Norman Macht on the Deadball Era
An interview with John McMurray
This Q&A first appeared last week in The Inside Game: The Official Journal of SABR’s Deadball Era Committee, ably edited by Donald Jensen. The interview was conducted by committee chair John McMurray. Norman Macht has been a SABR member for 40 years and in 2008 won the Ritter Award for Connie Mack and the Early Years of Baseball, the first of three volumes on Mack which he researched over 66 years. Macht recently offered opinions that were of principal interest to members of the Deadball Era Committee, but will be apt for readers of Our Game, too.
Every so often, we hear about Deadball Era players who have yet to be elected to the Hall of Fame. Sherry Magee, Gavy Cravath, and Jake Daubert are three notable examples. Do you believe that Deadball Era players deserve consideration for the Hall of Fame at this point, considering that no one living has seen them play?
Nobody alive today ever saw a majority of U. S. presidents, but that doesn’t stop historians from rating them. And what are we but Deadball Era historians? And what is the role of the veterans committee but historians?
It’s the veterans committee’s job to do the research or ask employees of the Hall of Fame to provide it. The stats are there; contemporary comments by teammates, opponents, and sportswriters are more easily researched than ever.
Deadball Era players should be judged in the context of their time: wearing heavy woolen uniforms, batting against mashed, nicked, grass- and tobaccostained pitches in the twilight of spring and fall, fielding with pancake hand-size gloves on a variety of field conditions, traveling by non-air-conditioned trains and sleeping sometimes two to a bed in stuffy hotels.
While stolen bases have been on the rise recently in baseball, sacrifice bunts, doubles, and triples are less a part of modern-day baseball than they were during the Deadball Era. At the same time, fans today have complained about the “three true outcomes,” where most plate appearances end in home runs, strikeouts, or walks. Part of the attractiveness of the Deadball Era game was that it was aesthetically fun to watch and often unpredictable. Please describe what you feel would have been particularly appealing about watching a Deadball Era game.
Putting the ball in play is what makes baseball fun to watch — and that’s what the Deadball Era offered. The three true outcomes today involve zero action. A home run in a crucial situation can be exciting (but seeing it repeated ad nauseam on scoreboards or TV is boooring). I’d rather see a batter beat out a bunt — or even be out on an attempted bunt. And the restrictions on pitchers’ holding a man on first plus the shortened distance between the enlarged bases have robbed some of the excitement of that action.
Which Deadball Era stadium do you believe would have been the most enjoyable in which to watch a game?
I’m old enough to have seen some games in ballparks built during the Deadball Era. The Polo Grounds was fun because of its vast outfield — a cab ride from home plate to the center field fence — providing plenty of action. And in those days a general admission ticket allowed you to sit anywhere except the few rows of box and reserved seats.
I also liked Ebbets Field for a different reason: it was small and you were close to whatever was happening wherever you sat. Right field had a high screen with a slanting billboard at its base — no fence, no bleachers, no home runs — just right fielder vs. base-runner battles of arms versus legs.
Deadball Era pitchers were known for pitching a lot of innings, including regularly completing games. How, without modern medicine and weight training techniques, do you believe pitchers from more than a century ago were able to be so durable and have such sustained success?
Deadball Era pitchers threw a lot of complete games because they expected to finish every game they started and they were expected to by managers and club owners. Pitching staffs were small. At contract time, a club owner would say, “You expect me to pay two players to pitch a game?” And if you couldn’t do the job, you were gone.
It was the job description. You were handed the ball to pitch the game, whether it took 9 or 12 or 15 — or even 26 innings. And pitchers resisted being taken out of a game, even if they were injured, or were being hit hard in an early inning. They made adjustments and hung in there. They paced themselves. The ultimate goal was to retire the side on three pitches, not to strike out the side. If they had a comfortable lead, ease up and throw a hittable pitch.
It had nothing to do with weight training and medicine. An ideal pitcher’s build was long, dangling arms, flat muscles and big hands. A lot of pitchers were farmers and hunters in those days. They were sturdy, they walked a lot. During the season they threw a lot. (Fifty years later Johnny Sain was a pitching coach preaching that pitchers had arm problems because they didn’t throw enough.)
Many Deadball Era players, such as Eddie Collins or Ty Cobb, were known for their baseball instincts and the abilities to anticipate situations. To what degree did managers serve as pitching and hitting coaches or were Deadball Era players mostly left to their own devices to figure out what worked and what didn’t?
Managers had a coach or two, often an old catcher or pitcher, but without the titles of hitting or pitching coach. McGraw did all the strategic thinking for the Giants and tried to call the pitches for some of his pitchers, who didn’t like it. (Other later managers did the same, including Bill Terry and Joe Cronin.)
Connie Mack looked for smart players, especially infielders, and encouraged them to develop strategies and plays on their own, but he moved his outfielders depending on the pitcher and batter. And he was specific about what pitchers and hitters could use some tips and who to leave alone.
With legalized sports gambling gaining an increasing foothold, the public’s expectation of the interaction between gambling and baseball has also changed. Please describe how gambling was viewed in the context of baseball during the Deadball Era, both by the sport itself and by the public at large, and to what degree public confidence in baseball was shaken by the Black Sox scandal.
Players betting on their own teams was common knowledge, often admitted and publicized, and not frowned upon by the public. If a pitcher almost always beat a particular team, he might bet on himself when he pitched, and some teammates might also. Players betting on a World Series in which they were not involved evoked no outcries from the public or club owners.
In a 1955 letter to Connie Mack, Ty Cobb wrote: “Two times Boston and Washington wagered on their pitchers, Johnson and Wood, in a game. The papers were full of it. Pitchers who knew they would win more than they lost would wager on themselves for extra pocket money.”
Clutches of gamblers sat in the outfield stands, betting among themselves on all sorts of impending events: a hit, a strikeout, a home run — whatever.
But AL president Ban Johnson agreed with Connie Mack that gambling in baseball could not help but harm the game. It wasn’t until Judge Landis became the Commissioner following the 1919 World Series scandal that a concerted effort was launched to curb all gambling by players and managers. The occasional rumbling of earthquakes felt today may be caused by Landis spinning underground at today’s marriage of betting and baseball.
The Deadball Era spans from 1901 to 1919, but the second half of the Deadball Era was very different from the first. Not only was offense very un-Deadball-like in 1911, but many of the accomplished players in the second half of the Deadball Era (such as George Burns, Bobby Veach, or Dave Robertson) are also nowhere near as well-known as players in the first decade. Accounting for World War I’s impact on the game, why is the latter portion of the Deadball Era sometimes an afterthought?
The first half of the Deadball Era was something new: a second major league meant twice as many big league players, new stars, new rivalries, the World Series. While the effects of the start of the Great War in 1914 cannot be minimized, and the U.S. entry into the war heightened those dampening effects, I would hardly regard as an “afterthought” any part of an era that introduced the likes of Babe Ruth, Edd Roush, Joe Jackson and George Sisler.
Which Deadball Era players did you have the opportunity to interview?
I interviewed two players from the Deadball Era. One was Shag Thompson, a cup-of-coffee outfielder who was the last surviving member of the 1914 Philadelphia A’s. He was in his 80s when I visited him but was still sharp. We talked about Connie Mack and the A’s, which was my interest at the time, and not about what it was like playing in the Deadball Era.
The other player was John Francis Daley, whom I visited on his 100th birthday (in 1987) in Mansfield, Ohio. (He was the oldest former major leaguer when he died at 101.). He described what it was like to bat against Walter Johnson in the late afternoon when games began at 3:30:
“In 1912 I was playing shortstop for Mansfield in the Class D Ohio State League. Along about July the St. Louis Browns, who would lose 101 games that year, needed infielders. They bought me for $3,500 and I was suddenly in the big leagues. In my third game, on July 20 in Washington, the score was 3–3 in the top of the eleventh. It’s getting dark. I’m up to bat. And who’s pitching? Walter Johnson. He’d come in in relief in the ninth inning. I worked him to a 3 and 2 count and fouled off a few. The next pitch I never saw. I heard it smack in the catcher’s mitt and the umpire call strike three.
“I guess I looked sort of dazed. Our manager, George Stovall, said to me, ‘What’s the matter, kid?’
“I told him, ‘You can’t hit what you can’t see.’”
(At the end of that inning, the game was called on account of darkness.)
In the Deadball Era, it was rare for players to be quoted in newspaper articles recounting particular games. One did not, for instance, typically see quotes from Eddie Plank or Rube Waddell after a well-pitched game. Considering that reporters often traveled with the teams and were close to players and managers, why were players of the time quoted so rarely?
In those days writers did not rush down to the clubhouses after a game to get quotes. They had enough to do writing their game stories for the telegraphers to send to their papers for the early editions. And they wouldn’t have been welcome in the clubhouses.
Some interviews took place on trains and in hotel lobbies. But a lot of players were farmers or smalltown boys who didn’t have much to say or were wary of reporters (which has always been the case). And, truth be told, some well-known writers made up interviews.
To what degree is the Deadball Era still relevant today?
More than a century later, what are the most important things to recall about the Deadball Era? The Deadball Era is relevant because it’s history, man. It’s part of the Americanization of the immigrants of the first 20 years of the twentieth century, as well as the evolution of the baseball fans of not just America but the world. And it’s full of fascinating stories about fascinating characters and once-in-a-lifetime events.
