SWC75
Bored Historian
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A LIVELY ERA
When did the Live Ball Era begin? The traditional story is that baseball was reeling from the Black Sox Scandal and decided to juice the ball so Babe Ruth could hit a lot of home runs and make baseball popular again, much as McGwire and Sosa brought the sport back after the 1994-95 strike. The evidence for that was that the Black Sox Scandal occurred in 1919 and Babe Ruth hit 29 home runs that year, then 54 the next. So the Live Ball Era began in 1920.
But the timing is all wrong. The Black Sox Scandal didn’t hit the headlines until September 1920 when the White Sox, still with their full complement of players, were in a tremendous pennant race with Ruth’s Yankees and Tris Speaker’s Indians. Ruth had already hit 53 of his 54 home runs when the Grand Jury hearings began. As Bill James said, it wasn’t the popularity of the game that was imperiled, it was the integrity. It was Commissioner Landis that fought that battle, not Babe Ruth. He does suggest that the owners didn’t do anything to try to scale back the home run hitting to return to the game they knew because of the impact it was having on the box office. But the increased hitting and home run hitting was not a direct response to the Black Sox Scandal.
A few years ago a book came out talking about the Live Ball Era that said that it was created by the Influenza pandemic of 1918-20, which killed more people world-wide than World War I. For years skinflint owners had insisted on trying to play entire games with one ball, even sending security people into the stand to retrieve foul balls. Doctoring the ball was legal and on the rare occasions when the ball was replaced, (because the old one came apart), it would immediately be thrown around the infield where each player would his best to spit on it, scuff it and dirty it up. It would become lumpy and dirtier as the game went on and harder to see, especially in the late afternoon, (there were no lights in ballparks yet). Heath authorities regarded this as a significant threat to the public because it was an excellent way to spread the flu germ. So they convinced the owners to start replacing baseballs when they got dirty and ban the spitball. This meant that hitters could see the ball better and when they hit it it had more elasticity and thus more velocity when it left the bat. There was no change in the manufacture of the ball. That created the “Live Ball Era”.
There’s a story that the death of Ray Chapman instigated these changes. He was hit by a pitched ball that he may never have seen. He’s the only player who ever died as a result of an injury in a major league baseball game. Again, we have the problem of timing: Chapman died on August 17, 1920, after these changes had already been implemented. Ruth had 42 home runs at that point.
By the way, the reasons Ruth went from 29 home runs to 54 had little to do with the ball. For him it was the ballpark. He’d been playing in Boston when Fenway Park had no right field bleachers and you had to hit it almost 400 feet to reach the fence. It was an abbreviated season, (140 games- and Ruth missed 10 of them) due to the war and the Babe was still a part-time pitcher. He hit 9 home runs in Fenway and 20 on the road. Then his contract was sold to the Yankees and playing in the Polo Grounds, where it was 258 down the right field line. He played 142 games that year and only pitched in one game. He hit 29 home runs in the Polo Grounds and 25 on the road. If you multiply the road numbers by two, in an average ballpark, he would have gone from 40 to 50 home runs in 1919-20, not from 29 to 54. (If you equalize the number of plate appearances it’s 45-50). If Ruth had been with the Yankees in 1919, people would think the Live Ball Era began in 1919, not 1920. They would also realize that it had nothing to do with the Black Sox, Ray Chapman or even the influenza epidemic. It had everything to do with Babe Ruth.
There’s a famous stat about Ruth’s 1920 season: he hit more home runs than any other American League team, (it would have been any other team in baseball except the Phillies were in the Baker Bowl). The implication is that Ruth’s home run capabilities were far above those of anyone else in baseball. But that wasn’t completely true. They were certainly greater than any other player’s but in subsequent years other players started to put up Ruthean numbers or close to it. In 1922 Ken Williams of the Browns beat out Ruth for the home run title with 39 and also became the first 30-30 man with 37 steals. In the same park, Rogers Hornsby hit 42 home runs to become the first national league with 30 and then 40 in a season. He also batted .401, the only player to hit .400 and have 40 home runs in the same season. In 1923 Cy Williams, (no relation to Ken), hit 41 homers for the Phillies. Bob Meusel led the league for the Yankees with 33 in 1925, the year of the Babe’s “bellyache” and two years later Lou Gehrig hit 47 to go with Ruth’s 60. In 1929 Chick Klein hit 43 for the Phillies and Mel Ott 42 for the Giants while in Philadelphia the Athletics came up with their own Ruth/Gehrig combination with Jmmie Fox, (33) and Al Simmons (36). Goose Goslin hit 37 that year for the Browns and the Senators. In 1930 came Hack Wilson’s 56, with 190 RBIs for the Cubs. With the success of Ruth, each team wanted to find their own Babe Ruth and when Gehrig joined him, they wanted their Gehrig, too. There weren’t many of them but more and more players started trying to hit home runs as result. The average number of home runs per team per 162 games went form 35 in 1919 to 48 in 1920, 63 in 1921, 69 in 1922, up to 70 in 1925 to 102 in 1930.The desire to hit home runs was increasing and the gap between the rest of the league and Ruth was narrowing.
Here are the average number of home runs per team per 162 games per decade:
1870’s 14
1880’s 35
1890’s 41
1900’s 22
1910’s 28
1920’s 72
1930’s 88
1940’s 85
1950’s 137
1960’s 133
1970’s 121
1980’s 130
1990’s 151
2000’s 174
2010’s 156 (through 2013)
The quantum leap from the teens to the 20’s is obvious. But the jump from the 40’s to the 50’s is remarkable, too. Some of that could be due to World War II, when the best players were in the service and the balls were made of inferior materials. But the 40’s were only slightly down from the 30’s. I think what may have happened was television. In the 20’s, 30’s and 40’s, hitting home runs was still a specialty. Other players were still playing a game based on getting on base and running the bases although, in time they even stopped doing that, satisfied to be on base when the big guy hit the long fly. But when games were on TV, I think everyone got the idea that they wanted some of the glory for themselves and more and more players started swinging for the fences. Of course, that also coincides with the integration of the major leagues and my perception is that, initially, there were more black star hitters than pitchers.
The last significant change in the manufacture of the ball was the introduction of the cork center in 1911-12. But it didn’t cause an explosion of home runs because players in that era didn’t look to hit home runs. What did increase was batting averages: the American League went from .243 to .273, the National League from .260 to .272 in 1912, (they first year they used it). The same thing happened in 1920 when balls started to be replaced during games: the American League went from .268 to .283 and the National League from .258 to .270. They were playing the same game they’d always played but just with a livelier ball.
Someone had to show what could be done with the livelier ball. It took a guy who had grown up in his father’s saloon, been sent to an orphanage not because he was an orphan but because he was incorrigible, who had seen the head of the school hit impressively long drives to the kids and who was still a man-child when he reached the major leagues, someone who would ride hotel elevators all day just for the fun of it. Such a person didn’t care how baseball had always been played. He played it the way he wanted to. And he wanted to see if he could hit the ball over the fence. And he had an unusual degree of eyesight, strength and body coordination and was able to do it. If Babe Ruth had been an outfielder from the time he came up, the Live Ball Era would have begun right then. So the way I’d put it is that the Live Ball Era began with the introduction of the cork centered ball in 1911-12. What began a few years later was the Babe Ruth Era.
The impact of this first stage of the Live Ball Era was almost immediately muted by something called the emery ball. Bill James: “A modestly talented minor league pitcher named Russ Ford accidentally scuffed a baseball against a concrete wall and noticed that it dived on the next pitch. Experimenting, Ford realized that if you put just a little scratch on a baseball, you could make the thing dive like a falcon….Ford had just put a little scratch on the ball about the size of a dime and had kept his pitch a secret by faking a spitball, which was a legal pitch.“ Ford went 26-6 his first year and his secret swiftly spread around the league. This is when the practice began, (or was intensified), of scuffing the ball up before it was used.
Batting averages in the decade went like this:
1910 AL .243 NL .256
1911 AL .273 NL .260
1912 AL .265 NL .272
1913 AL .256 NL .262
1914 AL .248 NL .251
1915 AL .248 NL .248
1916 AL .248 NL .247
1917 AL .248 NL .249
1918 AL .254 NL .254
1919 AL .268 NL .258
1920 AL .283 NL .270
The “emery ball” went out with the spit ball and the lively ball was now unleashed for good.
The other big developments in this period were temporary but set up the sport for the fall it received at the end of the decade: the reappearance of a baseball union and the creation of a new league.
The first union for major league players had been the Brotherhood of Professional Baseball Players, founded in 1887 by John Montgomery Ward. That had collapsed with the Player’s League in 1890. In 1900 Chief Zimmer, Cy Young’s catcher in his Cleveland years, organized the Players' Protective Association, which acquired a lot of members so long as the American League remained a viable alternative to the National league. But when the leagues declared peace, neither of them wanted anything to do with a union and Zimmer’s creation went out of business.
One of the best pitchers of the Dead Ball Era had been Cleveland’s Addie Joss, who won 160 games from 1902-1910, winning over 20 games four times with a high of 27 in 1907. He was also a very popular player and when he died tubercular meningitis in 1911, his widow got a great deal of sympathy- but not much else. There was no major league pension plan. Initially Ban Johnson refused to reschedule a game so the Naps could attend Joss’s funeral but he eventually backed down . The players organized their own tribute and fund raiser for Joss’ widow, baseball’s first All-Star Game, played in Cleveland . It was the Naps against the stars of the rest of the league. The All-Stars won 5-3 and some $13,000, (which would now be about $330,000), was presented to Joss’s widow, Lillian and their two children. Much of it went to pay Joss’s medical bills. The event unscored the financial vulnerability of baseball players and their families.
Ty Cobb, Walter Johnson and others got together to form the Fraternity of Professional Baseball Players of America, which was promptly ignored by the owners. But another group, this of businessmen who had wanted to buy into the two major leagues, formed their own league. The first attempt was something called the Columbian League in 1912 but that never got to the point of teams taking the field. A second attempt the next year was called the Federal league and this one took- temporarily. They were outside of “organized” baseball and were thus branded an “outlaw” league. They did not have any reserve clause in their contracts and they immediately began raising the AL and NL for players. Even Walter Johnson decided to switch leagues until Clark Griffith talked him out of it. It must have seemed familiar to Ban Johnson but he was not the establishment and felt little in common with the founders of the new league.
To hold onto their players, the established leagues increase salaries and even recognized the PBPA. The Federal league field an anti-trust suit which went before Federal Judge Kenesaw Mountain Landis, who delayed the case while the Federal league owners lost money. In December 1915 the owners of the AL and NL teams made their move, buying out the owners of half the team and promising two more the chance to buy into established teams, (Charles Weeghman, who bought the Cubs and brought his stadium along with him and Phil Ball who bought the Browns.) They merged their teams and players on other teams either returned to their world teams or went into a player pool as the league collapsed.
After that the owners withdrew recognition of the PBPA and player salaries collapsed, creating an atmosphere of bitterness among the players that may not have made what happened at the end of the decade inevitable but certainly made it more likely.
When did the Live Ball Era begin? The traditional story is that baseball was reeling from the Black Sox Scandal and decided to juice the ball so Babe Ruth could hit a lot of home runs and make baseball popular again, much as McGwire and Sosa brought the sport back after the 1994-95 strike. The evidence for that was that the Black Sox Scandal occurred in 1919 and Babe Ruth hit 29 home runs that year, then 54 the next. So the Live Ball Era began in 1920.
But the timing is all wrong. The Black Sox Scandal didn’t hit the headlines until September 1920 when the White Sox, still with their full complement of players, were in a tremendous pennant race with Ruth’s Yankees and Tris Speaker’s Indians. Ruth had already hit 53 of his 54 home runs when the Grand Jury hearings began. As Bill James said, it wasn’t the popularity of the game that was imperiled, it was the integrity. It was Commissioner Landis that fought that battle, not Babe Ruth. He does suggest that the owners didn’t do anything to try to scale back the home run hitting to return to the game they knew because of the impact it was having on the box office. But the increased hitting and home run hitting was not a direct response to the Black Sox Scandal.
A few years ago a book came out talking about the Live Ball Era that said that it was created by the Influenza pandemic of 1918-20, which killed more people world-wide than World War I. For years skinflint owners had insisted on trying to play entire games with one ball, even sending security people into the stand to retrieve foul balls. Doctoring the ball was legal and on the rare occasions when the ball was replaced, (because the old one came apart), it would immediately be thrown around the infield where each player would his best to spit on it, scuff it and dirty it up. It would become lumpy and dirtier as the game went on and harder to see, especially in the late afternoon, (there were no lights in ballparks yet). Heath authorities regarded this as a significant threat to the public because it was an excellent way to spread the flu germ. So they convinced the owners to start replacing baseballs when they got dirty and ban the spitball. This meant that hitters could see the ball better and when they hit it it had more elasticity and thus more velocity when it left the bat. There was no change in the manufacture of the ball. That created the “Live Ball Era”.
There’s a story that the death of Ray Chapman instigated these changes. He was hit by a pitched ball that he may never have seen. He’s the only player who ever died as a result of an injury in a major league baseball game. Again, we have the problem of timing: Chapman died on August 17, 1920, after these changes had already been implemented. Ruth had 42 home runs at that point.
By the way, the reasons Ruth went from 29 home runs to 54 had little to do with the ball. For him it was the ballpark. He’d been playing in Boston when Fenway Park had no right field bleachers and you had to hit it almost 400 feet to reach the fence. It was an abbreviated season, (140 games- and Ruth missed 10 of them) due to the war and the Babe was still a part-time pitcher. He hit 9 home runs in Fenway and 20 on the road. Then his contract was sold to the Yankees and playing in the Polo Grounds, where it was 258 down the right field line. He played 142 games that year and only pitched in one game. He hit 29 home runs in the Polo Grounds and 25 on the road. If you multiply the road numbers by two, in an average ballpark, he would have gone from 40 to 50 home runs in 1919-20, not from 29 to 54. (If you equalize the number of plate appearances it’s 45-50). If Ruth had been with the Yankees in 1919, people would think the Live Ball Era began in 1919, not 1920. They would also realize that it had nothing to do with the Black Sox, Ray Chapman or even the influenza epidemic. It had everything to do with Babe Ruth.
There’s a famous stat about Ruth’s 1920 season: he hit more home runs than any other American League team, (it would have been any other team in baseball except the Phillies were in the Baker Bowl). The implication is that Ruth’s home run capabilities were far above those of anyone else in baseball. But that wasn’t completely true. They were certainly greater than any other player’s but in subsequent years other players started to put up Ruthean numbers or close to it. In 1922 Ken Williams of the Browns beat out Ruth for the home run title with 39 and also became the first 30-30 man with 37 steals. In the same park, Rogers Hornsby hit 42 home runs to become the first national league with 30 and then 40 in a season. He also batted .401, the only player to hit .400 and have 40 home runs in the same season. In 1923 Cy Williams, (no relation to Ken), hit 41 homers for the Phillies. Bob Meusel led the league for the Yankees with 33 in 1925, the year of the Babe’s “bellyache” and two years later Lou Gehrig hit 47 to go with Ruth’s 60. In 1929 Chick Klein hit 43 for the Phillies and Mel Ott 42 for the Giants while in Philadelphia the Athletics came up with their own Ruth/Gehrig combination with Jmmie Fox, (33) and Al Simmons (36). Goose Goslin hit 37 that year for the Browns and the Senators. In 1930 came Hack Wilson’s 56, with 190 RBIs for the Cubs. With the success of Ruth, each team wanted to find their own Babe Ruth and when Gehrig joined him, they wanted their Gehrig, too. There weren’t many of them but more and more players started trying to hit home runs as result. The average number of home runs per team per 162 games went form 35 in 1919 to 48 in 1920, 63 in 1921, 69 in 1922, up to 70 in 1925 to 102 in 1930.The desire to hit home runs was increasing and the gap between the rest of the league and Ruth was narrowing.
Here are the average number of home runs per team per 162 games per decade:
1870’s 14
1880’s 35
1890’s 41
1900’s 22
1910’s 28
1920’s 72
1930’s 88
1940’s 85
1950’s 137
1960’s 133
1970’s 121
1980’s 130
1990’s 151
2000’s 174
2010’s 156 (through 2013)
The quantum leap from the teens to the 20’s is obvious. But the jump from the 40’s to the 50’s is remarkable, too. Some of that could be due to World War II, when the best players were in the service and the balls were made of inferior materials. But the 40’s were only slightly down from the 30’s. I think what may have happened was television. In the 20’s, 30’s and 40’s, hitting home runs was still a specialty. Other players were still playing a game based on getting on base and running the bases although, in time they even stopped doing that, satisfied to be on base when the big guy hit the long fly. But when games were on TV, I think everyone got the idea that they wanted some of the glory for themselves and more and more players started swinging for the fences. Of course, that also coincides with the integration of the major leagues and my perception is that, initially, there were more black star hitters than pitchers.
The last significant change in the manufacture of the ball was the introduction of the cork center in 1911-12. But it didn’t cause an explosion of home runs because players in that era didn’t look to hit home runs. What did increase was batting averages: the American League went from .243 to .273, the National League from .260 to .272 in 1912, (they first year they used it). The same thing happened in 1920 when balls started to be replaced during games: the American League went from .268 to .283 and the National League from .258 to .270. They were playing the same game they’d always played but just with a livelier ball.
Someone had to show what could be done with the livelier ball. It took a guy who had grown up in his father’s saloon, been sent to an orphanage not because he was an orphan but because he was incorrigible, who had seen the head of the school hit impressively long drives to the kids and who was still a man-child when he reached the major leagues, someone who would ride hotel elevators all day just for the fun of it. Such a person didn’t care how baseball had always been played. He played it the way he wanted to. And he wanted to see if he could hit the ball over the fence. And he had an unusual degree of eyesight, strength and body coordination and was able to do it. If Babe Ruth had been an outfielder from the time he came up, the Live Ball Era would have begun right then. So the way I’d put it is that the Live Ball Era began with the introduction of the cork centered ball in 1911-12. What began a few years later was the Babe Ruth Era.
The impact of this first stage of the Live Ball Era was almost immediately muted by something called the emery ball. Bill James: “A modestly talented minor league pitcher named Russ Ford accidentally scuffed a baseball against a concrete wall and noticed that it dived on the next pitch. Experimenting, Ford realized that if you put just a little scratch on a baseball, you could make the thing dive like a falcon….Ford had just put a little scratch on the ball about the size of a dime and had kept his pitch a secret by faking a spitball, which was a legal pitch.“ Ford went 26-6 his first year and his secret swiftly spread around the league. This is when the practice began, (or was intensified), of scuffing the ball up before it was used.
Batting averages in the decade went like this:
1910 AL .243 NL .256
1911 AL .273 NL .260
1912 AL .265 NL .272
1913 AL .256 NL .262
1914 AL .248 NL .251
1915 AL .248 NL .248
1916 AL .248 NL .247
1917 AL .248 NL .249
1918 AL .254 NL .254
1919 AL .268 NL .258
1920 AL .283 NL .270
The “emery ball” went out with the spit ball and the lively ball was now unleashed for good.
The other big developments in this period were temporary but set up the sport for the fall it received at the end of the decade: the reappearance of a baseball union and the creation of a new league.
The first union for major league players had been the Brotherhood of Professional Baseball Players, founded in 1887 by John Montgomery Ward. That had collapsed with the Player’s League in 1890. In 1900 Chief Zimmer, Cy Young’s catcher in his Cleveland years, organized the Players' Protective Association, which acquired a lot of members so long as the American League remained a viable alternative to the National league. But when the leagues declared peace, neither of them wanted anything to do with a union and Zimmer’s creation went out of business.
One of the best pitchers of the Dead Ball Era had been Cleveland’s Addie Joss, who won 160 games from 1902-1910, winning over 20 games four times with a high of 27 in 1907. He was also a very popular player and when he died tubercular meningitis in 1911, his widow got a great deal of sympathy- but not much else. There was no major league pension plan. Initially Ban Johnson refused to reschedule a game so the Naps could attend Joss’s funeral but he eventually backed down . The players organized their own tribute and fund raiser for Joss’ widow, baseball’s first All-Star Game, played in Cleveland . It was the Naps against the stars of the rest of the league. The All-Stars won 5-3 and some $13,000, (which would now be about $330,000), was presented to Joss’s widow, Lillian and their two children. Much of it went to pay Joss’s medical bills. The event unscored the financial vulnerability of baseball players and their families.
Ty Cobb, Walter Johnson and others got together to form the Fraternity of Professional Baseball Players of America, which was promptly ignored by the owners. But another group, this of businessmen who had wanted to buy into the two major leagues, formed their own league. The first attempt was something called the Columbian League in 1912 but that never got to the point of teams taking the field. A second attempt the next year was called the Federal league and this one took- temporarily. They were outside of “organized” baseball and were thus branded an “outlaw” league. They did not have any reserve clause in their contracts and they immediately began raising the AL and NL for players. Even Walter Johnson decided to switch leagues until Clark Griffith talked him out of it. It must have seemed familiar to Ban Johnson but he was not the establishment and felt little in common with the founders of the new league.
To hold onto their players, the established leagues increase salaries and even recognized the PBPA. The Federal league field an anti-trust suit which went before Federal Judge Kenesaw Mountain Landis, who delayed the case while the Federal league owners lost money. In December 1915 the owners of the AL and NL teams made their move, buying out the owners of half the team and promising two more the chance to buy into established teams, (Charles Weeghman, who bought the Cubs and brought his stadium along with him and Phil Ball who bought the Browns.) They merged their teams and players on other teams either returned to their world teams or went into a player pool as the league collapsed.
After that the owners withdrew recognition of the PBPA and player salaries collapsed, creating an atmosphere of bitterness among the players that may not have made what happened at the end of the decade inevitable but certainly made it more likely.
