Clark Griffith: The Old Fox of Washington Baseball (review)

In recent years, baseball researchers have published several excellent books detailing the lives of men who contributed to the game more as executives than as players. Readers of NINE are familiar with the works of Lee Lowenfish on Branch Rickey, Mark Armour on Joe Cronin, Norman Macht on Connie Mack, and Dan Levitt on Ed Barrow. Leavengood’s biography of Clark Griffith attempts a similar study.

Leavengood describes Griffith’s long career as a major-league player, manager, and team owner. As a player, Griffith earned a reputation as a labor radical, and in that capacity he helped establish the American League in 1901. Two years later, he became the first manager of the New York Highlanders, where he lost a struggle with his archrival, John McGraw, for baseball supremacy in the country’s largest city. In 1919, Griffith realized his grandest ambition when he purchased the Washington Nationals, the club he owned until his death in 1955.

First as manager and then as owner of the Washington club, Griffith presided over the franchise’s golden age and then its precipitous decline. From 1912 to 1933, the Nationals won one World Series, three American League pennants, and finished in the first division sixteen times. Leavengood provides excellent descriptions of Griffith’s trades that transformed the Nationals from perennial losers to pennant contenders. He is at his best recounting Washington’s pennant-winning 1924 season and the team’s victory over the New York Giants in the World Series. Griffith finally triumphed over his old nemesis John McGraw. The team’s win in Game Seven was the greatest game in Washington’s baseball history in the twentieth century. Beginning in 1934, the team was rarely competitive. Leavengood argues that the Nationals declined because Griffith lacked the financial resources to modernize his organization.

Leavengood advances several controversial theses. He argues that Clark Griffith played a more important role in the formation and success of the American League than Charlie Comiskey, Connie Mack, and Charles Somers. Griffith had the responsibility of convincing the members of the Baseball Players Protective Association, a weak players union, to jump from the National League to the upstart American League. He warned the players that their failure to support the new league would give the National League dictatorial control over their economic futures forever. “He was nothing less than an early version of Marvin Miller telling his membership they had to hold firm” (39). Griffith ultimately succeeded in luring many players to the new league.

Griffith, Leavengood concludes, served as baseball’s ambassador to Presidents Wilson and Roosevelt during World Wars I and II. He ultimately persuaded them to allow baseball to continue while the nation was at war. Leavengood conjectures that Griffith authored Roosevelt’s famous “Green Light” letter of January 15, 1942, in which the president gave his moral authority to the continuation of baseball during World War II.

Leavengood acknowledges that Griffith supported the owners who opposed integration and that he made no effort to integrate his team until 1954. Nevertheless, Leavengood concludes that Griffith was not a racist and did not oppose integration. Griffith did not have the financial means to integrate, and Washington fans were not prepared to accept black players. Leavengood also argues that Griffith was simply too old and too set in his ways to change: “The eighty-three year old patriarch of the American League had no grasp of the historic moment or the times in which he was living” (270). Griffith’s reputation as an opponent of integration is based largely on his nephew’s racist remarks made long after he died. Griffith’s failure to integrate sooner than he did does not diminish his many contributions to baseball.

Several factual mistakes mar this book. It is Early Wynn, not Early Winn. The Boston Braves played in the National League, not the American League. Before coming to the Nationals in 1928, George Sisler starred for the St. Louis Browns, not the...