Doubleheaders: A Major League History (review)

Charlie Bevis is a thorough and thoughtful scholar as evidenced by his growing body of work. This book, which grows out of his article on holiday doubleheaders that won the 2003 McFarland-SABR Research award, follows The New England League (2007), Sunday Baseball (2003), and Mickey Cochrane (1998).

In Doubleheaders, Bevis presents a chronological account of the growth and decline of Major League Baseball’s practice of playing two games on the same day. The most famous advertising slogan for double-bills, Ernie Banks famous cry of “Let’s play two,” created a false impression of players finding such joy in the game that they were ready to play a second game following the first. In reality, Bevis contends, players despised doubleheaders. Whether or not to schedule two games has always been management’s decision, and their decision has always been about money.

Bevis credits Billy Barnie, the manager of Baltimore’s American Association team, and Billy Sharsig, co-owner/manager of Philadelphia’s National League club, with being the earliest promoters of playing two games back-to-back. For them, doubleheaders were a means of making up postponed games. In 1886, a Philadelphia-Detroit twin-bill drew 11,000 fans, opening the eyes of club owners to the economic advantage of giving a game away for free. When Chicago drew 27,489 to a doubleheader against St. Louis on a Sunday in 1899, at a time when Eastern clubs were prohibited from playing on the Sabbath, the Sunday twin-bill gained traction.

Despite current attendance records, baseball reached its peak of popularity in the first decade of the twentieth century, at least when attendance is measured as a percentage of the city’s population. Bevis points to a new economic model to explain the popularity of the game. Fans flocked to opening day, holiday games, Saturdays, and Sunday doubleheaders, more than making up for a decline of paying customers at weekday games. By 1909, one-third of all games were two-in-one-day affairs.

Bevis enlivens his detailed study with interesting factoids. The term “doubleheader,” apparently, derived from the railroad’s name for attaching two locomotives to the head of a train. “Twin bill” became common parlance in the 1890s, when theaters offered two back-to-back stage plays. One of the strangest two-for-one price events occurred in 1883 at the Polo Grounds, when the Metropolitans and the New York Nationals played simultaneous games at opposite ends of the grounds. Equally unusual, in 1920 Cincinnati and Pittsburgh played the only tripleheader.

The real boom in doubleheaders came in response to the Great Depression. The Federal League, operating in 1914 and 1915, had demonstrated the popularity of weekend twin-bills, but from World War I until the Depression, the major leagues reserved the use of doubleheaders for holidays—Decoration Day, Independence Day, and Labor Day. As attendance plummeted by 40 percent between 1930 and 1933, owners looked for any means to pump up the number of paying customers. St. Louis Cardinals owner Sam Breadon gets credit for popularizing Sunday doubleheaders following the 1929 stock market crash. By 1931, fans could see two games for one price in half of all Sunday contests. It is Bevis’s contention that the “increase in Sunday doubleheaders during the 1929–1933 period rescued major-league baseball from oblivion” (123).

Continuing this theme, Bevis also maintains “The doubleheader helped to save major-league baseball during World War II” (150). The war years saw an “exponential increase” in doubleheaders, including twilight-night games beginning in 1942, and morning-afternoon and afternoon-night split games starting in 1943. By the end of the war, almost half of all games were part of twin-bills.

Bevis has been taken to task by two economists, Stephen K. Layson and Taylor Rhodes (“Were Major League Doubleheaders a Mistake?”). Their research supports Bevis’s conclusion about the positive effect of doubleheaders in the Depression, but they came to a different conclusion for the 1940s. Although Sunday doubleheaders outdrew weekday...