The Changing Game
A comprehensive look at “the unchanging game,” in several parts
Bill Felber wrote this dazzling essay for Total Baseball nearly thirty years ago, and Gary Gillette updated it for a later edition of that estimable encyclopedia, now gathering dust on my shelf beside my high-school slide rule. I thought to update this, with aid from the authors, still my friends after all these years, but then thought it better to present it as something of a rather large time capsule.
Those of you who think of launch angle as the latest, hippest thing in today’s game may enjoy this, from the Caldwell (Kansas) Advance of May 28, 1885:
In 1906, at the arguable heights of their careers, the Hall of Fame-bound trio of Joe Tinker, Johnny Evers, and Frank Chance completed approximately 50 double plays. In 2000, the primary players in the last-place Tampa Bay Devil Rays infield — Fred McGriff at first base, Miguel Cairo and Bobby Smith at second, and Kevin Stocker and Felix Martinez at shortstop — turned roughly twice that number. May we infer that the finest middle infield of a bygone era would be rejected as unfit for duty on a perfectly nondescript modern team?
For the five-year period between 1921 and 1925, Rogers Hornsby batted better than .400. In the past 60 seasons, not a single major league hitter has reached that level of excellence as much as once, let alone for half a decade. May we conclude that, were he in his prime today, Hornsby would shame Tony Gwynn into anonymity?
The answers to those questions are, of course, two resounding calls of “no.”
Baseball is not played in a time capsule, and neither its record book nor its archives should be read as if it were. The game played on the artificial turf of Veterans Stadium that you watch today on television holds the same lure as the contest your grandfather took a surrey to see at Chicago’s old West Side Park. Teams contest for the same end, using fundamentally the same objects in a format described basically by the same rules. However, technological, sociological, strategic, and cultural forces have over decades refined those elements, so that today’s performances cannot easily be accurately measured relative to yesterday’s. Nor can judgment be precisely made as to the superiority of either, save subjectively in the mind’s eye.
Baseball today is different from the game of the early 20th century in many ways, just as contemporary American culture is different from the horse-and-buggy era. Imagine paying a quarter for admission to the ballpark, another quarter for access to the grandstand, and a third quarter for a seat. Imagine games played before audiences of a few hundred, maybe a thousand, fans. Imagine visiting teams arriving in town on trains, bunking two to a bed, then caravaning to the ballyard in a grand parade through the streets — though never at night and never, ever on Sunday. Now imagine baseball as the only sport of widespread popularity. No football to speak of, no basketball, no hockey; no golf, no tennis, no track of consequence. Moreover, horse racing was only for the elite, and boxing only for the disreputable. There was such a time in America, and it was only a century ago.
In many ways, the game of baseball has changed precisely because America itself has changed. Whether all that change has been for the good may be argued. One might contend, for instance, that a laudable part of Americana died out when the practice of uniformed players publicly trolleying to the game (as a means of stirring fan attention) was halted in the first decade of the 20th century. However, most, if not all, aspects of baseball’s growth alongside society were inevitable. The 50-cent admission charge established by the National League in 1876 held for many years, but so did the rather unsavory practice of treating players as peons, to the point of doubling up sleeping arrangements. Philadelphia Athletics catcher Ossie Schreckengost once actually had it written into his contract that teammate (and bunkmate) Rube Waddell would be barred from eating animal crackers in bed because the crumbs irritated the catcher. Players today sleep in luxury hotels, and most do not even share rooms, much less beds. As the cost of living and the cost of operating a franchise have both increased strikingly, so have the size of the grandstand and the cost of a general admission ticket, the latter by a factor of 15 or 20.
In any era and at any price, a great championship battle has always held the American populace in thrall. Tens of millions of fans watched on their living room televisions in October 2000 as the Yankees and Mets waged their crosstown World Series struggle long into the night. Those fans studied every decisive play from a half dozen angles on instant replay as they second-guessed managerial moves and controversial umpiring decisions. Was that excitement any greater, measure for measure, than the grip in which the cities of Boston and Baltimore were held during the final days of the race for the 1897 National League pennant?
There was neither television nor radio then, but that did not stay the enthusiasm of hundreds of thousands of rooters nationwide as the pulsating battle for supremacy wound to a close. The principals were the two most dominant sporting teams of their generation: The Boston Beaneaters and Baltimore Orioles had divided the previous six pennants. Now, with less than a week remaining in the 1897 season, they were locked in a virtual tie for first, each having won better than seven of every 10 games played and fated by the schedule to meet for three conclusive games in Baltimore.
So all encompassing was interest in the games that Associated Press telegraphers dispatched play-by-play accounts to every major subscribing newspaper east of the Rockies. More than three dozen correspondents — an unheard-of number for the era — covered the games. Twenty more telegraphers tapped out accounts to cities where fans had gathered in theaters or outside newspaper offices to follow the events on chalkboards. In Boston, fan interest was so great that the game reports received triple the front-page space accorded the activities of President William McKinley, who was in Boston at the same time. Throngs numbering in the thousands massed daily along Washington Street, Boston’s Newspaper Row, to watch mechanical re-creations, which can be considered a distant precursor to graphical coverage of the World Series on the World Wide Web. There was a published report of 4,000 fans jamming Boston’s Music Hall to watch a similar simulation. The games at Baltimore’s Union Grounds drew as many as 25,000 spectators, more than twice the previous record attendance for that facility!
The excitement of a great pennant race is a constant; only the modes of sensing that excitement change. Consider only a few of the more obvious changes: The player pool has changed, albeit at times tardily, to reflect the nation’s ethnic populations. When that pool expanded to encompass Southerners, Irish, Jews, Latins, or African Americans, it did so in reaction to fundamental changes such as the gradual dying out of post-Civil War prejudice, the assimilation of immigrant populations, and the eventual willingness of white society to acknowledge blacks as equals.
Technology has worked on the grand old game in many ways. Basic improvements in the construction of the ball and glove have dramatically changed the play on the field. The field itself has changed in ways as grandiose and obvious as the abandonment of the unfenced pasture in favor of the comparative luxury of the wooden park. Intimate brick and steel stadiums of the early 20th century were followed half a century later by huge, impersonal concrete multipurpose facilities that are now being retired by atavistic retro ballparks evoking the golden years of the game.
Sociological alterations, as exemplified by population shifts from city to suburb and by the replacement of the trolley in favor of the automobile, resulted in the abandonment of many inner-city ballparks after World War II. At the turn of the millennium, ironically, high-tech new downtown ballparks are viewed by many cities as key components in reviving aging sections of their urban cores.
Changes in national attitudes have been mirrored in the game on the field. America was a prim and proper country in 1908, and its national game was a prim and proper one, heavy on the sacrifice bunt and very short on the long ball. Americans were a comparatively profligate bunch in the late 1920s, winning and losing with abandon on Wall Street, and these restless capitalists adopted baseball heroes like Babe Ruth and Hack Wilson, who hit ’em far during the day and swigged ’em long into the night. The difference of only two decades is strikingly underscored in a baseball statistic that also speaks volumes about off-field attitudes: for the five years between 1906 and 1910, the Chicago White Sox hit a total of only 27 home runs. Ruth hit more than that by himself in every season save one between 1919 and 1933.
Baseball’s labor-management relations have also generally mirrored national patterns. The present major leagues can trace their ancestry back to the 1870s, an age when even the legality of organized labor was questioned.
The motivation behind the organizers of the National League was to take control of the game that had been essentially run by players’ cooperatives. The 1890s, the era of some of the most violent union-management conflicts (e.g., the Haymarket riot, the Pullman strike), also witnessed the last direct player challenge to the authority of ownership, the Brotherhood War, which produced the Players League. Unionization very gradually gained favor, although both nationally and in baseball that process took decades. True player free agency in the National Pastime, as with worker rights in other businesses, often arrived only under the aegis of the courts.
Finally, as the educational level of America itself has changed, the strategies of baseball have evolved. The dominant function of today’s late-inning reliever could hardly have been envisioned by the game’s greatest minds as little as three decades ago. The stolen base, the home run, and the sacrifice have all come and gone as strategic coups (and, in some cases, have come back again). It is as judgmental to speculate on whether the game of today is better than the game of 1907 as it is to posit whether Joe Tinker was a better shortstop than Nomar Garciaparra.
No one would contend that baseball has been, or is today, any more than a general mirror of its times. Neither can it seriously be suggested that the National Pastime has failed to reflect many of the historical trends that have occurred during its existence. For purposes of this discussion, it is vital to recognize both of those realities. Paradoxically, only by appreciating the game’s evolution can one truly begin to sense the marvelous continuum represented therein.
So, by what context does one measure Hornsby’s feats of the 1920s relative to Gwynn’s of the 1980s and 1990s? By the context of the technological, strategic, societal, and cultural changes that wrought both of them. Could Joe Tinker play shortstop for the Cubs of today? For that matter, could Ozzie Smith have adapted to the scrub fields, primitive travel methods, incompetent training aides, and all-but-useless equipment of Tinker’s day?
These questions cannot be answered with finality. But without considering the many changing aspects of the game, attempts to even provide an answer become frivolous. What follows is an effort to examine some of the major causes of change and to provide context to a discussion of the evolving nature of baseball. It is a sport has possessed for more than a century only one enduring and vital characteristic: it has, from the outset, been America’s National Pastime.
Second part — Equipment — tomorrow: https://ourgame.mlblogs.com/the-changing-game-part-2-47af7522d5cc
