Vintage Baseball

[Unlucky Berman]

I saw "the Pride of the Yankees" last night and it wasn't the first time that I thought baseball seems an interesting sport and I really would like to see and hear more of it. But since I live in Europe there isn't much about it known and also hard to find other enthusiastics or fans of the sport. A shame, I know. I started to look in the lounge if there are threads about golden era baseball and it seems there is also not much, so I think it is about time for a thread for it to discuss, show pictures, share childhood memories and the like.

I also have a question for the experts. What is the main difference between modern baseball and what they played like in the times of Gehrig, DiMaggio, Ruth and all the others. I am just wondering if there were changes similar to soccer (football for the english people ) where it became much more athletic, faster and with a lot of technique than what was played at the era of Beckenbauer or Pelé. Looking at old photos of Babe he seems not as athletic as the players I saw in the few modern games I could at least watch during the olympics.

Another question is, do you know sources for informations, pictures, or even movies and radio pieces of the old games?

 

[LizzieMaine]

Baseball in the Era permeated the culture to an extent that no other sport even approached -- it was as close to a national language as we ever had in the pre-mass-media era, and that carried over until well into the mid-twentieth-century. Football was a college game, basketball was something played by schoolgirls in drafty old gyms, horse racing was for seedy gamblers and southern aristocrats. The only sport that came close to kindling the national interest that baseball did between 1900 and 1950 was boxing.

Major League baseball in the Era was an Eastern and Midwestern thing -- until 1955 there were no major league teams west or south of St. Louis, and until 1958, there were no major league teams on the West Coast. But that meant there was a huge amount of interest in minor league baseball in small towns and cities all over the country, and on the West Coast there was a Pacific Coast League of major-league quality. No matter where you lived, there was a team on some level for you to root for. And there were also factory and town teams that generated a great deal of interest at the local level.

Radio played a big part in spreading interest in baseball, especially among women. By the end of the 1930s, every major league team broadcast at least its home games, and with most games played during the day, millions of women became fans, doing their housework to the accompaniment of the baseball broadcasts.

In some sections of the country, baseball rooting took on levels of obsession. New York City had three teams -- one in Manhattan, one in the Bronx, and one in Brooklyn, and passionate inter-city rivalries developed. In New England, where baseball is close to a regional religion, radio coverage created a level of fanaticism among the native-born that still exists, passed down from generation to generation. Fans in St. Louis and Chicago have also developed multi-generational allegiances that remain strong.

The game itself was much less "entertainment" oriented. Ballparks were smaller than they are now, and were built in inner-city areas where they were fully integrated into their neighborhoods -- Fenway Park in Boston and Wrigley Field in Chicago are the only two major league fields remaining from the Era, and although they've both been horrendously tarted up in recent years, they still offer a flavor of what it was like to see a game before everything went Show Biz -- if you can block out the obnoxious rock music and flashing electric scoreboards.

Players in the era, and up thru the 1970s, tended to be, physically, much smaller than they are now -- and they were paid substantially less than they are now, to the point where most of them had to work off-season jobs to make ends meet. The modern emphasis on physical training didn't exist, so players were far less muscular than they are now, and tended to rely much more on skill than on brute strength.

The primary source for surviving radio baseball broadcasts is http://www.baseballtapes.com. I can heartily recommend this dealer and his product -- I've dealt with him for many many years, and am always amazed by the stuff he turns up.

 

[Blackjack]

My favorite baseball movie is a League of their Own, weird huh?

 

[Tomasso]

I've always had a soft spot for Hack Wilson.

 

[LizzieMaine]

What's not to love about a 5-foot-6, 200 pound man with the physique of a fire hydrant and size-5 feet?

Now that's an athlete.

 

[Dan'l]

I grew up in the 1970s about three hours south of Chicago. The Cubs and the Whitesox were, and still remain, huge around these parts. I can still hear how the games sounded coming out of transistor radios. You could ride your bike down the alleys and listen to the same game as you past from garage to garage with the men out there "tinkering" while enjoying the afternoon game.

I'm a life long Cubs fan... for what it's worth.

 

[Chas]

I'm a Giants fan; ever since I was a kid. I finally got a chance to see them play a few years again, and hope to again some day. We have a lovely little ball park in Vancouver, Nat Bailey Stadium. Brooks Robinson played briefly with them, IIRC. I love the minor league parks; they're inexpensive and somewhat self-effacing.

I grew up in Canada, but baseball is my game much more so than hockey. Old-school hockey is pretty hard core, the way it should have stayed, IMHO. The players had more elan, grace and grottiness. Now they're a bunch of pretty boy behemoths that batter each other into concussion-induced dementias. So much for that.

Back to topic - my favorite ball player of all time is a Giant. Willie Mays. They all talk about the catch, but the throw was almost as great.

[video=youtube;gUK9lG-7HTc]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gUK9lG-7HTc&feature=related[/video]

 

[Unlucky Berman]

please delete this one, posted twice.

 

[Unlucky Berman]

Hey thanks for the infos. Lizzie, it's interesting and new to me that it became this popular for women. Something different than I would have thought, cause in the movies you always see the daddy playing with the son. Also sports is in Europe more the thing for men, especially soccer which is similar popular like baseball was back then in the US.

Some other question did they had names on their jerseys? I'm just wondering because those replica jerseys have names on them but in the movie Yankee's Pride the jerseys did not have the names just the number of the player.

 

[Chasseur]

Lizzie,

Your posts are pure gems of information and are always a sheer pleasure to read.

Thank you!

 

[Flipped Lid]

The practice of putting names on the backs of jerseys was not widespread and to the best of my knowledge non-existent until the 1970's at the earliest. There may still be some teams who only put the names on the backs of their visiting uniforms, but I'm not certain. I've kind of distanced myself from the game the past few years because of the steroid use and the huge salaries although I still follow the Cubs. I saw my first major league game at old Comiskey Park in Chicago in 1964, the White Sox versus the Baltimore Orioles. I have been to Wrigley Field dozens of times and I'm old enough to have attended games at three different Cincinnati ballparks, Crosley Field, Riverfront Statdium, and Great American Ballpark.

The game you see played now is not all that much different than the game played back at the turn of the century. There have obviously been improvements in the equipment. Some say the baseballs of today are livelier and some say they are deader. The gloves are much bigger than the gloves worn decades ago, which allows defensive players to get to a lot more balls than they used to. There have also been a lot of improvements in the protective gear that catchers wear. The bats are essentially the same although you see much thinner handles on the bats these days and bigger barrels on the ends of the bats. That's why most of the players wear batting gloves. Also, all of the players wear batting helmets now, another practice (I think it might be a rule now) that you seldom saw prior to the 1970's.

Apart from the American League adding the designated hitter, which I despise, the biggest change in the game has been in pitching. Again, up until the late 1960’s and early 1970’s, the starting pitcher usually pitched the entire game. The 1970’s brought the relief specialists. At first there were the closers, who usually weren’t brought in until the eighth or ninth inning. These days you have middle relievers who typically pitch a couple of innings after the starter has been taken out and try to hold the opposition until the closer takes over in the ninth inning. Not infrequently, a pitcher will be brought in face only one hitter as managers like to play the percentages and have left-handers pitch to left-handed hitters and vice versa.

You see a lot more high-scoring games these days because the hitters are bigger and stronger and also because the strike zone has been whittled way down from what it was decades ago. You can probably thank television instant replay for that since the umpires don’t like to be seen calling pitches that don’t get a part of the plate a strike.

I could go on for a long time, but that might give you some of the basics. The great sportswriter Red Smith once said, “The ninety feet between home plate and first base may be the closest man has ever come to perfection.”

 

[LizzieMaine]

Names didn't appear on the back of players' uniforms until 1960, when the White Sox became the first team to do it -- it was an innovation of White Sox owner Bill Veeck, a man known for experimentation and unusual gimmickry. The style took a long time to catch on -- it wasn't until the late 70s that most teams went to names on back. The Yankees are one of the few teams never to have used names on back -- they still don't use them today.

Baseball's appeal to women in the Era is worth a study in itself, I think. Radio was a major factor in this, but the teams also actively encouraged female fans with "Ladies Day" promotions and such things as that -- allowing women in the park at half price or even free in some cases. Probably the most famous female fan of the Era was Hilda Chester, a working-class woman from Brooklyn who lived and died with the Dodgers -- and made her presence at the games known by clanging a school bell as loudly as possible while yelling YA BUM YA! at players who displeased her.

Hilda had a counterpart in Boston in the form of Megaphone Lolly Hopkins, a prim society woman who was a fixture at Braves Field, where she shouted encouragement to her favorites thru a gigantic megaphone, and if something made her especially happy she'd send her butler -- who always sat next to her -- over to the dugout to give a box of candy to the player who'd accomplished the feat. And the Cardinals' biggest fan was Screechin' Screamin' Mary Ott, the Horse Lady of St. Louis, who earned her nickname without the help of a megaphone.

 

[skyvue]

Berman, at MLB.com (where I work on the weekends eight months a year), you can sign up for a paid streaming service -- MLB.TV -- that is very impressive, I think. They do a nice job with it. As the season progresses, the price of the service drops. If you signed up now, you wouldn't have to pay very much, but you could see the last few games of the regular season and the playoffs, leading up to and including the World Series (an unfortunate name for a championship series, and one I wish they would change).

Just a suggestion of a way to see some baseball for not too much money. Every Major League team's games are available for viewing through the service (I think they're archived, too, for viewing after the fact, but I'd have to check on that). And if you're not inclined to pay, there is still lots of video to be enjoyed on the site at no cost -- game highlights, recaps, and the like.

 

[skyvue]

One thing that's not been mentioned, I don't think, is that baseball is very much associated with summer. Many people who are not really sports fans enjoy an occasional baseball game because of that -- the fact that games take place on lazy summer days and nights and are played at a leisurely pace (compared to other sports), allowing plenty of time for conversation, family bonding, etc. And eating. I think most folks eat and drink more while attending a baseball game than any other sport (football has its own dining traditions, but those feasts tend to occur pregame).

Also, baseball is very statistics-oriented, much more than any other American sport. Fans, broadcasters, and those in the print media can -- and do -- geek out on the most arcane and esoteric of stats.

Another difference between baseball and other American sports is that baseball is played virtually every day (or night -- mostly at night now, which is a big change from the golden era). Football teams play one game a week. Professional basketball teams play maybe four games a week, tops (I think I have that right -- I don't follow the NBA closely), but baseball teams play at least six days a week and often seven, so there's always a game on. Listening to or watching a game is a nightly activity, if you're a big enough fan.

And sometimes they even play two games in one day (it's called a doubleheader), but that's another change from the old days: Doubleheaders used to be scheduled several times in the course of a season, but nowadays, they're used only to make up games that were rained out. Sometimes they are day-night doubleheaders (requiring separate paid admission, with the stadium cleared out between games), but traditional doubleheaders, which are still played occasionally, allow fans to see two games for the price of one.

 

[Tomasso]

I saw my first major league game at old Comiskey Park in Chicago

That was a great old ballpark. It should have been renovated rather than razed. I always liked to catch an inning or two from the outfield picnic area where players would often chat with fans.

 

[Tomasso]

Bill Veeck, a man known for experimentation and unusual gimmickry.

Veeck (As In Wreck) planted the vines at Wrigley Field, making it (IMHO) the most beautiful park in baseball.

 

[flyfishark]

When I was a kid, in the 50s, we lived 100 miles south of Chicago. My parents kept weekend season tickets to the Sox. I grew up in Comiskey. Our box was right behing Mayor Daley's (The original "Boss"). It may have had its problems (an upper deck that didn't allow people sitting under it to see fly balls; steel girders that inhibited view), but I loved everything about 35th & Shields.

 

[Flipped Lid]

LizzieMaine briefly mentioned radio in her post above. I'm not sure I can effectively communicate to the generations younger than myself what a joy it was to listen to major league baseball on the radio. When I was growing up in north central Indiana in the 1960's, baseball on television was rare. You got the game of the week on CBS on Saturday, which was more often than not the Yankees and one of the other east coast teams like Boston or Baltimore. The broadcasters were Dizzy Dean and Peewee Reese. I can still remember Dean's southern drawl fifty years later, something you never hear on professional broadcasts these days. I even recall someone in the media getting on Dean about his grammar. Dean would frequently say that someone "slood" (rhymes with good) instead of slid into second base. Dean's classic response was, "If I say he slood, he slood." But I digress. If the stars were in their proper alignment, we could occasionally get WGN, Channel 9 out of Chicago and get a Cubs game. This might happen four or five times a summer.

For the most part, I was relegated to listening to Vince Lloyd and Lou Boudreau on WGN Radio. Of course, there were no night games in Wrigley Field in those days, so I'd often turn on my transistor radio at night if the Cubs weren't playing on the road and pick up Harry Caray and Jack Buck calling a St. Louis Cardinals game on KMOX in St. Louis, Ernie Harwell broadcasting a Detroit Tigers game, Bob Prince doing play-by-play of the Pittsburgh Pirates on KDKA, or Bob Elson on WCFL in Chicago calling the White Sox. These guys were all stylists and could paint a picture of the game right over the radio. They didn’t have the cookie-cutter broadcast-school voices of the guys doing today’s play-by-play. They all had their individual catchphrases and homerun calls. I never had the pleasure of hearing Red Barber or Mel Allen call a game. The last of that breed is probably Vin Scully who is still calling Los Angeles Dodgers games well up into his eighties although I don’t know if he’s on the radio or television. When cable television came along and you could suddenly get baseball virtually every night of the week on television, it took away a part of the game that I still revere. To this day, I much prefer listening to a game on the radio as opposed to watching it on television. I have a lot of fond memories of my dad and I listening to baseball on the radio and also one of my grade school teachers letting us listen to the World Series on the radio because the games were played in the afternoon.

A lot of people would say that I’m living in the past, but I believe major league baseball was played at a much higher level in the 1960’s and before. There were only eighteen major league teams throughout most of my youth. When baseball began to expand in the 1970’s it diluted the talent to a great extent. Players that would have still been toiling in the minor leagues were now everyday players. Baseball lowered the pitcher’s mound after the 1968 season to give the hitters more of an advantage. Managers quit playing what is referred to now as “small ball” and much preferred the three-run homer over a basehit, bunt-sacrifice, and a single which yielded a single run. When players earned the right to become free agents, the game became much more advantageous to the players, but became a lot less fun for the fans. It’s now rare for a player to play for the same team for his entire career. Players now play more for individual statistics than for their teams and it’s just not as good a game anymore. Toss in the outrageous salaries, greedy owners, and steroid-inflated stats and my love for the game is nowhere near what it once was.

 

[LizzieMaine]

These guys were all stylists and could paint a picture of the game right over the radio. They didn’t have the cookie-cutter broadcast-school voices of the guys doing today’s play-by-play.

This is one of the biggest things we've lost, I think. I learned to love the English language by listening to Ned Martin broadcast Red Sox games in the 60s and 70s -- he wasn't a "broadcasting school guy," he held a masters in English from Duke, and was perhaps the most literate broadcaster baseball ever had, more likely to quote Shakespeare or Milton to sum up a situation on the field than some tired broadcasting cliche. When the Sox were in a bad situation late in the game, and everything was falling apart, he'd shake his head and say "When sorrows come, they come not as single spies, but in battalions," or some other such appropriate comment, and he trusted his audience to be intelligent enough to pick up on the reference. The Sox fired him in 1992, after thirty years, because he refused to shill for a bad team, and I haven't been able to truly enjoy the broadcasts since.

The biggest problem with baseball broadcasts today is that the networks think baseball is football, and needs explosive sound effects, thumping rock music, flashing computer graphics, sideline bimbos, guest celebrities in the booth, capering mascots, and other such distracting excrecscenses. It doesn't, all that junk distracts from the game, and it's really undermined my enjoyment. I endure the broadcasts now, but I don't enjoy them anywhere near as much as I did when they were just an announcer and a microphone.

 

[Tomasso]

Speaking of announcers....

The White Sox announcing team of Harry Caray and Jimmy Piersall (circa 1980) was the most entertaining collaboration I've ever heard. It was pee in your pants funny.