Barney Dreyfuss initiated what came to be called the World Series when he challenged the American League champion Boston Pilgrims to a post-season series of games against his National League champion Pittsburgh Pirates. Only a few months before, the two leagues had been at war, a battle fought with money over the rights to players like Boston's Cy Young, Chick Stahl and Jimmy Collins. All of them, stars in the National League, had jumped for better pay.

Collins turned double duty as player-manager, but his wisest move usually involved entrusting the ball to Young, who won 28 of 37 decisions and pitched seven shutouts. Pittsburgh entered the Series handicapped by a late-season injury that hampered 25-game winner Sam Leever, and an incapacitating illness to 16-game winner Ed Doheny. That left most of the Pirate pitching burden to 24-game winner Deacon Phillippe who did all he could do to fill the gap. Phillippe won the first game of the best-of-nine format 7-3 on Oct. 1, won the third 4-2 two days later, and won the fourth game 5-4 Oct. 6. Even so, the Series was tied at 3 games each when Phillippe started his fourth game Oct. 10 in Pittsburgh. This time Young bested him 7-3. Rain created a two-day lull in the Series, giving Phillippe a chance to prepare for his fifth Series start in Game 8 Oct. 13. He pitched well, but Boston's Bill Dinneen shut out the Pirates on 4 hits in a 3-0 victory that clinched the championship for the insurgent American Leaguers.

ELSEWHERE IN BASEBALL          

Big Ed Delahanty, slugging outfielder, plunges to his death from a railroad bridge over Niagara Falls July 2.

The American League moves its Baltimore club to New York, the last franchise relocation for a half century.

IN THE WORLD

Orville and Wilbur Wright make the first successful heavier-than-air flight at Kitty Hawk Dec. 17.

If the America that was survives anywhere as more than a memory, it is in baseball, that strangely pastoral game in no matter what setting—domed stadium or Little League field. As hindsight improves upon foresight, memory improves upon reality, so that the endless monotony and grinding physical labor of small-town life before the Civil War are now thought quite romantic.  I may be in a distinct minority, but in my opinion life in today’s urban, technological, contentious, crime-beset, debt-ridden America is, for the vast majority of us, better than it ever was. 

Given the calamitous labor-management war of 1994, there are few who would say the same about baseball. However, today’s players  are better than those in the game’s golden age; the strategy of the game and even its execution are more adept (forget all that moaning about how nobody knows the “fundamentals” any more ... the average player of fifty years ago didn’t know them either); and the opportunities to watch baseball, if not to play it, far exceed those of say, the 1950s, today broadly regarded as the game’s halcyon era. (A golden age may be defined flexibly, it seems, so as to coincide with the period of one’s youth.) For all its pull toward the good old days, for all its statistical illusions of an Olympian era when titans strode the basepaths, for all its seeming permanence in a world aswirl with change, baseball has in fact moved with America, and improved with it. One wishes only that baseball, which first taught America to play, might now learn from it.

The period after World War II was a heady time for the nation and its pastime, both of them buoyed by returning veterans and removed restrictions. But in 1946 the major leagues still represented only the sixteen cities that had participated in the National Agreement of 1903, none west of St. Louis; a handful of African Americans were just entering the minor leagues after a half-century’s exclusion; and because television was not yet a staple of the American home, most baseball fans had never seen even a single big-league game.

Women had been courted as patrons (even nonpaying patrons) ever since the game’s dawn. Baseball management hoped that their presence would lend “tone” to the proceedings and keep a lid on the rowdies, in the stands and on the field. But women’s participation in the game’s labor force and management was even more limited than their role in the nation’s business and industry—Rosie the Riveter and Eleanor Roosevelt as yet had no counterparts in Organized Baseball. The All-American Girls Baseball League made its debut in 1943, the brainchild of Chicago Cubs’ owner Philip K. Wrigley. The women’s “league of their own” won many admirers over the next decade, but the majors always regarded it as separate and unequal.

On the amateur level, while American Legion Junior Baseball had begun as early as 1928, and Little League in 1939, neither attained their heights until after the War ended. Naysayers will point out that baseball has lost ground as more kids today play football, basketball, soccer, and tennis than fifty years ago—but far more play baseball, too, and not only in America. The annual pursuit of the Little League championship in Williamsport, Pennsylvania (like the Pan-American Games), has become an international affair, an instrument of diplomacy that State Department officials envy. Indeed, baseball may yet hold the key to neighborly relations with all nations in the hemisphere.

Baseball in the colleges, now so vibrant and so fertile with major league talent, was on the path to extinction by the end of the War, only to be brought back from the brink by the G.I. Bill: the explosive growth in enrollment that the returning veterans produced also created a sudden need for expanded athletic programs, and baseball was the prime beneficiary. The NCAA’s introduction of the College World Series in 1947 affirmed the game’s recovery on campus, and since locating in Omaha three years later it has grown steadily.

In 1951 Major League Baseball, as dated from the inception of the National League in 1876, reached the august age of 75 and proclaimed its “diamond jubilee.” Celebratory banquets were held, a plaque was erected at the old hotel where the league was founded, and all NL players wore a commemorative patch on their sleeves. (Coincidentally but less flashily the American League marked its fiftieth birthday as a major circuit.) Let’s take a moment to look at where baseball stood at that point.

There was no question it was booming. On the professional level, a whopping 59 leagues contained 448 teams employing about 8,000 players—or 19 minor leaguers competing for each of the then 400 spots in the big show. Little League would soon send its first alumnus to the majors, which had already accepted hundreds of graduates from Legion and other programs. Happy Chandler secured from television a then mind-boggling but now quaint $6 million for broadcast rights to the next six World Series. And with the game’s most powerful teams bunched in New York City—the Yankees, the Dodgers, and the Giants—the publicity mills and the turnstiles were spinning as they had never spun before.

But the excitement of the first five postwar years was not confined to New York: even such perennial tailenders as the Boston Braves, the Philadelphia Phillies, and the Cleveland Indians fought their way into the World Series; and staid old Cleveland, under Bill Veeck’s carnival-barker aegis, set staggering new attendance records. Many of the newly admitted African-American players had become stars and—satisfyingly, though few but Branch Rickey had predicted it—box-office attractions: Jackie Robinson, Roy Campanella, and Don Newcombe of the Dodgers; Monte Irvin and rookie Willie Mays of the Giants; Sam Jethroe of the Braves; Larry Doby and Satchel Paige of the Indians. Many prewar stars continued to shine, like Bob Feller, Stan Musial, and Ted Williams (though with the Korean War he answered Uncle Sam’s call yet again), and new ones like Gotham’s center field trio of Duke Snider, Mickey Mantle, and Mays replenished the stock as heroes like Joe DiMaggio hung up their spikes.

But most of these blessings had their downside. Opening the game to African Americans was indubitably right, but it killed the Negro Leagues, ruining owners and abruptly ending many playing careers. The increasing organization of youth baseball, particularly the rise of Little League, heightened the stress of the game at its formative levels and drained much of the fun, as driven parents began to see their Junior as tomorrow’s big leaguer, not as just a boy having fun while learning a thing or two. The game on the field was dominated by the home run, making for a brand of ball that might be termed, well, dull. League champs registered such stolen-base totals as Dom DiMaggio’s 15 or Jackie Jensen’s 22; Early Wynn led the AL in ERA one year with a mark of 3.20; and the three-base hit, despite the big old parks still prevalent, went the way of the dodo. And the pennant domination by the three New York teams—principally the Yankees, of course—made the national pastime a rather parochial pleasure; it was hard for fans in Pittsburgh or Detroit to wax rhapsodic over a Subway Series. No, the blessings of the 1950s were not unmitigated, any more than on the national scene the tranquility of the Eisenhower years were without cost.

Take television, for instance: the revenues were great, and so was the publicity value of electronically extending major-league play to people in southern and western areas. But the novelty of big-time heroes on the small screen kept those folks at home when formerly they had gone to the local ballpark. The minors began their long decline, one that didn’t bottom out until 1964; by then the 59 leagues of 1951 had become 19, and the 8,000-odd professional players had dwindled to fewer than 2,500.

Moreover, television whetted the baseball appetites of Californians and Texans (and Georgians and Washingtonians and more). That demand plus the development of faster passenger planes gave ideas to owners of two of  baseball’s decaying franchises. Walter O’Malley, owner of the Brooklyn Dodgers, and Giants’ owner Horace Stoneham had seen the solidarity of the original sixteen-city composition broken in 1953, when the venerable Boston Braves (a franchise established in the first year of the National Association, 1871) became the darlings of Milwaukee, and further weakened by the defections in 1954-55 of the St. Louis Browns to Baltimore and the Philadelphia Athletics to Kansas City. Amid weeping and gnashing of teeth that continue to this day, the Dodgers and Giants left for the Golden West in 1958.

In a strange twist, the architect of the move, Walter O’Malley, was (and in the East, still is) widely seen as the snake in baseball’s version of the Garden of Eden, responsible for ending the grand old game’s paradisical age.  Yet the placement of franchises in California, as distressing as it was for Brooklyn and Manhattan and as roundly condemned as it was by traditionalists, may now be seen as the best thing to happen to baseball in the decade. And Walter O’Malley, if you will permit your mind a considerable stretch, may be viewed not as the snake offering baseball the mortal apple but as a latter-day Johnny Appleseed (in the footsteps of Alexander Cartwright, who in 1849 also headed for California in pursuit of gold, yet who is remembered not for his venality but for bringing the New York Game to the West).

It was imperative that baseball take the game to where the people were, precisely as it had in 1903. America’s population had already begun the westward and southward shift that was to become so pronounced in the 1960s and ‘70s. The move to Los Angeles and San Francisco, rather than confirming those cities’ stature as “big-league,” as is so often written, brought baseball into step with America, which had long recognized them as such. Baseball could now call itself the national pastime without apology.

From its creation in 1871 to its crash five years later, the National Association had a rocky time as America’s first professional league.  Franchises came and went with dizzying speed, often folding in midseason.

Schedules were not played out if a club slated to go on the road saw little prospect of gain. Drinking and gambling and game-fixing were rife. And the Boston Red Stockings of Al Spalding and the Wright brothers dominated play, going 71-8 in the last of their four straight championship seasons; their predictable and one-sided victories crushed the competition and at last, interest in the entire circuit.

But from the ashes of the National Association emerged the Red Stockings’ model of success and the entrepreneurial genius of Chicago’s William Hulbert. After raiding Boston to obtain four of the biggest stars in the game—Spalding, Ross Barnes, Deacon White, and Cal McVey—and lining up the services of the Philadelphia Athletics’ Adrian Anson, the White Stockings were ready to roll in the National League of Professional Base Ball Clubs, founded on February 2, 1876 in New York’s Grand Central Hotel.

The first five years of the NL were nearly as unsettled as the final years of the NA, with franchises appearing and then disappearing in such cities as Syracuse, Indianapolis, and Hartford while major cities like New York and Philadelphia were, after the league’s inaugural year, unrepresented.  In 1878 the fledgling circuit was forced to cut back to six teams: Milwaukee, Indianapolis, Chicago, Providence, Cincinnati, and Boston. National League?  National Game? It seemed Americans had plenty of appetite for playing the game, but not much for watching it.

Yet as the National League suffered with growing pains, it was introducing some elements that were critical to the explosion of interest that came with the 1880s. It created a professional (paid) umpiring crew; insisted that the league schedule be honored; banned pool selling and hard-liquor consumption in the stands; and created a system of management-owned teams as opposed to the player-run cooperatives that had largely characterized the NA.  As the public’s renewed faith in the integrity of the game coincided with an upswing in the national economy, not only did the National League flourish; along came an interloper, the rival American Association, to offer patrons 25-cent baseball (NL admissions were 50 cents), Sunday games, and beer. With the public’s new appetite for the game seeming insatiable, a group of investors led by St. Louis’ Henry Lucas launched a third major league, the Union Association, for 1884.

With brash stars like Cap Anson, Tim Keefe, Dan Brouthers, and the larger-than-life King Kelly capturing the newspaper headlines and the nation’s imagination, the age of the baseball idol arrived. Before this decade, men like Jim Creighton, Joe Start, and George Wright had been admired in New York and New England, but now a baseball hero’s image could be mass-produced for nationwide sale, or licensed for advertising, or inspire odes and songs. Kelly inspired  Slide, Kelly, Slide, its arcane references now largely forgotten but once the most popular song in the land:

     Slide, Kelly, slide!

Your running’s a disgrace!

Slide, Kelly, slide!

Stay there, hold your base!

If someone doesn’t steal ya,

And your batting doesn’t fail ya,

They’ll take you to Australia!

Slide, Kelly, slide!

And although Ernest Lawrence Thayer, always denied it, Kelly could well have been the model for “Casey at the Bat,” the immortal lyric ballad Thayer penned in 1888. (“Casey” was sometimes reprinted in the newspapers of the 1880s as “Kelly at the Bat,” changing the locale from Mudville to Beantown.)

Baseball was ascendant in the 1880s, and like the budding nation whose pastime it was, pretty cocksure of itself. In the same summer that “Casey” made his debut, Albert Spalding led a contingent of baseball players on a round the world tour, spreading the gospel of bat and ball to such places as Egypt, Italy, England, Hawaii, and the above-mentioned Australia. Baseball, America thought, was too grand a game to be merely a national pastime; it ought to be the international pastime.

At a New York banquet for Spalding’s returning “world tourists” in 1889, speaker Mark Twain declared, “Baseball is the very symbol, the outward and visible expression of the drive and push and rush and struggle of the raging, tearing, booming nineteenth century.” Spalding himself later wrote:

In fact baseball had become more than the mere reflection of our rising industrial and political power and its propensity for bluster and hokum: the national game was beginning to supply emblems for democracy, industry, and community that would change America and the world—not in the ways that Spalding’s Tourists may have envisioned, but indisputably for the better.

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