of baseball players as crude and uneducated and sometimes even racist.
At the same time, many players were lionized, often appearing in vaudeville music halls in the off-season, recognized through their photographs in magazines and the copious newspapers of the time. Some were immortalized by doggerel like “Baseball's Sad Lexicon,” by Franklin Pierce Adams in New York's
Evening Mail
of July 10, 1910, lauding the Cubs' double-play combination of shortstop Joe Tinker, second baseman Johnny Evers, and first baseman Frank Chance.
These are the saddest of possible words:
“Tinker to Evers to Chance.”
Trio of bear cubs, and fleeter than birds,
Tinker and Evers and Chance.
Ruthlessly pricking our gonfalon bubble,
Making a Giant hit into a double—
Words that are heavy with nothing but trouble:
“Tinker to Evers to Chance.”
Adams's tribute was not as cosmically inventive as the citing of Abner Doubleday as the inventor of baseball, but these eight lines became embedded in the minds of fans everywhere, and perhaps even sportswriters. Tinker, Evers, and Chance were all fine players, who played together as a unit for 10 years, a rarity then and now, but they were not an unprecedented double-play machine, either. In direct response to Adams's little ditty, all three were eventually voted into the Hall of Fame, Evers in 1939 and his teammates in 1946.
While accumulating a folklore, the young industry of baseball was also developing new labor and financial problems. In 1913, the Fraternity of Professional Baseball Players was founded, leading to the outlaw Federal League of 1914, which raided the two major leagues. Connie Mack's A's won four pennants from 1910 through1914, but after Chief Bender and Eddie Plank jumped to the Federal League, and Home Run Baker sat out a season in a salary dispute, Mack tore apart his team even further, selling a number of players to the Red Sox (who would soon move their better players to the Yankees). The A's soon hit bottom. “The Federal League wrecked my club by completely changing the spirit of my players,” Mack would claim.
The two established leagues survived a restraint-of-trade suit by the upstart Federal League. In 1915, a Chicago federal judge, Kenesaw Mountain Landis, said he was “shocked” that anybody could possibly consider baseball to be “labor.” It was a game, Landis ruled, and, as a national institution, it was not subject to interstate commerce laws. This decision by Landis was vital to the owners because it strengthened the reserve clause, which appeared to bind players to their clubs for the length of their careers, or until they were traded, sold, or discarded. The reserve clause would dominate the industry for the next six decades.
As the war dragged on, attendance was down in the 1918 World Series, which led to a dispute over the size of World Series shares. Before the fifth game, the Red Sox and Cubs demanded minimum shares of $1,500 and $1,000 for winning and losing, respectively, insisting they were prepared to cancel the game. When baseball officials worried that a strike could cause a riot, the players gave in, starting the game an hour late. In the end, the Red Sox were paid only $1,108 per player and the Cubs $671 each. This strike threat was one of the justifications the Red Sox' ownership would use for dealing Babe Ruth to the Yankees at the end of 1919. Management convinced reporters in Boston and New York to depict Ruth as a malingerer, not just because of his undisciplined habits but also because of his salary demands and his role as potential striker.
With the owners receiving fawning decisions like that of Judge Landis, and with a growing public perception that baseball was the national game, the players were burdened with the expectation that they were somehow above labor grievances. Many players saw themselves as underpaid and exploited. The stage was set for base-ball's first major scandal.
VI
THE BLACK SOX
T hey are the lost boys of
At the same time, many players were lionized, often appearing in vaudeville music halls in the off-season, recognized through their photographs in magazines and the copious newspapers of the time. Some were immortalized by doggerel like “Baseball's Sad Lexicon,” by Franklin Pierce Adams in New York's
Evening Mail
of July 10, 1910, lauding the Cubs' double-play combination of shortstop Joe Tinker, second baseman Johnny Evers, and first baseman Frank Chance.
These are the saddest of possible words:
“Tinker to Evers to Chance.”
Trio of bear cubs, and fleeter than birds,
Tinker and Evers and Chance.
Ruthlessly pricking our gonfalon bubble,
Making a Giant hit into a double—
Words that are heavy with nothing but trouble:
“Tinker to Evers to Chance.”
Adams's tribute was not as cosmically inventive as the citing of Abner Doubleday as the inventor of baseball, but these eight lines became embedded in the minds of fans everywhere, and perhaps even sportswriters. Tinker, Evers, and Chance were all fine players, who played together as a unit for 10 years, a rarity then and now, but they were not an unprecedented double-play machine, either. In direct response to Adams's little ditty, all three were eventually voted into the Hall of Fame, Evers in 1939 and his teammates in 1946.
While accumulating a folklore, the young industry of baseball was also developing new labor and financial problems. In 1913, the Fraternity of Professional Baseball Players was founded, leading to the outlaw Federal League of 1914, which raided the two major leagues. Connie Mack's A's won four pennants from 1910 through1914, but after Chief Bender and Eddie Plank jumped to the Federal League, and Home Run Baker sat out a season in a salary dispute, Mack tore apart his team even further, selling a number of players to the Red Sox (who would soon move their better players to the Yankees). The A's soon hit bottom. “The Federal League wrecked my club by completely changing the spirit of my players,” Mack would claim.
The two established leagues survived a restraint-of-trade suit by the upstart Federal League. In 1915, a Chicago federal judge, Kenesaw Mountain Landis, said he was “shocked” that anybody could possibly consider baseball to be “labor.” It was a game, Landis ruled, and, as a national institution, it was not subject to interstate commerce laws. This decision by Landis was vital to the owners because it strengthened the reserve clause, which appeared to bind players to their clubs for the length of their careers, or until they were traded, sold, or discarded. The reserve clause would dominate the industry for the next six decades.
As the war dragged on, attendance was down in the 1918 World Series, which led to a dispute over the size of World Series shares. Before the fifth game, the Red Sox and Cubs demanded minimum shares of $1,500 and $1,000 for winning and losing, respectively, insisting they were prepared to cancel the game. When baseball officials worried that a strike could cause a riot, the players gave in, starting the game an hour late. In the end, the Red Sox were paid only $1,108 per player and the Cubs $671 each. This strike threat was one of the justifications the Red Sox' ownership would use for dealing Babe Ruth to the Yankees at the end of 1919. Management convinced reporters in Boston and New York to depict Ruth as a malingerer, not just because of his undisciplined habits but also because of his salary demands and his role as potential striker.
With the owners receiving fawning decisions like that of Judge Landis, and with a growing public perception that baseball was the national game, the players were burdened with the expectation that they were somehow above labor grievances. Many players saw themselves as underpaid and exploited. The stage was set for base-ball's first major scandal.
VI
THE BLACK SOX
T hey are the lost boys of
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