Baseball's Greatest Season, 1924

Preface

 W HEN THE baseball season of 1923 ended, one question stood uppermost in the minds of observers of the game: What would it take to defeat a New York baseball team? For the third straight year John McGraw’s Giants had faced Miller Huggins’s Yankees in the World Series. Twice the Giants had won; most recently, the Yankees had prevailed. But in each case the other ten municipalities that hosted and boasted major league baseball clubs had been excluded from postseason play. When the baseball season of 1924 ended, the question had been answered. The requirements for success surprised no fan: consistent pitching, dependable fielding, reliable hitting, and a measure of timely luck. But the team that displayed these marks was a surprise to virtually everyone. This book tells the story of how, for one memorable and dramatic season, to the admiring excitement of baseball fans across the country, Washington was first in war, first in peace, and first in the national pastime. Like most people who write about baseball, I have been a fan since childhood . My earliest baseball memory involves looking through a guide prepared for the 1946 season. This present book thus reflects a lifetime of interest. One long-standing aspect of that interest is the belief that there ought to be a written history of each major league season—a book, that is, to which the curious fan might turn to find out how the pennant races that year evolved, why the winners won and the losers didn’t, who the outstanding performers of the season were, and what remarkable events made the season memorable. Fortunately, we have some fine representatives of this kind of history. David Anderson’s More Than Merkle, Frederick Turner’s When the Boys Came Back, and David Kaiser’s Epic Season come to mind, along with Mike Sowell’s The Pitch That Killed and Lawrence Katz’s Baseball in 1939. But the large majority of • xi • seasons remain as yet uncharted. Happily for me, among the campaigns thus far neglected is the remarkable season of 1924. By the time readers finish this book, I hope they agree with me that it was the most exciting season that major league baseball has ever managed to stage. (All right. I admit it. In More Than Merkle, David Anderson makes exactly the same claim for 1908: “the most exciting baseball season in human history”—in fact, it’s part of the book’s subtitle. If we were concerned only with the pennant races, his assertion would have merit. But after the Cubs and the Tigers clawed their way to the top of their leagues in the closing hours of the remarkable 1908 pennant chases, they contended in a World Series that was dismally anticlimactic, as Chicago’s great pitching staff held Detroit hitters to a paltry .203 batting average and lost only once in 5 games against the Tigers. For a season to be the greatest ever, it must be exciting across its stretch and exciting to the end. And that’s the treat that 1924 offers.) Consider the following points. The 1924 season saw the Washington Nationals win their first pennant and only world championship. (A quick note on usage is in order. Though “Senators” had once been and would later again be the club’s name, in 1924 they were the “Nationals,” and that’s the way the D.C. press identified them.) The tightness of the two pennant races throughout the crucial month of September stamps the regular season as one of the four most exciting (in the sense of offering tight races) in baseball history. The subsequent World Series not only went to its seventh game, but then that final game went into extra innings. By a curious juxtaposition of events, the 1924 World Series came to be seen by many fans as a morality play, pitting good (the Washington Nationals ) against evil (the New York Giants). And as an analysis of the styles of play indicates, the 1924 World Series was also a confrontation— and in fact the last confrontation—of the older principles of low-scoring “inside baseball” (exemplified by the Nats) against the newer principles of high-scoring “big inning baseball” (exemplified by the Giants). Beyond the team efforts, the season featured some epic individual achievements , both by batters (especially Babe Ruth and Rogers Hornsby) and by pitchers (especially Walter Johnson and Dazzy Vance). It even offered elements...