Baseball's Greatest Season, 1924

5. The Players

  ‫ﱛﱠﱛ‬ The Players Who Were These Major Leaguers? D URING THE 1924 season more than five hundred men— from Adams (Babe) to Zahniser (Paul)—played in a major league baseball game. Almost 90 percent of them came from British, German, or Irish stock; none was of known African descent.1 The youngest was the Giants’ rookie third baseman, Freddy Lindstrom, who batted .253 at the age of eighteen; the oldest to play regularly was Jack Quinn, the extraordinarily durable Red Sox spitballer, who, although turning forty-one in July, pitched 2282 ⁄3 innings with an earned run average a full point lower than the league’s.2 These men came from all over the country. Illinois, Pennsylvania, and Missouri produced forty or more each. Texas, Ohio, and California produced thirty or more. New York, Massachusetts, and Indiana produced twenty or more. Though no traditional southern state appeared on the list until Tennessee broke through (the tenth highest, with fifteen), the South (even without Texas) supplied 109 players to the majors, second only to the 187 born in the Midwest. Only five sparsely populated western states, Idaho, Nevada, North Dakota, South Dakota, and Wyoming, had no representatives in the major leagues. By today’s standards these players were not big men. The Washington Nationals, to take a dramatic example, had no regular player who was 6 feet tall, and none who weighed more than 185 pounds. Ty Cobb, whom we often think of as small, was in fact a big man, standing 6 feet, 1 inch. Babe Ruth was bigger still, at 6 feet, 2 inches. The tallest player in the majors was Cincinnati pitcher Eppa Rixey at 6 feet, 5 inches; the shortest was Pirate second baseman, Rabbit Maranville, who stood 5 feet, 5 inches. An estimate from 1925 declared that about one-third of • 56 • major leaguers grew up on farms.3 But contrary to a popular image of the major league player as a hayseed, this was an educated group of men, with perhaps one in four having attended college.4 Harry Hooper, the veteran White Sox outfielder, later remarked: “I think it’s pretty clear we had more than our share of college men in baseball. And it’s also pretty clear that the usual picture you get of the old-time ballplayer as an illiterate rowdy contains an awful lot more fiction than it does fact.”5 Because of the premium it placed on the reflexes of youth, playing major league baseball was not a lifetime career prospect for any man. Still, it is startling how brief such careers could be. A study from the first decade of the twentieth century showed that the turnover of players in the ranks of the major leagues approximated 90 percent each decade, and of the more than five hundred major leaguers playing in 1924, only thirteen, or 2.5 percent, had played in the majors in 1910.6 It is likely that the Great War (1917–18) produced a decline in the quality of the personnel who played in the majors in the immediate postwar years. Although I know of no analysis of these matters, several lines of reasoning are suggestive nevertheless. For example, many major leaguers joined the armed forces or at least transferred out of ballplaying careers in 1917 and 1918. For some, in an era of nonstratospheric baseball salaries, this disruption probably meant the effective end of a career. Then, there was the war’s effect on the recruitment of new talent. The virtual demise of the minor leagues in 1918 obliterated the chief channel for training and winnowing talent, and it is likely that, as a result of the war, one brief generation of talent was underrepresented in the majors in the succeeding years.7 I find it suggestive, for example, that, rich as the 1920s would turn out to be in future Hall of Famers, only one of them entered the majors in 1919 and only two in 1920 and 1921.8 Still, I don’t mean to suggest that the major leagues in 1924 were peculiarly shorn of talent. Even if we believe that the decade is overrepresented in the Hall of Fame,9 it is undeniable that at least five of the game’s absolutely greatest players—Grover Cleveland Alexander, Ty Cobb, Rogers Hornsby, Walter Johnson, and Babe Ruth—were performing in 1924. Thus, I think that the effect of the war, at least in the early years...