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8 The Second Half July–august 1932 everything seemed to be chaos. The confusion engendered by the first-half champions debacle bred confusion throughout the rest of the season. its remainder seemed in doubt, as only four black newspapers published a second-half schedule for the league.1 only five papers maintained consistent baseball coverage through the rest of the season. “every day the papers chronicle the dropping out of some team in some league,” reported Afro-American sports editor bill Gibson, “or of the folding up of entire leagues because of the fact that the fans are conspicuous by their absence. north, south, east and West, the plaint is the same. The Pittsburgh Crawfords constitute the only team able to make the turnstiles click. but even they have years to go before bringing in enough dough to pay for their $75,000 park.”2 The monthly article tally for available newspapers demonstrates clearly the effect of press criticism for the confused first half of the southern league season. (see table 6.) The bulk of nsl coverage was in april, may, and June, showing a palpable interest in the season and its progress. July coverage, by contrast, was limited to league pennant meetings and the choosing of a champion. in august , the total dropped again, before the various convoluted championships that closed the season generated a flurry of september articles in various papers in the sample set—some reporting on the games, others arguing for the validity of one pennant or the other, as we shall see in chapter 9. after september, only twenty-one more articles exist for the rest of the calendar year, as assorted reports on the possibility of a season in 1933 offered editorialists a final soapbox from which to fret over the state of baseball. When broken down into regional location, the numbers become more telling . (see table 7.) The august coverage drops significantly in the south, particularly in the south’s largest black newspaper (and the only black daily paper in the 110 / Chapter 8 country), the Atlanta Daily World. also, the coverage decline begins much earlier in the south. new orleans, home of the Louisiana Weekly, and shreveport did not have teams in the nsl. memphis’s June and July tallies have not survived. atlanta’s and birmingham’s teams stopped league play prior to the monroeChicago controversy of early July. southern newspapers, in other words, had no more local incentive to pay attention. The first-half pennant controversy only exacerbated their apathy. instead, the northern papers with a surviving stake in the outcome of the southern league—the Indianapolis Recorder, Chicago Defender , and Pittsburgh Courier—remain truest to the pattern set by the broader national coverage trends. notably, those three publications carry the most southern league coverage in a regional category without many concerned newspapers. in the border region between north and south, the Kansas City Call and baltimore Afro-American—playing to a large circulation but without a direct hometown interest in the outcome—kept a generally consistent (though smaller) coverage pattern throughout. meanwhile, the West’s coverage existed almost entirely in the form of wire service reprints. When those papers are broken down into national and regional circulations, the pattern remains constant. (see table 8.) notably, of the papers with significant ball clubs in 1932, only the Kansas City Call had a higher number of august articles than it did July articles. That paper’s hometown team, the Kansas City monarchs, took the opposite route of the other teams in negro league baseball for 1932. The Kansas City monarchs did not field a team for the first half of the season, and when they did begin play, they barnstormed independently. in august , their opening games against the Chicago american Giants counted toward the Giants’ second-half record, and so are included in the sample’s august total. if those contests are eliminated, the august numbers become markedly lower.3 (The same cannot be said for the national total when Chicago’s Kansas City coverage is eliminated. The american Giants lost the series, and the Defender’s only article on the games announced that they would take place—no reports of the outcomes were printed. Journalistic disillusionment only grew with the increased confusion of the second-half schedule.)4 and so the full range of black newspapers largely gave up on the second half of the baseball season, and the same southern papers that argued for monroe’s pennant stopped any...

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