The Stars Are Back: The St. Louis Cardinals, the Boston Red Sox, and Player Unrest in 1946

Introduction

• 1 • Introduction Professional baseball survived World War II. Not all sports did. Bigtime golf was abandoned during the war, beginning with suspension of the Ryder Cup in 1939. The Davis Cup in tennis and America’s Cup in sailing were also suspended, and the Olympic Games were abandoned in 1940 and 1944. In 1946, optimism abounded in baseball as the game looked forward to its first postwar season, but conversion from war to peace presented problems for those who ran the game as it did for those who ran the country. The first issue of the Sporting News in 1946 featured a cartoon illustrating problems confronting baseball. An optimistic, carefree Mr. Baseball, is depicted with a great smile, striding jauntily, twirling his walking stick (a baseball bat), and singing, “Oh, what a beautiful mor-ning. Oh, what a beautiful day. Th’ birds are singing . . . the sun is shining . . . buds are bursting . . . I got dough in the bank . . . an’ I feel great!” But Mr. Baseball is about to walk under a ladder tagged “unlimited night ball” on which a painter holds a brush and a dripping paint can labeled “handling of returnees.” He is about to step on a banana peel representing “higher expenses” and is walking directly toward an open manhole branded “expansive farm systems,” all the while surrounded by sharp tacks representing the threat of inflation. The caption for the cartoon is, “Watch Your Step, Bub!” On the eve of the 1946 season, major league baseball was a model of stability. In forty-five years, only one franchise had relocated, when the New York Yankees replaced Baltimore in the American League in 1903. There had been little change in the rules governing how the game was played. The basic player contract with its reserve clause tying players to their teams in perpetuity had • 2 • INTRODUCTION long been in place, tracing its origins to the final decades of the nineteenth century when it was adopted by the National League, the only major league at the time. There had been the insurgency of the Federal League in 1914, which pirated players from their regular major league clubs but disappeared after the 1915 season with the two major leagues intact. There had been the Black Sox scandal in 1919 when gamblers had fixed the outcome of the World Series. It led to the appointment of a commissioner for baseball, Judge Kenesaw Mountain Landis, who was given extraordinary power to restore the integrity of the game that he governed for the next quarter century in the style of an absolute sovereign. Change came abruptly and dramatically to baseball following the 1944 World’s Series, the only one played entirely in St. Louis between the Cardinals and Browns, when Commissioner Landis died, leaving a great void at the organizational pinnacle of the game. Owners bickered over a successor but in April, they settled on U.S. Senator and former Kentucky Governor Albert B. “Happy” Chandler, who had been a vocal champion of the game in Congress when challenges to the game arose during the war. He was given a salary of $50,000 and a seven-year contract, but the owners were reluctant to give him the same authority Landis had had. Quarrels arose at the 1945 winter baseball meetings between the minor leagues and Chandler, as well as between some big-league owners and their new commissioner. But Chandler prevailed when owners were reluctant to engage in a public fight, and he emerged with more authority than was perhaps originally intended by the owners. The other significant changes in the 1940s came in the ownership of major league clubs. With the exceptions Powell Crosley’s purchase of the Cincinnati Reds in 1934 and Tom Yawkey’s of the Boston Red Sox in 1933, no major league club had changed hands since the 1920s. But from 1943 through 1946, seven teams acquired new owners, beginning with the 1943 purchase of the Philadelphia Phillies by Robert Carpenter. A perennial doormat in the National League, Carpenter moved immediately to change the team image by renaming it the Blue Jays, a nickname that failed in Philly but thrived later in Toronto. In 1944, two teams were sold. The Boston Braves were purchased by a trio of Boston businessmen, Lou Perini, Guido Rugo, and Joe Maney, all of whom owned construction companies. Their first move was to fire Casey Stengel as manager and replace him with Billy Southworth from the St. Louis Cardinals. The Brooklyn Dodgers also changed...