1940's Baseball

[poetman]

I'm looking for moderate length discussions--film or texts--that explore the relationship between baseball and the golden era. Baseball was huge in the 30's and 40's, and it extended until the 60's sometime. In contemporary culture, it's third to football and basketball. I'd love to know more about why it was so popular, how it was a part of the culture, and just generally more information about baseball's
relationship to 40's era culture.

Thanks for the recommendations!

 

[LizzieMaine]

Roger Kahn's "The Boys of Summer" is still one of the best literary looks at the Game and what it meant in the Era -- on the surface it's the story of one man's attachment to the Brooklyn Dodgers thru childhood, young adulthood, and ultimately his career as a newspaper beat writer actually covering the team. The second half of the book finds the author revisiting the players he knew twenty years later, revealing how baseball -- and leaving baseball -- affected their lives. The book was published in 1972, and has never been out of print since.

Also, as flawed as it is in a lot of ways, and as annoying as I find the filmmaker himself, Ken Burns's "Baseball" is worth seeing if you haven't already.

Kahn's approach to baseball in the book reveals something very important about understanding its appeal. It's a game of generations, not of the moment, and you have to have grown up with it -- as most Americans in the Era did -- grown up in a baseball oriented family, to truly understand why it matters. In the Era, you were a Dodger fan or a Red Sox fan or a Cardinal fan in the same way you were a Methodist or a Catholic or a Baptist or a Jew: it was part of your identity, and part of your heritage, and no matter where you go in life or how you evolve and change, it remains an essential element of who you are.

Without gambling, basketball and football would lose their entire reason for existence. Baseball transcends the game on the field to become a part of your very being.

 

[dhermann1]

"Bums, an Oral History of the Brooklyn Dodgers", about the Brooklyn Dodgers of that era, by Peter Golenbock. And "Summer of '49", by David Halberstam.
"Big Stick: The Batting Revolution of the 1920s" by William Curran. A little earlier, but very enlightening. And anything by Donald Honig.

 

[dhermann1]

This simple song will explain a lot of things that a 1,000 page book could never do.

[video=youtube;t4YQkrUCE80]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t4YQkrUCE80[/video]

 

[dhermann1]

A slightly better studio version:
[video=youtube;l9kVd6a3ajc]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l9kVd6a3ajc[/video]

 

[poetman]

Thanks dhermann1 for the song. I appreciate people who find answers in art. Lizzie, I appreciate the recommendations, but I'd like to know why don't you like Burns and why you feel gambling is exclusive to football and basketball but not baseball? In part, the former sports were not as developed in
the earlier part of the 20th century, which diminished their popularity. Sports have identities: Albert Camus claims to have learned everything that he knows from the game of soccer, and Teddy Roosevelt defended football as a sport that would cultivate manliness. Baseball is America's pastime, in part becasue it was so popular during the golden age of particularly American cultural achievements.

Back to the question, I'm interested in what the sport meant to the people of roughly 1930-1950. It seems to have a specific importance to this generation. I'm curious why and how.

 

[LizzieMaine]

I've always found Burns a bit too precious for my taste. The strength in "Baseball", the Burns film, is in the interviews, not the technique.

I'm being sarcastic, at least in part, when I dismiss basketball and football as little more than a bookie's delight, but I do think there's a kernel of truth in it. Aside from that, though, I'll contend that neither sport has the day-to-day emotional involvement of baseball. Football, especially pro football, is nothing more than a marketing spectacle, and basketball is something to kill time during the winter until baseball season begins.

One of the primary reasons baseball was as popular as it was during the Era specificallly was radio. No sport anywhere is better suited to radio than baseball, and by the end of the thirties every major league team was broadcasting its entire schedule, 154 games a year, every day of the week. Radio especially made fans of an entire generation of women -- baseball broadcasts were more popular in the afternoons even than soap operas -- and with the games coming right into your home, day after day, you couldn't help but get caught up in the rhythm of the unfolding season. I'm speaking from first hand experience on this point -- I grew up in a home where the game was always on, and radio made me a fan, even as it made fans of my mother and grandmother before me. To this day, my mother calls me every single day during the season to complain about "them damn Red Sox."

Baseball was something that united people of every background and every walk of life -- it created a common culture out of a nation fractured by class differences, economic differences, religious, racial, and language differences. No matter where you lived or where you worked or where you came from or what you believed, you could find a common point of reference by simply walking into a room and saying "How 'bout them Sox?" That's what made it the most quintessentially *American* game, in the days when we still believed in the melting pot.

 

[skyvue]

Without gambling, basketball and football would lose their entire reason for existence. Baseball transcends the game on the field to become a part of your very being.

Professional football, yes, Lizzie, but not college football. Believe me, in much of the country, people identify with -- live and die with -- their college football teams every bit as much as baseball fans did and do with their favorite teams.

 

[LizzieMaine]

Well, that's another difference between then and now -- until the GI Bill came along after the war, less than 10 percent of Americans had been to college, so the vast majority of people didn't have any sense of personal identification with college teams. While college football was certainly popular during the Era, at least as a general spectacle, it was a distant fourth place in popularity behind baseball, boxing, and horse racing.

Another reason for baseball's popularity is that it was the most democratic sport: every town had a team. The major leagues were an Eastern and Midwestern institution, with no team west of St. Louis, but the minor leagues were enormous, with class AAA, AA, A, B, C, and D leagues operating all over the country. There were hundreds of pro teams in operation, and nearly everyone was within driving distance of a minor league park. And aside from these leagues, every town had "town teams," sponsored by the local mill or the local factory, competing in local semipro leagues. No matter what your level of interest there was a team for you, and you probably knew someone who played on one of these teams to make the rooting interest even more personal.

A baseball player didn't need to be big or unusually muscular or have any kind of distinctive physical traits. Baseball isn't a game of brute strength or unusual agility, it's a game of hand-eye coordination, and a man five foot seven and 150 pounds could play professionally and do well enough at it to make the big time. You looked at ball players, even major leaguers, and they looked like your dad or your uncle or your brother, not like some pneumatic glandular freak. That's something the modern game has lost, and personally, I think it suffers for it.

 

[Espee]

Lizzie, the article on Curt Gowdy at, ahem, Wikipedia... says the Yankees and Giants shared a radio network, and announcers-- 77 games each-- through the 1940s. And that the Red Sox and Braves had the same sort of arrangement even a couple years longer.
Not saying I'd stake my life on that being correct...
It's odd for me to realize a Giants home game would usually be played at about the same time as a Yankees road game... considering the Major Leagues were within two time zones instead of four.

 

[LizzieMaine]

Until 1947, all teams broadcast their home games live from the ballpark, and their road games live by recreation -- the announcers would be in the studio, reading a Western Union teletype description of what was happening on the field, and recreating the action, often with sound effects to make it sound like they were actually on the scene.

In two-team cities the teams were never home at the same time. The team at home would have its games broadcast live and the road team would have its game broadcast later that evening by recreation. This was the situation in all two-team cities until 1947, when the Yankees broke from the Giants, and sent Mel Allen on the road with the team, so that the entire schedule was broadcast live from the park. The Giants countered by hiring Russ Hodges, the Yankees' former number-two anouncer, and had him do the same thing for them. The Dodgers adopted the same arrangement with Red Barber and Connie Desmond in 1948, so all three New York teams had their full schedule broadcast live. The Athletics and Phillies split their broadcasts in 1950, with both teams covering their road schedule live, and the Braves and Red Sox followed suit in 1951. During the early fifties, all other major league teams followed this example and began broadcasting their road games direct from the ballpark.

The last team to broadcast a home games in person/road games by recreation arrangement was the Pirates in 1954, due to the declining health of their announcer, Rosey Rowswell. Rowswell died in early 1955, and that season the Pirates sent his replacement, Bob Prince, out on the road with the team, bringing the era of recreations to an end in the major leagues. However, many minor league clubs were still doing road recreations into the 1970s.

 

[dhermann1]

Big league teams resisted doing that tooth and nail, thinking that if they gave the product away for free, nobody would come to the ballpark. Actually, the opposite was true. Live broadcasts only increased fan interest, and ultimately increased the take at the turnstyles. (Similar psychology to what record companies are doing with regard to live streaming media today.)

 

[LizzieMaine]

New York was the last hold out. The three NYC teams made a formal pact in 1934 prohibiting all broadcasting from their parks during the regular season, but in 1939 Dodgers general manager Larry MacPhail, who had had enormous success with broadcasting when he was running the Cincinnati Reds, declared that he wouldn't be renewing the agreement and that he'd be bringing his Cincinnati announcing team of Red Barber and Al Helfer into Brooklyn to broadcast the Dodgers over WOR. The Giants and Yankees were taken by surprise, and had to settle for a split broadcast over WABC, which was never as popular or as successful as the Brooklyn broadcast -- it wasn't until after the war that any other local team even got close to Barber's popularity.

Other cities had radio long before this -- Boston, St. Louis, and Philadelphia all had both of their teams on the air by the mid-twenties, and both Chicago teams not only allowed all their games to be broadcast but also allowed any station that wanted to air them to do so with no payment of rights fees. As a result, you might have the same Cubs or White Sox game being broadcast by four or five different stations at a time -- baseball was literally all over the dial and you couldn't help but hear it.

 

[V.C. Brunswick]

Vin Scully to return to the Dodgers' broadcast booth in 2013
http://www.cbssports.com/mlb/blog/e...-to-return-to-dodgers-broadcast-booth-in-2013

2013 will mark his 64th season calling the Dodger games.

 

[LizzieMaine]

God bless him. You can listen to a tape of him from 1957, and his voice sounds just as good today. He's one of the last real baseball broadcasters left, as opposed to the ESPN-style yawping gasbags most teams use nowadays, and once he's gone there'll never be another.

[video=youtube;VJdli-ONL-8]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VJdli-ONL-8[/video]

Descriptions like this are why people fell in love with baseball on radio.

 

[dhermann1]

That's interesting, Liizzie. I had heard the story about the New York teams, and assumed it applied to the rest of the country.

 

[Espee]

I notice the same differences in Vin Scully's voice now, that I notice with octogenarians I know personally. But I go to some lengths to hear him... I'm not usually near a TV when he's telecasting (and the radio only carries him... simulcast... for innings 1-3. Except in post-season.)
Last week I bought an "armband radio" so I could hear those three innings AT Dodger Stadium. Using an earbud, I realized how much G.D. racket goes on at the stadium now. And when's the last time I had a clue what "theme music" was being played when any home batter came to the plate? It's just variations of thumping hip hop with unintelligible lyrics.
A friend of mine tells the story, from about 1991, of Mike Scoscia (broad-shouldered #14 for the Dodgers) being at the plate, and he heard Vin say "And the 1-2 pitch to Hodges..." Gil Hodges being a much earlier broad-shouldered Dodger wearing #14.
It was mentioned in an L.A. Times column, and during a later game Vin explained that his pencil had rolled off the table and he had been in a rush to pick it up without missing the next pitch. And his mind apparently turned back many years when he came back up to see how #14 would come out.
They do little radio spots of Dodger highlights through the years, almost always featuring calls by Vin. You'd think the ones where his voice is noticeably higher, must be from when he was much younger. And if the recording is nice clear quality, it's from modern times. But their collection of audio seems to have come from a mixed bag of sources. I've heard pristine recording from the sixties and poor ones from the nineties. Some of them are probably playing at the wrong speed. Oh well, I've gone off on a tangent...

 

[Espee]

For about 30 years, Vin's partner was a nice guy, an "adequate" announcer, named Jerry Doggett. He supposed called one play something like this:
"He's going after it, back, back... and he HITS HIS HEAD AGAINST THE WALL! Now...... it's rolling back toward the infield..."
Jerry had worked for the Liberty Baseball Network, which I understand specialized in re-creations.

 

[LizzieMaine]

Comparatively few complete-game regular season broadcast recordings exist prior to the mid-70s, and practically all of those that do were recorded by one man, a guy from Albany named Pat Rispole, who started recording Dodger games in 1957 and then switched to the Yankees after the Dodgers left, and later picked up the Mets. Rispole recorded and preserved thousands of games between 1957 and his death in 1979, and organized a trading network with fellow enthusiasts to preserve games from outside his home area -- he had a contact in Phoenix who recorded a lot of Dodger and Angel games from the West Coast during the 1969-72 span, and another contact in the Army who recorded a great deal of material off the Armed Forces network. The majority of vintage baseball recordings in circulation today come from this one cache.

Most of the Golden Era World Series and All Star Game recordings that survive exist only because they were preserved by the Commissioner's Office -- most Series and All Star games between 1934 and 1949 survive, but there are some notable holes: there is no trace at all left in any archive of the 1946 World Series, and only fragments survive of Series games from 1950 thru 1953.

 

[Espee]

In my cassette days, I obtained one or two late-Brooklyn games, including "Carl Furillo Night." Lately I've been listening to an mp3 disk which includes some of the games from the '63, '65, and '66 Series (NBC); the '66 All-Star Game(NBC); and a few Mets regular season games from around '66.
Today I found another announcer being credited with a similar "hits his head against the wall" call... but in this version, he "picks it up and throws it" back to the infield.