who took sick at the finish of opening game, died today. We sent $25 for a wreathMonday, May 10: Rained all day. Sat around in hotel.Wednesday, May 12: We are invited to the Burlesque at the Empire. Good show—for its kind.Monday, June 28: Beat Washington. Got hit off [Walter] Johnson which scores winning run.–Harry Hooper"

"In 1919, no team played better than the Chicago White Sox, Pennant winners of the American League, and few teams were paid as poorly, or got along as badly. Players deliberately crossed each other on the field. During infield practice, no one threw the ball to second baseman Eddie Collins, Chicago’s highest-paid player, all season long. Teammate Chick Gandil had not spoken to Collins since 1915. “I thought you couldn’t win without teamwork,” Collins said later, “until I joined the White Sox, yet somehow we won 100 games and the Pennant that year.” The White Sox were heavy favorites to beat the better-paid but far weaker Cincinnati Reds in the World Series. The Chicago owner was the Old Roman, Charles A. Comiskey, himself a former player, but now among the game’s most parsimonious executives."

"In two years, he [Shoeless Joe Jackson] had risen from a poor mill hand to the rank of a player in the major leagues. The ignorant mill boy had become the hero of millions. Out on the hot prairies, teams of "Joe Jacksons" battled desperately with the "Ty Cobbs." There came a day when a crook spread money before this ignorant idol and he fell. For a few dollars...he sold his honor..."

"[Shoeless Joe Jackson] A South Carolina country boy, had learned to bat from a Confederate veteran who had learned his baseball from Union soldiers in a northern prison camp. He had hoped to be a pitcher until he broke a batter's arm with a wild pitch."

"Jackson could neither read nor write, but he could hit; .408 in his rookie year, .356 lifetime — the third highest average in history. His home runs were called Saturday Specials because most of the textile workers' games in which he got his start were played on Saturdays, and he hit them with a special 48-ounce bat, Black Betsy, made for him by a local lumberman from the north side of a hickory tree and darkened with coat after coat of Jackson's tobacco juice."

"Only at bat did Jackson evidently forget the script—he would bat .375 in the Series."

"Well I was at all the Chicago games, and Eddie Cicotte, one of our pitchers, who had won 29 games and lost 7 during the season, lost his two games, and Lefty Williams lost his two games. I’ve forgotten what his 1919 record was, but it was great, and it was just virtually impossible for those two men to lose two games each and be honest."

"Who is this Baby Ruth? And what does she do?"

"Now, at any other time, something so disruptive of tradition would've been held in check. The moguls of the game would've changed the rules, they've done it twenty times before. But, in the wake of the Black Sox Scandal and the public fascination with Babe Ruth, they simply let it happen."

"Before Ruth, pitchers were taught to pace themselves, only bearing down when someone was on base. Now, there was a danger of a run being scored at any moment. They had to bear down from the first pitch to the last. Between 1910 and 1920, 8 different pitchers won 30 or more games in a season. In the seventy-odd years since the advent of Babe Ruth, there have been just three."

"If you play against the best clubs in the land–white clubs, as you say–it'll be a case of Greek meeting Greek. I fear nobody."

"I got a letter the other day asking why I didn't write about baseball no more, as I used to write about nothing else, you might say. Well, friends, I may as well admit that I have kind of lost interest in the old game. A couple of years ago, a ballplayer named Babe Ruth that was a pitcher by birth was made into an outfielder, on account of how he can bust them. And the masterminds that control baseball says to themselves, that if it is home runs that the public wants to see, why, leave us, give them home runs."

"The Yankees were on their way to a fourth consecutive pennant in 1924, when they were stopped cold by one man: Walter Johnson."

"When we got to the ballpark, we knew we were going to win. That's all there was to it. We weren't cocky. I wouldn't call it confidence, either. We just knew. Like when you go to sleep, you knew the sun's going to come up in the morning."

"The idea of community, the idea of coming together—we’re still not good at that in this country…In moments of crisis, we’re magnificent at it—the Depression, Franklin Roosevelt lifting himself from his wheelchair to lift this nation from its knees. At those moments, we understand community—helping one another. In baseball, you do that all the time. You can’t win it alone. You can be the best pitcher in baseball, but somebody has to get you a run to win the game. It is a community activity. You need all nine people helping one another. I love bunt plays. I love the idea of the bunt. I love the idea of the sacrifice. Even the word is good. Giving yourself up for the good of the whole. That’s Jeremiah. That’s thousands of years of wisdom. You find your own good in the good of the whole. You find your own individual fulfilment in the success of the community—the Bible tried to do that and it didn’t teach you. Baseball did."

"He died two years later, mourned by many as the greatest of all baseball managers, the winner of 10 pennants. Not long after his death, his wife found among his effects a list of all the Black players he had secretly wished he could hire over the decades."

"The Depression was the worst crisis in America since the Civil War. In Harlan County, Kentucky, where the coal industry had died, whole communities tried to survive on dandelions, and blackberries, and pokeweed. Farm prices collapsed, and farm families were driven off the land. In just one day, one quarter of the entire state of Mississippi went under the auctioneer’s hammer. Banks failed, and in several bankrupt cities, the animals in the zoo were shot and the meat distributed to the poor. Hundreds of boys and men thumbed their way to Florida to try out for the big leagues, hoping not for stardom but simply for a job. Half-starved and in rags, without money, gloves or shoes, most were turned away. Some who did get a tryout collapsed on the field from exhaustion and hunger."

"How to stay young:"

"There's a catcher that any big-league club would like to buy for $200,000. His name is Gibson. He can do everything. He hits the ball a mile, and he catches so easy, he might as well be in a rocking chair. Throws like a rifle. Too bad this Gibson is a colored fellow."

"By 1934, the world economy was in ruins, and fascism was on the rise. In Germany, the National Socialists had come to power and [had] begun to institute exclusionary laws against Jews, in an eerie echo of Jim Crow statutes in the United States."

"From then on, until the day he died, Claire Ruth remembered, Ruth sat by the telephone, waiting for a call to manage that never came."

"That winter, Chester Washington of the Pittsburgh Courier sent a telegram to the manager of the struggling Pittsburgh Pirates. 'To: Pie Traynor, Pittsburgh Pirates, Congress Hotel. Know your club needs players. Have an answer to your prayers right here in Pittsburgh. Josh Gibson, catcher. Buck Leonard, first base. S. Page, pitcher and Cool Papa Bell all available at reasonable figures. Would make Pirates formidable pennant contender. What is your attitude? Wire answer, Chester Washington.' There was no answer."

"But for black baseball players in America, nothing had changed. For most, the season didn't end in October. When the weather turned cold, they headed south to Latin America, Cuba, and Mexico, where they found a warm welcome playing wintertime baseball. "Not only do I get more money playing here," shortstop Willie Wells wrote after leaving the Newark Eagles for the Mexican league, "but I live like a king. I've found freedom and democracy here, something I never found in the United States. Here in Mexico, I am a man.""

"On May 1, 1939, something that had not happened for 14 years, happened to the Yankees: Lou Gehrig took himself out of the lineup. He had played in a record 2,130 consecutive games and earned himself the nickname "The Iron Horse." But now, something was terribly wrong. He was only 35, but had begun to play like an old man: dropping balls, missing again and again at bat, sliding his feet along rather than lifting them. During batting practice one afternoon, Joe DiMaggio watched in astonishment as the Yankees' hitting star missed 10 fat pitches in a row. Gehrig could not understand what was wrong; neither could his teammates. But he could not stand the thought of letting them down. He was benching himself, he said, "for the good of the team.""

"In December 1944, a Japanese troop ship was torpedoed off the island of Formosa. Among those lost was 26-year-old Eiji Sawamura, the pitcher who had once struck out Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig."

"What about the Satchel Paiges of the future? Will they be playing in the Big Leagues? The question becomes more pressing yearly. It has been tossed into old Judge Landis' lap more than once. And the spectacularly adroit manner in which this articulate apostle of Lincoln tosses it out the window, is a source of much marvel."

"He'd helped restore the game's integrity after the Black Sox Scandal of 1919. He'd also done all he could to keep it white. It was true that there had never been no written law banning black players, but Judge Landis had worked ceaselessly to ensure that the old "gentleman's agreement" against hiring them remained firmly in effect. When the Pittsburgh Pirates sought permission to hire slugger Josh Gibson in 1943, Landis bluntly refused: "The colored ballplayers have their own league. Let them stay in their own league." When Bill Veeck Jr. attempted to buy the 8th place Phillies, then restaff it with stars from the Negro Leagues, Landis made sure the team was sold to someone else. And when Leo Durocher told a newspaper man that he'd seen plenty of blacks good enough for the big leagues, Landis forced him to claim he had been misquoted."