SWC75
Bored Historian
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Six things had a powerful impact on baseball in the 1915-19 period: the collapse of the Federal League and with it, the latest player’s union , the US involvement in World War I and with it the influenza epidemic, the switch of Babe Ruth to the outfield and the Black Sox scandal. These events and their timing combined to interact and, to a considerable extent, create baseball as we know it today.
The Federal league got off to a good start but lacked the financial wherewithal for a long struggle and when Judge Landis delayed the hearings on the Federal’s law suit against the established leagues, the “outlaw” league’s days were numbered. The “kill shot” came when the owners of the major league teams simply bought out most of the Federal league owners and offer a couple others the chance to buy into major league clubs. One owner that was left out, the owner of the Baltimore Terrapins, who continued to press the lawsuit long after the league went out of existence.
The Federal league lawsuit eventually went before the Supreme Court, who ruled that the Sherman Anti-Trust Act did not apply to baseball. Bill James discusses this decision at length. The court did not decide, as most accounts present it, that baseball is a sport not a business, although that was the owner’s argument. Instead they ruled that it was not interstate commerce, since the games were being sold to the people who bought tickets and who were, the court presumed, from the same state. One wonders what the ruling would have been if the games were being broadcast.
James points out that “the case was heard only three weeks after the Black Sox scandal broke. Revelations about baseball being sold out were appearing in the newspapers daily while the appeal was being heard. And when you think about it, what does a crooked baseball player believe? He believes that baseball is a business, not a sport. Isn’t that the precise statement of an athlete who sells out? What does the crook who set it up say to his teammates? He says “We’re in this for the money aren’t we? We’re not doing this for our health; we’re not doing this for fun. We’re professionals. We’re doing it for the money.”
“So the appeals court which ruled in favor of Organized baseball heard the case with a monster looking over their shoulders: the monster of professionalism run amok. The court was asked, in essence: Must the issues of money govern the sport? But the court was asked that question in a highly unusual context, in which the worst consequences putting money ahead the sporting interest had just been dramatically demonstrated. This unusual circumstance is reflected in an odd decision.” And, because of that, baseball has been exempt from the Sherman Anti-Trust Act ever since.
Without a rival league, baseball owners no longer felt the need to deal with Fraternity of Professional Baseball Players of America, so they didn’t. It just kind of faded away through its own powerlessness. And player salaries, which had inflated by 2-3 times while the Feds were open for business, collapsed back down to their previous levels. People who got something and lost it are always angrier than people who never had anything.
There were two more attempts to form player’s unions before it took. Former ball player and lawyer Raymond Cannon formed the National Baseball Players Association of the United States in 1922. Unfortunately, he had been Happy Felsch’s lawyer and that association doomed the enterprise. In 1946 another attorney, Robert Murphy, created the American Baseball Guild in 1946 but couldn’t generate enough support. In 1954, the Major League Baseball Players Association was created after informal negotiations between owners and players as a sort of “house union”. It’s first President, Bob Feller, actually said, “You cannot carry collective bargaining into baseball.” But the attitudes of players changed in the turbulent 1960’s and in they hired Marvin Miller to lead them into the modern era. But that was decades away.
Bill James: “World War I came about, I am told, because the expansion dreams of the imperial powers reached the limits of the earth and began to crush against one another. When no more territory remained to be claimed and conquered, the great powers began to fight over the ones already in tow. It was a greedy time: there’s no other way to put it.” Here’s a fine article I found on baseball during WWI, (there aren’t many of them: most are about the game during WWII):
http://www.thisgreatgame.com/1918-baseball-history.html
The most interesting points, (to me):
- There was minimal impact in 1917: just a few players were in the service. The season was a full 154 games. The owners wanted to make sure that the public knew baseball was aware of the war by having players march around before games with bats on the shoulders, (as pictured in the article), making it look as if they were prepared to defend the country if it came to that, (and if we ever got down to using baseball bats, we were in trouble).
- They started the 1918 season as if it was business as usual but it wasn’t. A draft had been established and the director of it said that all men of military age in a non-essential profession must be part of it or get a job connected with the war effort. The owners asked to have baseball declared “essential” for public morale but were turned down. Of course their profits were essential to their morale but that didn’t count.
- They did agree to shortened the season end September 1st, (the deadline for finding a defense job or get drafted), - in exchange for exceptions being given to the players on the pennant-winning teams so they could play in the World Series.
- The two teams that had competed in the 1917 World Series, the Chicago White Sox and the New York Giants, were devastated by the draft and fell out of contention. The Boston Red Sox were not and the Chicago Cubs loaded up on so much pitching that they could absorb the loss of Grover Cleveland Alexander and still win the pennant.
- One player the Red Sox did lose was left fielder Duffy Lewis. At Harry Hooper’s suggestion , manager Ed Barrow decided to use his ace pitcher, who was a good hitter, in the outfield when he wasn’t pitching. And Babe Ruth came through for him- so well he decided to just have Ruth play in the outfield the next season. So Ruth’s switch to become an everyday player and the “Babe Ruth Era” that was the result of that decision, was a product of World War I. One assumes that Ruth’s prowess with the bat would have been recognized and rewarded at some point anyway, who knows when? I’ve always wondered if Ruth could have pitched every 4th game and played the outfield the rest of the time- he might have been a 300 game winner with 700 home runs- but the Babe said he didn’t like pitching because “it interfered with my nightlife”. I guess it involved too much preparation. Just showing up at the ballpark and grabbing a bat was easier.
- The owners announced during the series that the gate receipts, which had always been distributed among the players on the two teams, would not be shared with players from the 2nd, 3rd and 4th place teams in each league. The players were not consulted and refused to take the field. They were persuaded to play by appeals to their patriotism: how can they be complaining about money when men of their generation were fighting and dying in the trenches?
- But the owners were concerned about money. They reduced the player’s salaries due to the abbreviated schedule and then released all of them from their contracts after the season amid rumors that the 1919 season would be cancelled. When the war ended and the season wasn’t cancelled, the owners re-signed the players, negotiating only with the ones they had previously employed and refusing to pay any more than they had been. They had avoided paying them during the offseason and saved themselves about $200,000.
All of the maneuvering and the finagling and the resulting low salaries created an atmosphere of cynicism that allowed corruption to prosper. People who feel they’ve been exploited or left out are going to have less respect for institutions and the decisions and rules they make. And the problem was worse in Chicago than anywhere else.
Many people ask why the White Sox were favorites to win the 1919 World Series. They had an inferior regular season record than the Reds, 88-52 (.629) vs. 96-44, (.686) and they’d won their pennant by only 3 ½ games over Tris Speaker’s Indians as opposed to the 9 game lead the Reds had over the second place Giants and 21 games over the third place Cubs. (The season was reduced to 140 games because of the time it took to get players back from military service.)
The primary reason The White Sox were favored is that they were the American League team. The AL had won 8 of the 9 World Series of the decade with the only exception being the legendary upset of the Athletics by the Braves in 1914. Just as any NFC team would have been favored over any AFC team during that period, (1984-1996) when the NFC won 13 straight Super Bowls, so any AL team would have been favored over any NL team in 1919.
Beyond that, the White Sox were the de facto defending champions. With so many players in the service or in defense jobs in 1918 and with the curtailed season that year, 1917 was the last “true” baseball season to most fans and that year the Sox had won 100 games and the World Series. They were considered superior to any team that had played in the 1918 season.
They were also considered superior to the Reds, who had literally never won anything. The original Cincinnati Red Stockings had been the dominant team in baseball in the 1860’s but that team had gone out of business, to be replaced by an American Association team in 1882. That franchise actually won the initial AA title but they’d won no pennants since and had only one winning season, (77-76 in 1909) from 1906-1916. They became respectable in 1917 with 78-76 and 68-60 in 1918 but no one considered them to be the equal of the White Sox.
But the Sox were owned by the most parsimonious owner of them all, Charles Comiskey. The team was known as the “Black Sox” before the scandal because Comiskey made them launder their own uniforms. When they refused, they played in dirty uniforms until Comiskey agreed to pay to have them laundered- and then took the cost of it out of their 1917 World Series shares. Comiskey paid Eddie Collins $12,000. Joe Jackson got half of that. Everyone else was a fraction of that. The team threatened to strike for more money but were persuaded not to with promises of bonuses if they could win the pennant that never materialized. There’s an oft-repeated story that Eddie Cicotte was promised a $10,000 bonus if he won 30 games and was then held out when he had 29 wins to avoid paying the bonus. But he started two games in the last week of the season but didn’t get the decision in either. As with the Wagner-Cobb story from the 1909 World Series, the fact that people would believe it happened is as revealing as if it were true.
Bill James: “The arch-villain of this villainous era was Charles Albert Comiskey. He had no reason in the world not to deal fairly with his players. The White Sox drew the largest crowds in baseball in this period- even larger than the Giants- yet the White Sox were one of the lowest-paying teams. Comiskey held all the power in the relationship between the owner and the players and he had to rub their noses in it.”
On top of that was another problem. James: “The White Sox divided into two factions: a gentleman’s faction led by (Eddie) Collins and Ray Schalk and a bitter, rough neck faction led by Chick Gandil. The two factions hated each other.” This further eroded any sense of doing anything for the benefit of the team. “It is not my intention to make apologies for dishonest ballplayers. But you have to understand what happened…..It’s a hard thing to know that another man is making money off of your labor and has no intention of dealing fairly with you….Put Joe Jackson in the Hall of Fame? How about if we kick Comiskey out? Bury them all in a common grave and put up a marker with an eleven word epitaph: They all wanted the money and they wanted it all.”
Six things had a powerful impact on baseball in the 1915-19 period: the collapse of the Federal League and with it, the latest player’s union , the US involvement in World War I and with it the influenza epidemic, the switch of Babe Ruth to the outfield and the Black Sox scandal. These events and their timing combined to interact and, to a considerable extent, create baseball as we know it today.
The Federal league got off to a good start but lacked the financial wherewithal for a long struggle and when Judge Landis delayed the hearings on the Federal’s law suit against the established leagues, the “outlaw” league’s days were numbered. The “kill shot” came when the owners of the major league teams simply bought out most of the Federal league owners and offer a couple others the chance to buy into major league clubs. One owner that was left out, the owner of the Baltimore Terrapins, who continued to press the lawsuit long after the league went out of existence.
The Federal league lawsuit eventually went before the Supreme Court, who ruled that the Sherman Anti-Trust Act did not apply to baseball. Bill James discusses this decision at length. The court did not decide, as most accounts present it, that baseball is a sport not a business, although that was the owner’s argument. Instead they ruled that it was not interstate commerce, since the games were being sold to the people who bought tickets and who were, the court presumed, from the same state. One wonders what the ruling would have been if the games were being broadcast.
James points out that “the case was heard only three weeks after the Black Sox scandal broke. Revelations about baseball being sold out were appearing in the newspapers daily while the appeal was being heard. And when you think about it, what does a crooked baseball player believe? He believes that baseball is a business, not a sport. Isn’t that the precise statement of an athlete who sells out? What does the crook who set it up say to his teammates? He says “We’re in this for the money aren’t we? We’re not doing this for our health; we’re not doing this for fun. We’re professionals. We’re doing it for the money.”
“So the appeals court which ruled in favor of Organized baseball heard the case with a monster looking over their shoulders: the monster of professionalism run amok. The court was asked, in essence: Must the issues of money govern the sport? But the court was asked that question in a highly unusual context, in which the worst consequences putting money ahead the sporting interest had just been dramatically demonstrated. This unusual circumstance is reflected in an odd decision.” And, because of that, baseball has been exempt from the Sherman Anti-Trust Act ever since.
Without a rival league, baseball owners no longer felt the need to deal with Fraternity of Professional Baseball Players of America, so they didn’t. It just kind of faded away through its own powerlessness. And player salaries, which had inflated by 2-3 times while the Feds were open for business, collapsed back down to their previous levels. People who got something and lost it are always angrier than people who never had anything.
There were two more attempts to form player’s unions before it took. Former ball player and lawyer Raymond Cannon formed the National Baseball Players Association of the United States in 1922. Unfortunately, he had been Happy Felsch’s lawyer and that association doomed the enterprise. In 1946 another attorney, Robert Murphy, created the American Baseball Guild in 1946 but couldn’t generate enough support. In 1954, the Major League Baseball Players Association was created after informal negotiations between owners and players as a sort of “house union”. It’s first President, Bob Feller, actually said, “You cannot carry collective bargaining into baseball.” But the attitudes of players changed in the turbulent 1960’s and in they hired Marvin Miller to lead them into the modern era. But that was decades away.
Bill James: “World War I came about, I am told, because the expansion dreams of the imperial powers reached the limits of the earth and began to crush against one another. When no more territory remained to be claimed and conquered, the great powers began to fight over the ones already in tow. It was a greedy time: there’s no other way to put it.” Here’s a fine article I found on baseball during WWI, (there aren’t many of them: most are about the game during WWII):
http://www.thisgreatgame.com/1918-baseball-history.html
The most interesting points, (to me):
- There was minimal impact in 1917: just a few players were in the service. The season was a full 154 games. The owners wanted to make sure that the public knew baseball was aware of the war by having players march around before games with bats on the shoulders, (as pictured in the article), making it look as if they were prepared to defend the country if it came to that, (and if we ever got down to using baseball bats, we were in trouble).
- They started the 1918 season as if it was business as usual but it wasn’t. A draft had been established and the director of it said that all men of military age in a non-essential profession must be part of it or get a job connected with the war effort. The owners asked to have baseball declared “essential” for public morale but were turned down. Of course their profits were essential to their morale but that didn’t count.
- They did agree to shortened the season end September 1st, (the deadline for finding a defense job or get drafted), - in exchange for exceptions being given to the players on the pennant-winning teams so they could play in the World Series.
- The two teams that had competed in the 1917 World Series, the Chicago White Sox and the New York Giants, were devastated by the draft and fell out of contention. The Boston Red Sox were not and the Chicago Cubs loaded up on so much pitching that they could absorb the loss of Grover Cleveland Alexander and still win the pennant.
- One player the Red Sox did lose was left fielder Duffy Lewis. At Harry Hooper’s suggestion , manager Ed Barrow decided to use his ace pitcher, who was a good hitter, in the outfield when he wasn’t pitching. And Babe Ruth came through for him- so well he decided to just have Ruth play in the outfield the next season. So Ruth’s switch to become an everyday player and the “Babe Ruth Era” that was the result of that decision, was a product of World War I. One assumes that Ruth’s prowess with the bat would have been recognized and rewarded at some point anyway, who knows when? I’ve always wondered if Ruth could have pitched every 4th game and played the outfield the rest of the time- he might have been a 300 game winner with 700 home runs- but the Babe said he didn’t like pitching because “it interfered with my nightlife”. I guess it involved too much preparation. Just showing up at the ballpark and grabbing a bat was easier.
- The owners announced during the series that the gate receipts, which had always been distributed among the players on the two teams, would not be shared with players from the 2nd, 3rd and 4th place teams in each league. The players were not consulted and refused to take the field. They were persuaded to play by appeals to their patriotism: how can they be complaining about money when men of their generation were fighting and dying in the trenches?
- But the owners were concerned about money. They reduced the player’s salaries due to the abbreviated schedule and then released all of them from their contracts after the season amid rumors that the 1919 season would be cancelled. When the war ended and the season wasn’t cancelled, the owners re-signed the players, negotiating only with the ones they had previously employed and refusing to pay any more than they had been. They had avoided paying them during the offseason and saved themselves about $200,000.
All of the maneuvering and the finagling and the resulting low salaries created an atmosphere of cynicism that allowed corruption to prosper. People who feel they’ve been exploited or left out are going to have less respect for institutions and the decisions and rules they make. And the problem was worse in Chicago than anywhere else.
Many people ask why the White Sox were favorites to win the 1919 World Series. They had an inferior regular season record than the Reds, 88-52 (.629) vs. 96-44, (.686) and they’d won their pennant by only 3 ½ games over Tris Speaker’s Indians as opposed to the 9 game lead the Reds had over the second place Giants and 21 games over the third place Cubs. (The season was reduced to 140 games because of the time it took to get players back from military service.)
The primary reason The White Sox were favored is that they were the American League team. The AL had won 8 of the 9 World Series of the decade with the only exception being the legendary upset of the Athletics by the Braves in 1914. Just as any NFC team would have been favored over any AFC team during that period, (1984-1996) when the NFC won 13 straight Super Bowls, so any AL team would have been favored over any NL team in 1919.
Beyond that, the White Sox were the de facto defending champions. With so many players in the service or in defense jobs in 1918 and with the curtailed season that year, 1917 was the last “true” baseball season to most fans and that year the Sox had won 100 games and the World Series. They were considered superior to any team that had played in the 1918 season.
They were also considered superior to the Reds, who had literally never won anything. The original Cincinnati Red Stockings had been the dominant team in baseball in the 1860’s but that team had gone out of business, to be replaced by an American Association team in 1882. That franchise actually won the initial AA title but they’d won no pennants since and had only one winning season, (77-76 in 1909) from 1906-1916. They became respectable in 1917 with 78-76 and 68-60 in 1918 but no one considered them to be the equal of the White Sox.
But the Sox were owned by the most parsimonious owner of them all, Charles Comiskey. The team was known as the “Black Sox” before the scandal because Comiskey made them launder their own uniforms. When they refused, they played in dirty uniforms until Comiskey agreed to pay to have them laundered- and then took the cost of it out of their 1917 World Series shares. Comiskey paid Eddie Collins $12,000. Joe Jackson got half of that. Everyone else was a fraction of that. The team threatened to strike for more money but were persuaded not to with promises of bonuses if they could win the pennant that never materialized. There’s an oft-repeated story that Eddie Cicotte was promised a $10,000 bonus if he won 30 games and was then held out when he had 29 wins to avoid paying the bonus. But he started two games in the last week of the season but didn’t get the decision in either. As with the Wagner-Cobb story from the 1909 World Series, the fact that people would believe it happened is as revealing as if it were true.
Bill James: “The arch-villain of this villainous era was Charles Albert Comiskey. He had no reason in the world not to deal fairly with his players. The White Sox drew the largest crowds in baseball in this period- even larger than the Giants- yet the White Sox were one of the lowest-paying teams. Comiskey held all the power in the relationship between the owner and the players and he had to rub their noses in it.”
On top of that was another problem. James: “The White Sox divided into two factions: a gentleman’s faction led by (Eddie) Collins and Ray Schalk and a bitter, rough neck faction led by Chick Gandil. The two factions hated each other.” This further eroded any sense of doing anything for the benefit of the team. “It is not my intention to make apologies for dishonest ballplayers. But you have to understand what happened…..It’s a hard thing to know that another man is making money off of your labor and has no intention of dealing fairly with you….Put Joe Jackson in the Hall of Fame? How about if we kick Comiskey out? Bury them all in a common grave and put up a marker with an eleven word epitaph: They all wanted the money and they wanted it all.”
