Baseball's Greatest Season, 1924

7. The Game of Baseball in the 1920s

  ‫ﱛﱠﱛ‬ The Game of Baseball in the 1920s Take Me Out to the Ball Game W HAT WAS IT LIKE to attend a major league baseball game in 1924? How were the ballparks different from today ’s? What about the rules and conventions of the game? The planning and strategizing? The equipment and uniforms? The fans? The assumptions? Now we’ll go on a tour, as I identify some of the aspects of viewing a baseball game in 1924 that might strike a fan from the opening of the twenty-first century as peculiar or unexpected. All the reader needs to do is supply visual imagination. Most of the stadiums used in 1924 were no more than fifteen years old. Built at considerable expense, they stood as mighty monuments to the success and popularity of major league baseball. As I write more than seventy-five years later, the corrosion of time has exacted its inevitable toll: Only three of the arenas used in 1924—Fenway Park, Wrigley Field (then known as Cubs’ Park), and Yankee Stadium—still stand, and all three have felt the renovator’s touch in the intervening years. But they are sufficient to remind us that one of the characteristics of baseball in the 1920s was that, although infield diamonds were geometrically identical in all ballparks, the circuits of the several major league outfields varied from stadium to stadium and from left field to right field with almost total abandon—a consequence of the owners’ need to locate their new arenas on oddly shaped patches of real estate. In fact, only two major league fields were symmetrical, and the average difference in the distance down the two foul lines in the ballparks was 36 feet.1 Other aspects of these ballparks that would catch the eye of our • 84 • time-traveler were the absence of warning tracks and padded walls and the presence of bats scattered in front of dugouts and of photographers crouching along the baselines. Moreover, to a much greater degree than spectators of today are accustomed to, attending major league baseball in 1924 could be an intimate experience, with each major league park having its own atmosphere, its own character, and its own quirks. In some interesting ways baseball games themselves in 1924 were very different from the games of today. First, there’s their length. Most contests then concluded in less than two hours, and on September 5, Grover Cleveland Alexander of the Cubs and Pete Donohue of the Reds joined up to complete a 9-inning game in the astonishing time of one hour and ten minutes.2 Pitchers worked more quickly than modern hurlers normally do, and clubs required less time between innings than teams from an age conditioned to television commercials are inclined to need. As a consequence of their usual brevity, games could start later in the afternoon than they do today—rarely, in fact, before 3:00 .. Games were played exclusively in daytime in the 1920s, with night ball being an awkward experiment resorted to only by minor league teams desperate for attendance. The doubleheader was a far more frequent scheduling device in the 1920s than it is now. In fact, certain holidays were regularly filled with twin bills, and when single games were rained out (a common occurrence in the spring of 1924), it was customary to reschedule them as a second game on a day when the two teams were already due to meet. In order not to sacrifice too many paid admissions, the holiday engagements were often staged as entirely discrete events—one game played in the morning, the other in the afternoon—and attended by different ticket-buying crowds. Spectators sat reasonably close to the action. In many parks they were separated (de facto if not de jure) by race, with African Americans relegated to some section in the cheaper outfield seats. In the absence of a public address system, spectators received information about the game from a man with a megaphone and from a hand-operated scoreboard. In accordance with a very recent innovation, a spectator who recovered a ball batted into the crowd would ordinarily no longer be pressed to return it for further use.3 The fans’ proximity to the field allowed them to hear, and often to contribute to, the barrages of profanity and heckling that all teams used as they sought to unnerve opposing players and umpires alike. Few explicit examples...