Greta Garbo

So I've been viewing the films of Greta Garbo, from the Swedish silents to the Hollywood silents to the talkies, and despairing to find a single truly great picture among them. Garbo, befitting her legend, is always captivating — an almost-too-clever remark, attributed to an English critic, goes, "What, when drunk, one sees in other women, one sees in Garbo sober" — but is seldom supported by first rate direction or writing. It would appear that her best collaborators were cinematographers; she is at all times exquisitely lit, even when the sets and locations are not.

One early highlight is The Saga of Gosta Berling (1924), both the crown jewel and capstone of Swedish silent cinema. This is romantic realism in service to period drama, shot stunningly on location in the Scandinavian Mts (sort of a bergfilm but without the ardent nationalism), and has several great setpieces including a colossal burning estate and a pack of real wolves pursuing a sleigh across a frozen lake. The latter is an unforgettable thrill. Garbo doesn't have much to do besides collapse from smoke inhalation or clutch her furs in brave resolution as she flees across the ice, but damn if she isn't bravely and beautifully resolute.

Her Hollywood silents are routine melodrama. Louis B Mayer brought her over and made her a star without making any good movies, which was (and is) a Hollywood producer's job. The talkies are only a little better. She's well remembered for Grand Hotel ("I want to be alone..."), a shoddy assembly of top stars without a purpose or script. Her 1935 Anna Karenina (my first exposure to the story) leads me to suspect the novel is a monumental bore. I did have high hopes for her collaboration with George Cukor on Camille, but that turned out to be just a warhorse melodrama lacking the mercy and quaint charm of silence. (I take from the experience that Cukor is nothing without the Algonquin school of 30s writers who penned for him Dinner at Eight and The Philadelphia Story.) Garbo's best role, then, turns out to be Queen Christina: the embodiment of her appeal as a robust and pityingly tender white exotic, tragically unreachable.

But then I saw Ninotchka. As it really turns out, the only director ever to do her justice was Ernst Lubitsch, the same maestro who gave us Pola Negri. Also, it was the only time Garbo was serviced by one of the great writers: Billy Wilder. They made for her an enduring comedy (Oh, Thirties comedy!) that works by playing against her famous gravitas. The movie is flush with verbal wit and persistent satire of a straw man prewar caricature of Soviet Russia (with stereotyping as bald as in a wartime Looney Tunes propaganda short), but the biggest laugh comes from a strategic pratfall. What a delight!

Ken Burns' Baseball, 5th Inning: 1930-1940

"The idea of community, the idea of coming together. We're still not good at that in this country. We talk about it a lot. In moments of crisis we're magnificent at it — the Depression; Franklin Roosevelt lifting himself from his wheelchair to lift this nation from its knees. At those moments we understand community, helping one another. In baseball you do that all the time; you can't win it alone. You can be the best pitcher in baseball but somebody has to get you a run to win the game. It is a community activity. You need all nine people helping one another. I love bunt plays. I love the idea of the bunt. I love the idea of the sacrifice. Even the word is good; giving yourself up for the good of the whole. That's Jeremiah. That's thousands of years of wisdom. You find your own good in the good of the whole. You find your own individual fulfillment in the success of the community. The Bible tried to do that and didn't teach you. Baseball did."
— Mario Cuomo


"The Depression hit the national pastime almost as hard as it hit the nation. Millions of fans could no longer afford even the fifty cents it cost to get into a game. Others, unwilling to give up baseball, made the nickel-ballpark hot dog their only meal of the day. Attendance fell off. The St Louis Browns averaged fewer than 1500 fans a game. The Cincinnati Reds, the Boston Braves, and the Philadelphia Phillies nearly went out of business. Organized baseball tried desperately to fill its stadiums. The Thirties saw the first all-star game, the spread of night baseball, the induction of the first players into the brand new Baseball Hall of Fame. Nothing seemed to work. But in a time when, more than ever, America needed heroes, baseball still provided them." — KB


Great is baseball. The national tonic, the reviver of hope, the restorer of confidence.
— The Sporting News, 1931

Negro league baseball:

"In cities and small towns all across the country there were other teams and other stars that may have been the greatest in the century, but whose deeds would live only in the memories of those who saw them play. Over the years, black baseball stars played white major league stars at least 438 times in off-season exhibition games. The whites won 129 of those postseason games. Blacks won 309. That's when we played the hardest, one black veteran explained, to let them know and to let the public know that we had the same talent they did and probably a little better at times. To the delight of crowds everywhere, barnstorming black teams liked to warm up in pantomime. They threw an invisible ball around the infield so fast, hit and fielded imaginary fly balls so convincingly, and made close plays at first and diving catches in the outfield so dramatically that fans could not believe it was not real. They called it shadow ball. [...]

"While most of organized white baseball faltered in the midst of the Depression, black baseball flourished as never before. Black entertainers sponsored their own teams. Louis Armstrong had his New Orleans Secret Nine. Cab Calloway played on his own team of all-stars. Bill 'Bojangles' Robinson was part-owner of the New York Black Yankees, and sometimes tap danced on the dugout roof. Teams were points of pride in black communities all over the country, boosting local economies, making life a little easier in Southern towns and in Northern ghettos, stitching black America together. In the 1930s, Rube Foster's old dream of a separate but athletically equal league finally came true. [...]

"Black players excelled under conditions big leaguers never had to face. Their season was longer. Their pay, far less. And to keep their teams afloat during hard times they were always on the road. The brand of baseball they played wherever they stopped was faster, more daring than that in the majors. And just as competitive."
— KB

We were worked like the mule that plows the fields all week and then drives the carriage to church on Sunday.
— Satchel Paige

"Back in those days we rode all night in the buses. Sometimes we played four games in one day. Nobody ever heard of that before. We'd play nine forty-five in the morning, one o'clock a double header, then go fifty, sixty miles at night and play a game. And traveling all night in those buses. That's the thing: I traveled in those buses 31 years, was turned over four times and you know what? Somebody upstairs liked me 'cause I never got a scratch."
— Double Duty Radcliffe

"We played in a rough league. When I say a rough league... I notice nowadays every time a youngster get a sprain: 15 days on the disabled list, and all this. Uhh, we didn't go on the disabled list. Unless we were broken and in a wheelchair and on two crutches. If we get hurt, we played. We don't have no relief pitcher. You go out there, you go for nine. That's it. You were paid for nine and that's the way they wanted you to pitch. Nine innings."
— Riley Stewart, Chicago American Giants

Spitballs, shine balls, emory balls... I never knew what the ball would do once it left the pitcher's hand.
— Roy Campanella, catcher

"Some pitchers used a bottle cap hidden in their gloves to scuff up the ball to make it break more sharply. As a result, Negro league batters learned how to hit everything. For years major leagues had scorned the bunt, but black players turned it into an art.

"As the Depression deepened black teams were forced to innovate. Some clubs expanded their schedules still further, to play for white fans in small towns starved for baseball." — KB

"They had a sizable following, especially among their fellow blacks, but also white people used to turn out to watch them. They were always sort of scrappy affairs. Seldom had a grandstand or anything else. And they were not often offered the use of the stadium, you see, so they had to play in all kinds of sandlot situations. I really don't see how they played baseball traveling the way they did in those ramshackle buses without any sleep and bone-jarring trips over those bad roads."
— Shelby Foote

"It's a trade-off. I think that the Negro leagues were a wonderful institution in American life, but they had the stigma of reminding black people that they were separated from and not a part of American life. That was a problem with all segregated institutions that we had: they were important in enriching the black community's life on one level, but they were stigmatized in telling us that we could not be a part of everything else that was going on. So you're talking about a very limited kind of life, on the whole."
— Gerald Early

Depression era:

1926; Joe McCarthy becomes manager of the Chicago Cubs.

1926; Mel Ott debuts with the New York Giants, right field. "He was so feared at the plate that he was once intentionally walked with the bases loaded."

1926; Babe Herman debuts with the Brooklyn Dodgers, then nicknamed the "Robins" after manager Wilbert Robinson.

"The Thirties were a time of clowning in baseball, particularly in the National League. You had two forms of the clown: On one end you had the St. Louis Cardinals. On the other, more inept level you had the Brooklyn Dodgers — the Daffiness Boys, led by Wilbert Robinson."
— Daniel Okrent

"Brooklyn had last won a pennant in 1920, but the Dodgers had never won a World Series, and with players like Pea Ridge Day and Hot Potato Hamlin, they were best known for what one of their own managers called bonehead plays. The most celebrated Dodger star was Babe Herman, who hit .393 in 1930, an all-time Dodger record. But he was famously inept in the field, carried lit cigars in his pockets, and once boasted that if a fly ball ever hit him on the head, he'd quit." — KB

It was an even bet that Babe would either catch it or get killed by it. His general practice was to run up when the ball was hit, and then turn and run back, and then circle about uncertainly. All this time the ball was descending, the spectators were petrified with fear, and Mr Herman was chewing gum, unconcerned. At the proper moment he stuck out his glove. If he found the ball there he was greatly surprised and very happy.
— Collier's magazine

"The Dodgers' best pitcher was Dazzy Vance [debuted 1922], a hefty righthander with an 83 inch reach, who had been the dominant strikeout pitcher of the 1920s. He literally had a trick up his sleeve..."

You couldn't hit him on a Monday. He cut the sleeve of his undershirt to the elbow, and on that part of it he'd use lye to make it white, and the rest he didn't care how dirty it was. Then he'd pitch overhand out of the apartment houses in the background of Ebbets Field; between the bleached sleeve of his undershirt waving and the Monday wash hanging out to dry — the diapers and undies and sheets flapping on the clothesline — you lost the ball entirely. He threw balls by me I never even saw.
— Rube Bressler

"Brooklyn rarely rose above sixth place. Even their diehard fans called the Dodgers, dem bums."

"Dem Bums became the Dodgers. That was their big name for them: our bums, our beloved bums. But the term, when it was first used, was pejorative. In the Twenties and Thirties the people in Brooklyn needed the Dodgers to win, and they'd go out to the ballgame and the Dodgers would lose, and they'd lose stupidly and carelessly and dumbly and people would come out of Ebbets Field saying Them bums, those lousy bums, they lost again — How'd those bums do today? And it wasn't until they started to win that the nickname became an admirable nickname. It became capitalized."
— Robert Creamer

"I think in the past that certainly Brooklyn's character was defined by the Brooklyn Dodgers. Even just the name Dodgers, coming from these trolley cars that everybody had to dodge. The idea that Brooklyn felt a stepchild to New York City, and that somehow the Dodgers, the Bums, were stepchilds too — they were gonna show the hotty-totty New Yorkers that we were really better than them — defined who Brooklyn was, and even in Long Island, where I grew up, I felt that sense of Brooklyn, and it was all part of the Dodgers. I don't know that that exists today in the same way, that you define who you are through your team and through your city, and I think it's a loss. It means that people are more fragmented. They've got themselves and a few friends but they don't have that group sense, unless there's a win — but that's not the same. That's not what this was all about when I was growing up. We hardly ever won and it didn't matter."
— Doris Kearns Goodwin

1926; Andy Cohen, the first Jew in the major leagues, is signed to the New York Giants by John McGraw.

Baseball is the great American sport, and as the Jew is thoroughly Americanized, there is no reason why his name should not be prominently found upon the baseball roll of honor.
— The American Hebrew, 1926

1927; Satchel Paige makes his Negro league debut with the NNL Birmingham Black Barons.

How to stay young: 1) Avoid fried meats, which angry up the blood. 2) If your stomach disputes you, lie down and pacify it with cool thoughts. 3) Keep the juices flowing by jangling around gently as you move. 4) Go very light on the vices, such as carrying on in society. A social ramble ain't restful. 5) Avoid running at all times. 6) Don't look back — something might be gaining on you.
— Satchel Paige

"The most celebrated of all black baseball stars was a tall, gangly pitcher of indeterminate age: Leroy 'Satchel' Paige. A natural showman and shrewd self-promoter, he drew black baseball's biggest crowds for 22 years. He pretended to be a sort of sleepy country boy, giving distinctive nicknames to all his friends, and reporters eagerly gathered the aphorisms he loved to coin. He may have been the greatest pitcher of all time." — KB

"Satchel Paige had a good arm. A strong arm with no muscles. Like a slingshot."
— Connie Johnson

"On the mound, one rueful batter remembered, Satchel Paige threw fire. He had a whole arsenal of distinctive pitches: his Bee Ball, Jump Ball, Trouble Ball, Long Tom, Hesitation Pitch..."

"Number one, that's a fastball, he'd call that his Midnight Rider. The changeup, he'd call that Four-Day Creeper..."
— Sammie Haynes, catcher

"He kicked his leg impossibly high before pitching, then he'd throw around that foot. Half the guys, one victim remembered, were hitting at that foot coming up. They rarely hit the ball at all. When playing hometown teams Paige liked to guarantee to strike out the first nine men up. Then he would call in the outfield and make good on his promise."

People only saw the major leaguers in the big cities. I believe people got a chance to see me everywhere. I played all over. Farm fields, penitentiaries. Anyplace in this whole country where there was a baseball diamond, they know me, and see me.
— Satchel Paige

"Because black baseball was played in so many places, and because few black teams had the money to pay someone to keep score, no one knows precisely how many games he won. Paige himself estimated that he pitched in 2,500 games and won 2,000 of them — four times the major league record." — KB

1928; Carl Hubbell debuts with the New York Giants.

"Well I was always fascinated by Carl Hubbell. Mr Highpockets. He was a lefthanded pitcher for the New York Giants and his most famous pitch was the screwball, and he'd thrown so many of these things that his arm was literally deformed, and you could see it when he walked out to the pitcher's mound. His arm — a screwball is a reverse curve, like that — and he'd thrown so many that the palm was almost out when he walked out, and curious. And I was so impressed by this pitcher that I used to walk around like that when I was about 9 years old. My mother used to say, What is wrong with that arm of yours, anyway? They finally made me stop it; it looked as though I'd fallen out a window or something and my parents hadn't had enough money to get me the right operation to get the thing twisted back right."
— George Plimpton

"I saw so many great pitchers, and maybe it's because of an early impression, but of all the pitchers I saw — thinking in terms of their control of themselves spiritually, as well as their ability to throw the ball, to manipulate the pitch — I would say... Let's put it this way: If I had a ball game to be pitched and my life hung on the balance, I'd want Carl Hubbell to pitch it."
— Red Barber

1929 World Series; Connie Mack's Athletics defeat Joe McCarthy's Chicago Cubs.

"Finances had forced Connie Mack to disband his first championship team in 1914, and it had taken him 15 years to climb back to the top. His newly constituted A's won back-to-back championships in 1929 and 1930, and the pennant in 1931. Mack's finest pitcher was Robert Moses "Lefty" Grove. He was so fast, a sportswriter said, he could throw a lamb chop past a wolf. He was a savage competitor who sometimes threw at his own teammates in batting practice, and was notorious for ripping his clothes and smashing lockers when he lost, something he didn't do very often. During the Athletics' three championship years he won 79 and lost just 15.

"The A's hitters rivaled even the Yankees' Murderers Row. Mickey Cochrane was the best-hitting, fastest-running catcher the game had yet seen, but he was called Black Mike because of the foul mood that overcame him when the Athletics suffered even a momentary setback. Leftfielder Al Simmons was a Polish immigrant's son, whose real name was Aloisius Szymanski. He drove in more than 100 runs 11 years in a row. He just couldn't help it, Simmons said, he hated pitchers. But the most frightening hitter was first baseman Jimmie Foxx, Double X, who hit 58 home runs one season, just two short of the record Babe Ruth had been sure would never be broken. He cut off his sleeves to display his massive biceps. Even his hair has muscles, a pitcher complained. Opposing players called him The Beast. Jimmie Foxx wasn't scouted, a pitcher said, he was trapped." — KB

Oct 29, 1929; Black Tuesday; stock market crash

1930; Babe Ruth signs a two-year contract paying $80,000 a season, the highest ever. When a reporter asked him whether it was unseemly, in the midst of the Depression, to be getting a bigger salary than President Herbert Hoover, he answered, Why not? I had a better year than he did.

"Despite the Depression, baseball was still big in New York, where Babe Ruth still dominated the game and filled the headlines. He was the idol of every schoolboy, the delight of every sportswriter, drinking and eating too much, cheerfully lighting up the half-smoked cigars he found on the men's room floor, doing his best to ignore the younger sluggers who were now overtaking him, including his seemingly invincible teammate, Lou Gehrig.

"Gehrig had become the best hitter in the American League, driving in runs at a faster clip than Ruth, but he still had to settle for second billing. The two men were growing increasingly distant, and now Gehrig became obsessed with setting a record no one could ever match. Since May of 1925 he had not missed a single game, and despite aches, sprains and fevers he determined never to take himself out of the lineup. Why don't you take a rest? someone asked him. There's no point to it, Gehrig answered, I like to play baseball, and if I were to sit on the bench the worry and fretting would take too much out of me." — KB

1930; Gus Greenlee, king of the Pittsburgh numbers racket, acquires and develops the Negro league Pittsburgh Crawfords, creating a crosstown rivalry with the Homestead Grays, the established black club owned since 1920 by ex-player Cumberland Posey Jr.

"Much of the drama of black baseball was centered in Pittsburgh. [...] Before long much of black baseball would be in the hands of racketeers, among the few members of the black community with enough money in the midst of the Great Depression to pay the bills." — KB

1930; Negro league Kansas City Monarchs begin carrying portable lights, for night play.

"Founded in 1920, the Monarchs dominated black baseball for more than 25 years. They won three pennants in a row between 1923 and 1925, and even in the darkest years of the Depression they were the most profitable of all the black ball clubs. One East Side black bartender remember that they made Kansas City the talk of the town all over the world. At the heart of the Monarchs was their hard-hitting first baseman, John Jordon "Buck" O'Neil, who would stay with the Monarchs for nearly 20 years, becoming their manager, leading them to 5 more Negro league pennants and two championships in the Black World Series." — KB

"We were the attraction. In our baseball the Kansas City Monarchs were like the New York Yankees in major league baseball. Very tops, very tops. We had the stars, and so to make a living we showed it to the world."
— Buck O'Neil

1930; Josh Gibson debuts with the Homestead Grays.

There is a catcher that any big league club would like to buy for $200,000. His name is Gibson. He can do everything. He hits the ball a mile. He catches so easy he might as well be in a rocking chair. Throws like a rifle. Too bad this Gibson is a colored fellow.
— Walter Johnson

"Josh Gibson was black baseball's greatest home run hitter, and, after Satchel Paige, its biggest crowd pleaser. He hit more than 70 home runs in 1931 alone, some of them soaring better than 575 feet, and his lifetime record may have approached 950. Legend had it that Gibson hit a ball so hard at Forbes Field in Pittsburgh that it never came down. The next day, Gibson was playing in Philadelphia, 300 miles away, when a ball dropped from the heavens into an outfielder's glove. The umpire pointed at Gibson and shouted, You're out! Yesterday, in Pittsburgh!

"Once when another player handed him a broken bat, thinking it was his, Gibson replied, I don't break bats. I wear them out. Gibson was often called the black Babe Ruth, but there were some who thought Ruth should have been called the white Josh Gibson." — KB

Sept 1930; Hank Greenberg, the "first great Jewish baseball star", debuts at first base for the Detroit Tigers. In 1934 he would lead the Tigers to the American League pennant, and in 1935 be the unanimous choice for MVP, driving in 170 runs.

"There had been Jewish major leaguers before him, including Andy Cohen of the Giants, but few did well, and the antisemitism of the times had forced many of them to change their names. Hank Greenberg never even considered it. Born in Greenwich Village, the son of a garment manufacturer who initially found his boy's interest in baseball bizarre, Greenberg broke into the minors playing in little Southern towns where crowds were said to be as curious to see a Jew as they were to watch the game. His power hitting brought him to the majors, where he soon faced a torrent of antisemitic abuse from players and fans alike. Greenberg's willingness to fight back eventually earned him the grudging respect of his fellow players. But Jewish fans, many of whom were recent immigrants and anxious to embrace the national pastime of their adopted country, worshiped him as a hero." — KB

"What better marriage of national aspiration and national passion, that one of their own could rise to become one of the great ballplayers of the time? He wouldn't play on the Jewish holidays, but he would hit a lot of home runs for the Detroit Tigers every other day of the year."
— Daniel Okrent

I came to feel that if I, as a Jew, hit a home run, I was hitting one against Hitler.
— Hank Greenberg

1930; Hack Wilson of the Chicago Cubs bats in 190 runs in the season; still a major league record. "He hit even harder than he drank. One writer said that Wilson was built along the lines of a beer keg, and not unfamiliar with its contents."

1930 World Series; Connie Mack's Athletics defeat Branch Rickey's Cardinals.

1931; Joe McCarthy leaves the Cubs to manage the New York Yankees for the next 15 years.

1931 World Series; Connie Mack falls in a rematch with Branch Rickey.

"Even the A's great lineup could no longer fill the seats at Shibe Park, and Connie Mack once again sold off his stars, this time to repay bank loans incurred after the Great Crash." — KB

1932; Greenlee Field, the first black-built and -owned baseball stadium, opens in Pittsburgh.

"When his black stars weren't allowed to use the showers in Pittsburgh's Forbes Field, Gus Greenlee built his Crawfords a $60,000 stadium. Then he stole Cumberland Posey's biggest stars, including Oscar Charleston and Judy Johnson [and Josh Gibson, not to mention Satchel Paige]. The result was a lineup which for a time rivaled the best white teams in history. The Crawfords played everywhere, a player remembered, in every ballpark, and we won. Won like we invented the game.

"Josh Gibson and Satchel Paige were relentless competitors. As teammates on the Crawfords they were a virtually unbeatable combination. But each believed he was the better ballplayer. You're the greatest hitter and I'm the greatest pitcher, Paige told Gibson when he left the Crawfords, Someday we're gonna meet up and we're gonna see who's best." — KB

1932; James "Cool Papa" Bell plays center field for the KC Monarchs and the Mexican winter leagues before bouncing to the Homestead Grays. "He may have been the fastest runner in baseball history, so fast that he once scored from first on a sacrifice bunt."

Cool Papa could snap off the light, get into bed and pull the covers up before the room was dark.
— Satchel Paige

1932; Shortstop Willie Wells, MVP of the Cuban winter league in 1929-30, plays for the Monarchs and the Grays before bouncing to the Chicago American Giants in '33, the Newark Eagles in '36 and, in 1940, Mexico.

"For most [blacks], the season didn't end in October. When the weather turned cold they headed south to Latin America, Cuba and Mexico, where they found a warm welcome playing wintertime baseball."

Not only do I get more money playing here, but I live like a king. I've found freedom and democracy here, something I never found in the United States. Here in Mexico, I am a man.
— Willie Wells

"Black and white in Cuba suffered that the blacks could not play in the big leagues, because we had many Cuban stars who were black. And we said, What a waste. It was the feeling, What a waste. And when the black athletes came to play in Cuba they were lionized. They were heroes, and they felt very comfortable in Cuba."
— Manuel Marquez-Sterling

June 3, 1932; Lou Gehrig becomes the first player to hit 4 home runs in a single game.

June 4, 1932; John McGraw retires.

After 30 years of continuous services, John Joseph McGraw has resigned as manager of the Giants. At the age of 59 Mr McGraw steps down because of ailing health, with his Giants in last place. Mr McGraw was a product of the old school of baseball, when fistfights were common, when red liquor was sold at all the parks, when only ladies of questionable social standing attended the game. To the end he was faithful to his truculent creed. The last official act he performed as manager of the Giants was to file a protest with the league against Bill Klem, the umpire.
— Joe Williams, New York World-Telegram

"He died two years later, mourned by many as the greatest of all baseball managers. The winner of 10 pennants. Not long after his death, his wife found among his affects a list of all the black players he had secretly wished he could hire over the decades." — KB

1932 World Series; Babe Ruth's called shot at Wrigley Field, the "most hotly debated moment in baseball history."

"One of the things about baseball is the imagination of people, and something remarkable happens. I was there! in their imaginations. When Babe Ruth allegedly pointed to right field bleachers before hitting his home run there against the Cubs, in that World Series — I've had at least, maybe a hundred people tell me, I was there! If everybody who said they were there really were there, Cubs park would seat a half million people."
— Studs Terkel

"The Yankees easily won the first two games in New York and then headed west. There was bad blood between the two teams. [Yankee manager Joe McCarthy formerly managed the Cubs.] Cub fans jeered and spat on Babe Ruth and his wife on the way in and out of their hotel. In the first inning of the third game Ruth hit a three-run homer off Chicago pitcher Charlie Root and rounded the bases amidst a nonstop torrent of taunts and abuse. It was only the beginning." — KB

"He came up again in the fifth inning, and this was after he'd fought for a shoestring catch and missed it and the Cubs tied the score. Ruth came to bat the next inning and the crowd was all over him, just hooting and jeering 'cause he messed up the play in the outfield, and he was yelling back at the Chicago bench and jeering and he said later, I never had so much fun in my life. It was the first time I got the crowd and the players on me at the same time. And he held up a finger when he missed — there were two called strikes and two called balls — he held up a finger saying, That's one. And he held it up again, That's two. And Hartnett, the Cub catcher, heard him say, Only takes one to hit it. A time-honored baseball phrase."
— Robert Creamer

"Then Ruth waved his arm. Whether he was merely gesturing toward the Cub dugout or pointing toward the center field stands, no one will ever know for sure." — KB

"And then he hit the home run. And it wasn't just that he hit a home run; he hit the longest home run ever seen in Chicago at that time to dead center field. And you didn't get center field home runs much in those days, that was a fairly rare thing. And it was a tremendous home run, and it just stunned the crowd. Ruth went down to first base and he told a reporter later he was saying to himself, You lucky bum, you lucky lucky bum! And he said something to the Cub first baseman, something to the second baseman, waved at the Cub dugout, came across home plate — Franklin Roosevelt was running for President for the first time and he was sitting in a box behind home plate, and they said when Ruth crossed home plate with a home run, Roosevelt just put his head back and laughed."
— Robert Creamer

"The pitcher, Charlie Root, swore that Ruth had never pointed to the fence. If he had, I'd have put one in his ear and knocked him on his ass. Lou Gehrig was no less certain that he had. What do you think of the nerve of that big monkey, he asked, calling his shot and getting away with it? [...] Ironically, Gehrig was the real star of the Yankees' four-game sweep, but few would remember his performance in the face of all the publicity Ruth got. Ruth himself was evasive when asked if he really had called his shot. It's in the papers, isn't it? he said, Why don't you read the papers?" — KB

Nov 1932; Franklin Roosevelt is elected President.

I have no expectation of making a hit every time I come to bat. What I seek is the highest possible batting average, not only for myself, but for my team.
— FDR

1933;

"As Franklin Roosevelt began to implement his New Deal for the American people, the Depression had devastated organized baseball. Attendance dipped to its lowest levels in decades. Only the Yankees and a handful of other teams were profitable, and club owners everywhere scrambled to save their businesses. Some sold off their stars to survive. The minor leagues were hit even harder; more than half went out of business. Desperate to lure back paying customers, minor league owners tried dozens of innovations and promotions: mortgage nights, beauty contests, grocery giveaways, raffles, night baseball and cow milking contests." — KB

July 6, 1933; The first All-Star Game is held in Chicago's Comiskey Park, "to try to revive interest in baseball. Fittingly, Babe Ruth was the hero, hitting a dramatic 2-run home run that gave the American League the edge."

Sept 10, 1933; The first black All-Star Game is held, in Chicago at Comiskey Park as well. "Black fans also picked their favorites, voting in the pages of the country's top black newspapers. The East-West All-Star Game quickly became the biggest event of the Negro league season. That was the glory part of our baseball, one player remembered. The huge crowds sometimes reached 50,000."

1933 World Series; The New York Giants, under John McGraw's successor, Bill Terry, defeat Joe Cronin's Washington Senators. One year later Cronin is sold by his own father-in-law, owner Clark Griffith, to shore up the Senators' finances.

1934; Walter "Red" Barber, a young Southerner who has never even seen a major league ballgame, is hired by Larry MacPhail, general manager of the Cincinnati Reds and innovator, to broadcast the play-by-play at every game.

"Larry MacPhail was a banker's hard-drinking son, a born promoter, impatient with tradition, desperate to find new ways to boost attendance and rescue his club from bankruptcy in the midst of the Depression. He was also a champion of radio. Broadcasters had covered the World Series since 1922, but most owners feared that regular broadcasting would hurt ticket sales. Larry MacPhail was sure broadcasting would increase profits, and went into partnership with the owner of two local radio stations to prove it." — KB

"Anything new has to establish itself and gain its own credentials. When radio came along some of the entrenched conservative owners said, Wait, wait a minute. Why give away something that you're trying to sell for your living, to try to keep your enterprise afloat? And especially on days of threatening weather, when people will say, Well, it looks like it may rain, I'll just listen to the radio and I won't go. They did not realize at that time that it would be creating new fans, that it would be making families of fans. Before radio, by and large, the people who came into a ballpark were men. Once radio came along and came into the homes women began to understand the game. They didn't have to have somebody explain it to them; the play-by-play broadcaster was doing it. And attendance visibly went up when you had families coming instead of single members of the family. And that's the beginning of the impact of radio. Radio made new fans."
— Red Barber

1934; Buck Leonard debuts at first base with the Homestead Grays. "He was billed as the black Lou Gehrig. His steady, dependable hitting helped lead the Grays to 9 Negro league pennants in a row."

1934 All-Star Game; Carl Hubbell strikes out, in succession, Babe Ruth, Lou Gehrig, Jimmie Foxx, Al Simmons and Joe Cronin.

1934; Gashouse Gang

They don't look like a major league ball club, or as major league ball clubs are supposed to look in this era of the well-dressed athlete. Their uniforms are stained and dirty and patched and ill-fitting. They don't shave before a game and most of them chew tobacco. They spit out of the sides of their mouths and then wipe the backs of their hands across their shirt fronts. They're not afraid of anybody.
— Frank Graham, New York Sun

"Baseball had never seen a team quite like the 1934 St. Louis Cardinals, of the National League: a perfect symbol for a country down on its luck. They were daring, hotheaded, raucous, unstoppable; the carefully crafted creation of general manager Branch Rickey and his revolutionary farm system. In a time when people were forced to make do with less, the poorly paid Cardinals were everybody's heroes. They were led by Frankie Frisch, the Fordham Flash, who was celebrated for his furious reactions to bad calls, and he considered any call against the Cardinals bad. He hurled his glove into the air; leaped up and down on his cap until his spikes had shredded it. At least once this proved so persuasive that the umpire actually reversed himself and called for a game to be replayed. Shortstop Leo 'the Lip' Durocher was brash and cocky and good in the field, but so bad at bat that Babe Ruth named him the All-American Out. Leftfielder Joe Medwick, called Ducky because he ran like one, swung at almost everything, but connected enough to lead the league in runs batted in three seasons running, and to win the National League Triple Crown — something no one else has managed since. Third baseman Pepper Martin, the Wild Horse of the Osage, was a fierce competitor and former hobo who liked to drop sneezing powder into hotel ventilation systems. He was said to be so fast that back home in Oklahoma he liked to run down rabbits." — KB

I was in the top ten percent of my class in law school. I'm a doctor of jurisprudence. I'm an honorary doctor of laws. And I like to believe I'm an intelligent man. Then will you please tell me why in the name of common sense I spent four mortal hours today conversing with a person named Dizzy Dean?
— Branch Rickey

"The most famous member of the Cardinals was a cocky righthanded pitcher from Arkansas: Jerome Hanna Dean. A farmboy who had dropped out of school in the second grade — I didn't do so well in the first grade either, Dean said — he was an eighteen-year-old itinerant cotton picker when Rickey's scouts discovered him playing sandlot ball. Right from the start Dean was convinced of his own greatness. I'll put more people in the park than Babe Ruth, he told Branch Rickey, even before he was hired. Anybody who's had the pleasure of seeing me play knows that I am the greatest pitcher in the world. He was very nearly as good as he said he was. He averaged 24 wins a year for five seasons. Son, he liked to ask a batter to whom he hadn't pitched before, what kind of pitch would you like to miss? He was a master at drumming up publicity. Before the 1934 season began, Dizzy announced that he and his younger brother, Paul, whom the press insisted on calling Daffy, would together win 45 to 50 games. They did. Dizzy won 30 and Paul won 19." — KB

1934 World Series; Cardinals v. Tigers

"Dean won the first game, 8 to 3. Afterwards he wired Rickey that this American League is a pushover. I think if they pitched me the whole four days, he said, I'd win all of them.

"At the plate, Ducky Medwick was well on his way to setting a World Series record for most hits. In the fourth game Dizzy Dean, running to second, was hit in the head with a ball fielded by the shortstop. The throw knocked Dean senseless and he was rushed to the hospital. Headlines the next day said: X-rays of Dean's head showed nothing.

"In the seventh and deciding game Dean and the Cardinals were already ahead by seven runs when Ducky Medwick, star of the series, came to the plate. A fight broke out between Medwick and the third baseman. The Detroit crowd turned ugly. When Medwick later took his position in left field the Detroit fans pelted him with eggs, fruit and bottles. Commissioner Landis removed Medwick from the game for his own protection, depriving him of the chance to set the record for most hits in a World Series. The Cardinals won the game anyway, 11 to nothing, and the World Series, 4 games to 3. Afterwards Medwick was puzzled. I knew why they threw all that garbage at me, he said, What I could never figure out is why they brought it to the park in the first place." — KB

1934 postseason; Babe Ruth tours Japan with an all-star team.

"Half a million fans turned out in Tokyo to cheer the mythic hero they called Beibu Rusu. The Americans won 17 of 18 games and Ruth hit 13 home runs. But in one game a high school boy named Eiji Sawamura struck out Ruth, Charlie Gehringer, Lou Gehrig and Jimmie Foxx before the Americans managed to get a single, winning run. Sawamura became a national hero, and the tour sparked the formation of the first Japanese professional league." — KB

The Babe's big bulk today blotted out such unimportant things as international squabbles over oil and navies.
— New York Times

We like to believe that countries having a common interest in a great sport would rather fight it out on the diamond than on the battlefield.
— Sporting News

1935; Babe Ruth sold.

"He was, according to the Associated Press, still the most photographed man in the world, but by 1934 Babe Ruth was growing increasingly unhappy. He knew his best days were behind him, and he had glumly absorbed a series of humiliating pay cuts as his averages dropped. He no longer spoke to Lou Gehrig because of a misunderstanding between his wife and Gehrig's mother. And he couldn't stand the new Yankee manager, Joe McCarthy. Ruth desperately wanted to be manager himself, But how could you manage a team, Yankee owner Jacob Ruppert asked him, when you can't even manage yourself?" — KB

"That's sort of a myth: Ruth couldn't handle himself, how could he handle other players? That nonsense. I mean, the man drank a lot and he raised hell and he caroused but he was a major league player for 22 years; he must've taken care of himself pretty well. And could he have managed? Who knows. Some terrible people have become great managers and some likely people were terrible managers. He certainly deserved a chance. He didn't get it."
— Robert Creamer

"Ruth's Far Eastern tour was a triumph, but when he got back he learned that the Yankees, the team that he had built, had decided to dispense with his services and had no intention of making him a manager. He turned down an offer to run their best farm team as beneath his dignity. Instead he joined the worst club in the National League, the Boston Braves, lured by a vague promise of becoming manager the following season. The Braves never really meant to give him the manager's job. The main hope was that his mere presence would boost receipts." — KB

1935; Effa Manley and her husband become co-owners of the Negro league Newark Eagles. Effa runs the team until 1948. "Tough-minded and shrewd, she was a power in Negro baseball and the black community for more than fifteen years, sometimes donating the home game proceeds to the most important civil rights issue of the day: the campaign against lynching."

May 24, 1935; First night game in major league baseball. Larry MacPhail arranges for President Franklin D Roosevelt to push a button in the White House that lights up Crosley Field in Cincinnati for a game between the Reds and the Philadelphia Phillies.

June 1, 1935; Babe Ruth retires.

"On the last Sunday of his career [May 25], when he was 40 years old, playing for the Boston Braves, heartbroken that he'd left the Yankees, couldn't sign on with them, changed leagues — trying to prolong, trying to stay on in baseball, which all players want to do — fat, worn-out, near the end — the Boston Braves played in Pittsburgh and that last Sunday he hit three home runs, and the third home run, the last of his career — number 714 — went out of the ballpark, over the roof in Forbes Field. No one had ever hit a ball out of there, up to that point, ever. That is a farewell. Goodbye, baseball."
— Roger Angell

From then on, until the day he died, he sat by the telephone waiting for a call to manage that never came.
— Claire Ruth

1935 World Series; Tigers defeat Cubs.

1936; The First Class of the Baseball Hall of Fame is selected by vote of the Baseball Writers Association of America:

Ty Cobb
Babe Ruth
Honus Wagner
Christy Mathewson
Walter Johnson

May 1936; Joe DiMaggio debuts in the Yankee outfield.

"At 17 he had broken in with the San Francisco Seals at shortstop, and was moved to center field after committing 11 wild throws in a single exhibition game. But he hit safely in 61 straight games in his first year in the minors and batted .398 in his third. The press was ready when he joined the majors, and he did not disappoint, hitting 29 homers and knocking in 125 runs in his rookie season. DiMaggio was the perfect complement to Lou Gehrig. He would help lead the Yankees to four consecutive world championships [1936, 37, 38, 39], an accomplishment Babe Ruth and Murderers Row had never even approached." — KB

"Always you look for heroes. Always the people look up to see something that represents them, that is larger than they are, and, if it's perfect, that they might become. As a young boy when I was taken to my first game at Yankee Stadium — my god! Yankee Stadium! talk about awesome sights — to see Joe DiMaggio, whose name had that happy combination of vowels that mine had, to whom you could relate without knowing anything about San Francisco or anything else about him. But he was an Italian American. He was a baseball player. He didn't seem to have any other credential but his ability, and that was sufficient to make him a great hero and a great success, and therefore a great inspiration."
— Mario Cuomo

July 1936; Bob Feller, a 17-year-old fastball pitcher from Iowa, whose father had built him his own practice field, debuts with the Cleveland Indians. "In his very first start he struck out 15 St. Louis Browns. A few weeks later he set an American League record by striking out 17 A's. Then he went back home to finish high school."

"My father and mother brought me up. I knew where the stakes were set, and I concentrated on my game. I was very conscientious; good night's sleep, good nutrition. I practiced hard, worked hard, I did, as a kid on the farm, and my baseball career was number one. So I just didn't exactly, say, fall off the turnip truck.

"We went to the World Series in 1934 in St. Louis and saw the Gashouse Gang. And I thought right then and there that — I was only 15 — that major league baseball wasn't that far away. And, not being cocky, I had a lot of confidence. My father gave me a lot of confidence. I never was afraid of a batter on the mound. They may hit me, hit me well, but I was never afraid of them."
— Bob Feller

"Imagine Bob Feller, seventeen years old, in the small farming town of Van Meter, Iowa, throwing against the proverbial wall of the barn and having a fastball that could beat any in the major league at that time. What was particularly extraordinary — when the young Feller, at 17, came into the major leagues — and what people forget is that his fastball was so great because his curve ball was extraordinary too."
— Daniel Okrent

"Baseball stories are so various, and they swap characters in 'em, but the way I heard it, Lefty Gomez, himself a pitcher, faced an 18-year-old Bobby Feller. The first one came over and the umpire called a strike, and the second one came over, called a strike, and the third one came over and the umpire called a strike and Gomez said, I thought that last one sounded a little low."
— Shelby Foote

1936 World Series; Yankees defeat Giants.

1937; Trujilo All-Stars.

"In the middle of the 1937 season, Satchel Paige and 19 other Negro league players suddenly disappeared. They turned up in the Dominican Republic, playing on a team organized by the dictator, General Rafael Trujilo, a man who could not bear to lose. Their assignment was to win the national championship for the general. Trujilo had Paige's team put on armed guard the night before the big game, and gave orders that anyone who sold the players whiskey would be shot." — KB

By the seventh inning we were a run behind, and you could see Trujilo lining up his army. It began to look like a firing squad. In the last of the seventh we scored two runs. You never saw old Satch throw harder than that. I shut them out that last two innings and we won. I hustled back to our hotel and the next morning we blowed out of there in a hurry. We never did see Trujilo again, and I ain't sorry.
— Satchel Paige

1937 World Series; Yankees defeat Giants, again.

July 29, 1938; During a radio interview, Yankee outfielder Jake Powell "cheerfully explained that he kept in shape during the off-season by cracking niggers over the head while serving as a policeman back home in Ohio. The white press paid little attention, but the black press was outraged and threatened a boycott. Yankee management suspended Powell for ten days and sent him on a tour of bars in Harlem to apologize."

October 2, 1938; Hank Greenberg shoots for the home run record.

"On the last day of the season, newsreel crews were dispatched from New York to cover what might possibly be a historic confrontation between Cleveland and Detroit. Greenberg had already hit 58 home runs that summer, tying Jimmie Foxx's record for righthanded hitting. If his luck held he might tie, or even break Babe Ruth's record of 60, and the cameramen wanted to be there to record the action. But facing him on the mound that afternoon was Bob Feller. It was Feller's turn to make history. He set a new strikeout record of 18, and Hank Greenberg struck out twice. The next day Adolf Hitler's army invaded Czechoslovakia."

1938 World Series; Yankees sweep Cubs.

1938; Martín Dihigo, El Maestro, "the most versatile of all Negro league stars, a Cuban too dark-skinned to be considered for the majors, who played brilliantly at every position", leads the Mexican League simultaneously in both pitching and hitting. He will be the only player inducted into the American, Cuban and Mexican Baseball Halls of Fame.

1938 postseason; Major league players are polled as to whether they would object to playing alongside blacks. Four-fifths say they have no objections. A small band of black sportswriters begin actively campaigning for integration of the big leagues. Club owners are not interested. Chester Washington of the Pittsburgh Courier sends an unanswered telegram to the manager of the struggling Pittsburgh Pirates:

To Pie Traynor, Pittsburgh Pirates, Congress Hotel: Know your club needs players stop Have answers to your prayers right here in Pittsburgh stop Josh Gibson catcher Buck Leonard first base S Paige pitcher and Cool Papa Bell all available at reasonable figures stop Would make Pirates formidable pennant contenders stop What is your attitude? stop Wire answer

1939; Red Barber is brought from Cincinnati to New York by the Dodgers' new owner, Larry MacPhail, to become radio broadcaster for Brooklyn.

"No one ever came up with the expressions that Red Barber had. And so what he brought to New York, to the Metropolitan Area, was that country flavor that they were not familiar with at all. I mean, when he said rhubarb, everybody would go, Wow...rhubarb. And so he became part of the language: ducks on the pond; sitting in the tall cotton — I mean there were just a million of 'em. You would suddenly say, I wonder what that looks like when somebody leaps up against the wall or dives head-first into second or bowls over the catcher? So they'd come out to see what they'd been listening to."
— Vin Scully

"My first memory of baseball is radio, listening on the car radio to Red Barber talking from Ebbets Field in Brooklyn. My father wanted to know how the games were going on. He was following Brooklyn. My mother and I — I was an only child — driving in the car, began to listen, I suppose, out of self-defense. And both of us, at about the same time, my mother and I, became caught up in the drama of the game."
— Donald Hall

1939 spring training; Lou Gehrig ails.

March 16, 1939, St. Petersburg. The older newspaper men sit in the chicken coop press boxes around the circuit and watch Lou Gehrig go through the laborious movements of playing first base, and wonder if they're seeing one of the institutions of the American League crumble before their eyes. They watch him at the bat and note he isn't hitting the ball well. They watch him round the bag and it's plain he isn't getting the balls he used to get. They watch him run and they fancy they can hear his bones creak and his lungs wheeze as he lumbers around the bases. On eyewitness testimony alone the verdict must be that of a battle-scarred veteran falling apart.
— Joe Williams, New York World-Telegram

May 1, 1939; Lou Gehrig, the Iron Horse, takes himself out of the Yankees lineup for the first time in 14 years, after playing 2,130 consecutive games.

"He was only 35 but had begun to play like an old man; dropping balls, missing again and again at bat, sliding his feet along rather than lifting them. During batting practice one afternoon, Joe DiMaggio watched in astonishment as the Yankees' hitting star missed ten fat pitches in a row. Gehrig could not understand what was wrong. Neither could his teammates. But he could not stand the thought of letting them down. He was benching himself, he said, for the good of the team."

To whom it may concern: This is to certify that Mr Lou Gehrig has been under examination at the Mayo Clinic from June 13 to June 19, 1939. After a careful and complete examination it was found that he is suffering from amyotrophic lateral sclerosis. This type of illness involves the motor pathways and cells of the central nervous system. The nature of this trouble makes it such that Mr Gehrig will be unable to continue his active participation as a baseball player. Signed, Dr Harold H Habian.

The road may come to an end here. Seems like our backs are to the wall. But there usually comes a way out. Where and what I know not. But who can tell that it might lead right on to greater things?
— Lou Gehrig, writing to his wife

June 12, 1939; The National Baseball Hall of Fame officially opens its doors in Cooperstown, New York, on the game's "dubious centennial". Twelve figures selected by the Baseball Writers of America are inducted, including Christy Mathewson, who had died in 1925, and Ty Cobb, who "refused to appear in the official photograph just to spite his ancient enemy, Kenesaw Mountain Landis". Inductees present are Eddie Collins, Babe Ruth, Connie Mack, Cy Young, Honus Wagner, Grover Cleveland Alexander, Tris Speaker, Napoléon Lajoie, George Sisler and Walter Johnson.

It is our belief that baseball is loved by an entire nation, that it is the very backbone of America itself.
— Commissioner Kenesaw Mountain Landis

This week the 100th anniversary of our — pardon us — national pastime is being celebrated. During this century of diamond-doings, however, Negro baseballers, in spite of their undoubted ability to bat, run, pitch, snare gargantuan flies, cavort around shortstop and the keystone sack and think baseball, haven't reached first base insofar as getting into the big leagues is concerned.
— Amsterdam News

Every known nationality, including Indians, Cubans, Filipinos, Jews, Italians, Greeks — with the lone exception of the American black man — have played in both the National and American Leagues. The white sporting public wants to see a good ball game. They do not raise the question of the nationality of a player who can knock a home run or can pitch a good game. There was no Hitler movement created in America when John McGraw of the New York Giants put Andy Cohen, a Jew, on second base. It was up to Cohen to make good or go. What is the matter with baseball? The answer is: plain prejudice, that's all.
— Chicago Defender

"I would like to think of the Negro leagues and the tragedy of the Negro leagues — the fact that these men were excluded from baseball — the way that Buck O'Neil thought about them: that nobody owed him any apology; he had his career. But I can't think of it that way. I don't think any of us can, and that O'Neil has a generosity of spirit that perhaps goes above and beyond the call. Systematically, for six decades black Americans were excluded from playing in the major leagues, in the minor leagues, in the organized wing of the national pastime. One thing one could say is that it was, therefore, not the national pastime. It was a closed society. One could also point out to those people who would say that baseball was at its best in the Twenties, at the time of Ruth and Gehrig, or in the Thirties when DiMaggio and Williams came along: Impossible! Impossible! When part of the national population was being systematically excluded from baseball it couldn't have been the best. What we are left with from the black leagues is memory, legend, and an endless series of what-ifs with the names attached to them of Josh Gibson and Ray Dandridge and Cool Papa Bell and Willie Wells and what might have been. What if these men had been there to play in the majors against the Ruths and the Cobbs and the Walter Johnsons and back farther, against Cap Anson who started it all?"
— Daniel Okrent

July 4, 1939; Lou Gehrig's farewell address. He dies two years later of what is now called Lou Gehrig's disease.

"A huge, sad crowd packed Yankee Stadium to pay tribute to their beloved hero. Babe Ruth came back and the two old teammates ended their long feud. Manager Joe McCarthy presented him with a trophy. At first, Gehrig was too moved to speak..."

For the past two weeks you've been reading about a bad break. Today I consider myself the luckiest man on the face of the Earth. That I might've been given a bad break, but I've got an awful lot to live for. Thank you.

1939 World Series; Yankees sweep Reds.

1942 Negro League World Series; Satchel Paige, pitching for the Kansas City Monarchs, finally faces Josh Gibson, batting for the Homestead Grays, in Game 2.

"Satchel Paige always thought he was the greatest pitcher in the world, and Josh Gibson thought he was the greatest hitter in the world and we did too. And Satchel and Josh in this World Series ballgame. Satchel's pitching, and we got a ballgame won — the Kansas City Monarchs. With two out in the ninth inning, the first-place hitter, he tripled off Satchel. We got two outs, so that didn't bother us at all. So, Satchel called me, said, Hey, Nancy, come here. I said, What do you want, Satchel? He said, Let me tell you what I'm fixing to do. I said, What are you fixing to do? He said, I'm going to walk Howard Easterling, I'm going to walk Buck Leonard, I'm going to pitch to Josh Gibson. I said, Man, don't be facetious. He said, That's what I'm going to do. I said, Time! I called the ump, I called the manager, who was Frank Duncan — great ballplayer himself — I said, Frank, you got to listen to what Satchel said. And so Satchel told him what was going to happen. And so, in walking Easterling and walking Buck Leonard to fill the bases — now, when he was walking Buck, Josh was in the circle, you know, and he's talking to Josh all the time, said, Josh, do you remember the day when we were playing on the same team and I told you that one day we were gonna meet and see who was the best? He said, Yeah, I know what you're talking about. Satchel said, All right, said, Now is the time to prove this thing. So when Josh comes up to the bat — listen, let me tell you what this man did. He said, Time! He called the trainer. Our trainer was Jew-Baby Floyd — and I don't know why they called him Jew-Baby, 'cause he was black as me — but anyway, when Jew-Baby comes out with his, you know, like the smock that the doctor would wear, and he's got a concoction in a glass. He's got a glass, he's got some water, and he puts this — I guess Alka-Seltzer or something — he pours this in that water and it fizzes and Satchel drinks it down. He lets out a belch — I can hear it, but nobody else heard it. And so, he said, Now I'm ready. So, the fans, now they know what's happening now, everybody — we got to have 40,000 people — they're standing, and here comes Satchel. Satchel said, You know, Josh, I'm going to throw you some fastballs. I'm going to throw you a fastball belt-high. Boom! Strike one. Josh didn't move the bat. He said, Now, I'm going to throw you another fastball, but this is going to be faster than the other fastball. Boom! Strike two. He said, Now, Josh, I've got you two strikes and no balls. You know, in this situation I'm supposed to knock you down, you know, brush you back, he said, but, uh-uh, I'm not gonna throw any smoke at your yoke, I'm gonna throw a pea at your knee. Boom! Strike three. And when he struck him out — you know, Satchel must be 6' 5" — Satchel stretched out, looked like he was 7 feet tall, and he walked off the field and walked by me and said, You know what, Nancy? Nobody hits Satchel. That was the end of that story."
— Buck O'Neil

Ken Burns' Baseball, 4th Inning: 1920-1930

"Baseball is a human enterprise. Therefore, by definition, it's imperfect, it's flawed, it doesn't embody perfectly everything that's worthwhile about our country or about our culture. But it comes closer than most things in American life. And maybe this story, which is probably apocryphal, gets to the heart of it: An Englishman and an American having an argument about something that has nothing to do with baseball. It gets to the point where it's irreconcilable, to the point of exasperation, and the American says to the Englishman, Ah, screw the king! And the Englishman is taken aback, thinks for a minute and says, Well, screw Babe Ruth! Now think about that. The American thinks he can insult the Englishman by casting aspersions upon a person who has his position by virtue of nothing except for birth; nothing to do with personal qualities, good, bad or otherwise. But who does the Englishman think embodies America? Some scruffy kid who came from the humblest of beginnings, hung out as a six-year-old behind his father's bar; a big, badly flawed, swashbuckling palooka, who strides with great spirit — not just talent, but with a spirit of possibility and enjoyment of life across the American stage. That's an American to the Englishman. You give me Babe Ruth over any king who's ever sat on the throne and I'll be happy with that trade."
— Bob Costas


Who is this "Baby Ruth"? And what does she do?
— George Bernard Shaw

Babe Ruth:

He was a parade all by himself; a burst of dazzle and jingle; Santa Claus drinking his whiskey straight and groaning with a bellyache. Babe Ruth made the music that his joyous years danced to in a continuous party. What Babe Ruth is comes down one generation, handing it to the next, as a national heirloom.
— Jimmy Cannon

It is impossible to watch him at bat without experiencing an emotion. I've seen hundreds of ballplayers at the plate, and none of them managed to convey the message of impending doom to the pitching that Babe Ruth did with the cock of his head, the position of his legs, and the little gentle waving of the bat feathered in his two big paws.
— New York Daily News

I saw it all happen, from beginning to end. But sometimes I still can't believe what I saw. This nineteen-year-old kid, crude, poorly educated, only slightly brushed by the social veneer we call civilization, gradually transformed into the idol of American youth and the symbol of baseball the world over; a man loved by more people and with an intensity of feeling that perhaps has never been equaled before or since. I saw a man transform from a human being into something pretty close to a god. If somebody had predicted that back on the Boston Red Sox in 1914, he woulda been thrown into a lunatic asylum.
— Harry Hooper

Feb 1914; George Herman Ruth, Jr, resident of St Mary's Industrial School for Boys, a Catholic reformatory and orphanage, is signed to the minor league Baltimore Orioles.

July 1914; Ruth signs to and debuts with the Boston Red Sox.

Babe Ruth joined us in the middle of 1914, a nineteen-year-old kid. He was a left-handed pitcher and a good one. He had never been anywhere, didn't know anything about manners or how to behave among people. Just a big, overgrown green pea. [...] Lord, he ate too much. He'd stop along the road when we were traveling and order half a dozen hot dogs and as many bottles of soda pop, stuff them in one after another, give a few belches and then roar, "Okay, boys, let's go!"
— Harry Hooper

"Off the field he was bigger, louder, more excitable than his teammates. He used other people's toothbrushes, ran the elevator up and down, and got married to Helen Woodford, a sixteen-year-old coffee shop waitress he met on his very first day in Boston. Everybody called him Baby, then just the Babe." — KB

1915; Rogers Hornsby debuts with the St. Louis Cardinals.

1916; Harry Frazee, a theatrical producer, purchases the Red Sox. "He liked baseball, but Broadway was his first love, and whenever he needed cash for a new show he would sell off one of his stars."

Somebody asked me if my club was for sale. What a ridiculous question! Of course it is for sale! So is my hat and my overcoat and my watch. Anyone who wants them can have them, at a price. I will dispose of my holdings in the Red Sox at any time, for my price.
— H. Harrison Frazee

1916 & 1918 World Series; Ruth pitches for the victorious Red Sox. "In the Red Sox' greatest years he was their greatest pitcher, setting a record of 29 and 2/3 scoreless World Series innings that stood for 43 years."

"The interesting thing, among the many many many endlessly interesting things about Babe Ruth — certainly the most stunning figure in baseball history — is that he was nearly as great a pitcher as he was a hitter. In his coming-up as a raw boy from Baltimore he mowed down his opponents in the American League; he was the best left-handed pitcher in the 1910s, without question, in the American League, and it was only because of the prodigal strength that resided in his bat that he moved off the mound. [...] When people get into discussions about who's the greatest ballplayer in history and they say, Well there was Ruth, but there was also DiMaggio and Cobb and Mays and Aaron and the other claimants. To me it seems like an utterly wasted discussion. Let us say that Ruth was not as good an offensive player as Willie Mays...but he was also one of the greatest pitchers ever! It is as if imagining that Beethoven and Cézanne were one person producing the same work. It just can't be compared to anything else."
— Daniel Okrent

1919; Ruth sets a new single-season record for home runs: 29. "Ruth liked to pitch, but he loved to hit, and he played outfield on the days he wasn't pitching so that he could do it more often. He is said to have modeled his swing after the best power hitter in the game: Shoeless Joe Jackson."

Dec, 1919; The Curse of the Bambino. Ruth is sold to the New York Yankees for "$125,000 plus the promise of a $300,000 personal loan with which Frazee could finance still another show. As security for the loan, Frazee put up Fenway Park itself."

Harry Frazee became the owner of the Red Sox and then before long he sold off all our best players and ruined the team. Sold them all to the Yankees. Ernie Shore, Duffy Lewis, Dutch Leonard, Carl Mays, Babe Ruth. I was disgusted. The Yankee dynasty of the Twenties was three-quarters the Red Sox of a few years before. Frazee was short of cash and he sold the whole team down the river to keep his dirty nose above the water. What a way to end a wonderful ball club.
— Harry Hooper

"The Red Sox never recovered. They had won 5 of the first 15 World Series. They would not even play in another World Series for more than a quarter of a century." — KB

Negro league baseball:

It matters not what branch of mankind the player sprang from with the fan, if he can deliver the goods. The Mick, the Sheeney, the Wop, the Dutch and the Chink, the Cuban, the Indian, the Jap or the so-called Anglo-Saxon — his "nationality" is never a matter of moment if he can pitch or hit or field. In organized baseball there has been no distinction raised except tacit understanding that a player of Ethiopian descent is ineligible, the wisdom of which we will not discuss except to say that by such a rule some of the greatest players the game has ever known have been denied their opportunity.
— The Sporting News, 1923

"In 1919 the bloodiest race riots since the Civil War broke out in more than 25 Northern cities as black communities became the focus of white rage. The worst was in Chicago: Before it was over 38 were dead, 536 injured, whole neighborhoods burned and looted. The violence was a devastating blow to the millions of Southern blacks who had moved north fleeing segregation. But out of the riots grew a new assertiveness among African Americans. The black nationalist leader Marcus Garvey urged his people to look to themselves. No more fear, no more cringing, he said, no more begging and pleading. Now black culture flourished as never before. A Harlem renaissance began, and black businesses thrived in all the big cities. In riot-torn Chicago, Andrew "Rube" Foster created one of the most successful black enterprises..." — KB

Feb, 1920; The Negro National League (NNL) is organized and established by Rube Foster, owner and manager of the Chicago American Giants. It was his object, he said, to provide the North's growing black population with professional baseball of their own, to do something concrete for the loyalty of the race, and to eventually challenge the major leagues.

"...a very successful operation, actually. Probably the third biggest black business in the world."
— Buck O'Neil

When the big games shall have become history there will stalk across the pages of the record a massive figure, and its name will be Andrew Foster. The master of the show, who moves the figures on his checkerboard at will. The smooth-toned counselor of infinite wisdom and sober thought. Cold in refusals, warm in assents. Known to everybody, knows everybody. That's Rube.
— The Pittsburgh Courier

"The finest black pitcher of his time, Foster was a big, outwardly genial Texan who called friends and strangers alike Darlin'. But he was tough with the white owners of the big city stadiums where his teams played when the big leaguers were safely out of town. And he was tough on his players, too, insisting on the same kind of aggressive, fast-moving baseball preached by John McGraw, fining any member of his team $5 if he were tagged out standing up. You're supposed to slide, he said. No one unable consistently to bunt a ball into a cap could play for Rube Foster, and white managers regularly attended his games to study his tactics." — KB

If you play the best clubs in the land — white clubs, as you say — it will be a case of Greek meeting Greek. I fear nobody.
— Rube Foster

"What more interesting kind of organization could black people create than leagues and baseball? It was a sport that defined America, and so black people adopting this sport and showing we too can have leagues and we too can play this game and play it very well, in some way was black people showing white Americans: Yes, we're American. Yes, we can play this game and this game means something to us, too, and it means something in our history and in our heritage."
— Gerald Early

Live ball era:

We'd play a whole game with one ball if it stayed in the park. Lopsided and black and full of tobacco juice and licorice stains. Pitchers used to have it all their way then: spitballs and emory balls and whatnot. Until 1921 they had a dead ball. The only way you could get a home run is if the outfielder tripped and fell down. The ball wasn't wrapped tight and lots of times it'd get mashed on one side, come bouncing out there like a Mexican jumping bean. They wouldn't throw it out of the game, though. Only used three or four balls in a whole game. Now they use sixty or seventy.
— Sam Crawford

"During the first twenty years of the twentieth century great pitchers ruled the game: Christy Mathewson, Cy Young, Grover Cleveland Alexander, Walter Johnson. They had an advantage not available to their successors. The moment a new ball was thrown onto the field, part of every pitcher's job was to dirty it up. By turns they smeared it with mud, licorice, tobacco juice. It was deliberately scuffed, sandpapered, cut, even spiked. The result was a misshapen earth-colored ball that traveled through the air erratically, tended to soften in the later innings, and as it came over the plate was very hard to see." — KB

August 16, 1920; Cleveland shortstop Ray Chapman is struck in the temple by a high, inside pitch thrown by the Yankees' Carl May. He dies the next day — big league baseball's first fatality. Thereafter, "as soon as a ball got dirty, the umpire had orders to substitute a spotless white new one, and the ball itself had been made livelier by winding more tightly the yarn within it. Overnight the balance shifted from the pitcher's mound to the batter's box. The era of the home run hitter was about to begin."

1920; In his debut year with the Yankees, Ruth breaks his previous year's home run record by 25, hitting 54. (More than all but one team managed to hit that year.) "His slugging average, a new statistic that measured the power of a hitter, was .847. In all the years since, no one else has ever come close to matching it." The Yankees become the first team to draw a million fans in a season, doing so in John McGraw's own Polo Grounds, to his fury.

"Babe Ruth revolutionized baseball. He changed it. Judge Landis came in and gave baseball its integrity. Ruth began hitting home runs and gave baseball its excitement. They changed everything from the ball itself, the construction of the bats, the philosophy of hitting, the philosophy of pitching...Babe Ruth changed it. We don't realize it today, but the game of baseball has never been the same since Babe Ruth began to hit home runs."
— Red Barber

"Now, at other times in the history, something so disruptive of tradition would've been held in check — the moguls of the game would've changed the rules; they'd done it twenty times before — but in the wake of the Black Sox scandal and the public fascination with Ruth they simply let it happen."
— Stephen Jay Gould

"Before Ruth, pitchers had been taught to pace themselves, only bearing down when someone was on base. Now, there was a danger of a run being scored at any moment. They had to bear down from the first pitch to the last. Between 1910 and 1920, eight pitchers won 30 or more games in a season. In the seventy-odd years since the advent of Babe Ruth, there have been just three." — KB

I got a letter the other day asking why I didn't write about baseball no more, as I used to write about nothing else, you might say. Well, friends, I may as well admit that I have kind of lost interest in the old game. A couple of years ago a ballplayer named Babe Ruth, that was a pitcher by birth, was made into an outfielder on account of how he could bust them, and the masterminds that control baseball says to themselves that, If it is home runs that the public wants to see, why, leave us give them home runs!
— Ring Lardner

"New heroes like Babe Ruth called for a new kind of reporting, and sportswriting reached its gaudy pinnacle in the 1920s, producing its own stars. Fred Lieb started as a player for his Philadelphia church team, the Princes of Peace, moved to New York and covered baseball for more than sixty years. Ford Frick of the New York Journal hammered out complete stories in eight minutes, which gave him the time he needed to act as Babe Ruth's ghostwriter. John Kieran of the New York Times liked to write up a game before it began, then edit his account to fit the sometimes-inconvenient facts. Damon Runyon of the New York American, who changed the carnation in his lapel three times a day, wrote his accounts of games as they happened, and rarely changed a word. And Shirley Povich, who's first name once got him included in Who's Who of American Women, would write eloquently about baseball for more than half a century for the Washington Post." — KB

1921; The farm system, in which major league clubs own and operate minor league clubs exclusively to breed star players, is invented and first implemented by Branch Rickey, general manager of the St. Louis Cardinals.

Starting the Cardinal farm system was no sudden stroke of genius. It was a case of necessity being the mother of invention. We lived a precarious existence. Other clubs would outbid us. They had the money and the superior scouting system. We had to take the leavings or nothing at all.
— Branch Rickey

"The farm system made Rickey a rich man. He personally got ten cents on the dollar for every player he sold. In negotiating salaries, one player remembered, Mr Rickey came to kill you. If he could get a player to sign for five cents less than the player wanted, he felt he had accomplished something. Nobody, a friend said, knew how to put a dollar sign on the muscle better than Branch Rickey." — KB

June 1921; Babe Ruth and Ty Cobb square off.

Given the proper physical equipment, which consists solely in the strength to knock a ball forty feet farther than the average man can do it, anybody can play big league ball today. In other words, science is out the window.
— Ty Cobb

"Ty Cobb, now managing as well as playing for the Tigers, and with his own skills beginning to wane, hated the brash young newcomer and the impact he was having on the game. He demeaned Ruth's talent whenever he got the chance, and from the dugout called him Nigger. But when the two stars, whom sportswriters called the supermen of baseball, met in what was billed as a grudge series in 1921, Ruth homered in every game. Cobb hit only one. The New York Times reported that Ruth has stolen all of Cobb's thunder. Yankee manager Miller Huggins admitted that real students of the game might prefer Ty Cobb's classic brand of baseball, but Babe Ruth appealed to everybody. They all flocked to him, he said, because nowadays the American fan likes the fellow who carries the wallop." — KB

August 5, 1921; The first radio broadcast of a major league baseball game is carried by radio station KDKA in Pittsburgh.

"Baseball on the radio is part of the background music of America. That's basic! In a small town in a barbershop on a Saturday there's a ballgame in the background, it goes without saying. You may be having a discussion of somebody's herd of cattle or some professor talking, where I grew up, about the exam he's going to give, and the barber telling vaguely dirty jokes, but in the background of all that is a ballgame. That's basic. Of course."
— Charley McDowell

1921; Ruth breaks the home run record again, hitting 59.

"Babe Ruth erupted into baseball like an Everest in Kansas. There was no one like him before. No one remotely like him. In his third year as a full time player — that is, his third year not as a pitcher — just three years! — he held the career record for home runs. He went on to break his own record 577 times, and when he retired, with 714 home runs, the man in second place in career home runs — then Lou Gehrig — had fewer than half the number Ruth had. There's never been a disparity like that; a talent so disproportionate to what had come before."
— George Will

"Sportswriters competed to come up with new titles with which to decorate the headlines Ruth made daily. He was the Bambino, the Sultan of Swat, the Wali of Wallop, the Wazir of Wham, the Maharajah of Mash, the Rajah of Rap, the Caliph of Clout, the Behemoth of Bust." — KB

Don't tell me about Ruth. I've seen what he did to people. I've seen them! Fans driving miles in open wagons from the prairies of Oklahoma to see him in exhibition games as we headed north in the spring. I've seen kids, men, women with a dirty piece of paper or hoping for a grunt of recognition when they said Hiya, Babe. He never let them down, not once. He was the greatest crowd pleaser of them all.
— Waite Hoyt

"He lived fast and loose. He didn't live too long, but he lived while he did." — Milt Gaston

"Having married Helen Woodford and adopted a daughter, Dorothy, he tucked them away in an old farmhouse in rural Sudbury, Massachusetts, moved into an 11-room suite in the Ansonia hotel on Broadway, bought himself a 12-cylinder Packard, and set about indulging himself. In an age of conspicuous consumption he was the most conspicuous consumer of them all. Ruth made more money than any other player, and spent every penny of it, Like it was going out of style, a teammate remembered, and he often gave it away to perfect strangers. He drank bourbon and ginger ale before breakfast, changed silk shirts six and seven times a day, and became a favorite customer in whorehouses all across the country. The boy who sorted through his mail had orders to throw away everything except checks and letters from broads. Sportswriters never wrote about Ruth's excesses off the field — he was simply too popular. You can't boo a home run, one reporter noted." — KB

1921 World Series; The Yankees meet John McGraw's Giants at the Polo Grounds, home to both teams. "The Giants come-from-behind victory was especially sweet for McGraw. His pitchers managed to hold Ruth in check by throwing him mostly slow stuff."

We pitched only 9 curves and 3 fastballs to Ruth during the entire series, and of those 12, 11 set him on his backside.
— John McGraw

1921 postseason; Ruth violates league rules prohibiting players to participate in barnstorming tours in the off-season and is suspended by Commissioner Landis for the first six weeks of the 1922 season.

Who does that big monkey think he is? In this office he's just another player.
— Kenesaw Mountain Landis

May 1922; Federal Baseball Club v. National League is decided by the Supreme Court unanimously in favor of major league baseball, finding that MLB does not constitute interstate commerce under the Sherman Antitrust Act.

The business is giving exhibitions of baseball, which are purely state affairs. It is true that, in order to attain for these exhibitions the great popularity that they have achieved, competitions must be arranged between clubs from different cities and states. But the fact that, in order to give the exhibitions, the Leagues must induce free persons to cross state lines and must arrange and pay for their doing so is not enough to change the character of the business. [...] the transport is a mere incident, not the essential thing. That to which it is incident, the exhibition, although made for money, would not be called trade of commerce in the commonly accepted use of those words. As it is put by defendant, personal effort not related to production is not a subject of commerce. That which in its consummation is not commerce does not become commerce among the states because the transportation that we have mentioned takes place.
— Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes

"In essence, baseball could govern itself. The players would have no recourse in federal court; the government would not intervene in their disputes with management. Although antitrust laws applied to other sports, they somehow did not apply to the national pastime. The court's decision still stands to this day." — KB

May–June 1922; Ruth is suspended by AL President Ban Johnson after an outburst in which "Ruth threw dirt in an umpire's eyes, stormed into the stands to chase a heckler, and when the home crowd booed him, stood on the dugout roof shaking his fist and shouting, You're all yellow!" Weeks later Johnson suspends Ruth yet again, for using vulgar and vicious language to an umpire.

Your conduct was reprehensible to a great degree, shocking to every American mother who permits her boy to go to a game. A man of your stamp bodes no good in the profession. It seems the period has arrived when you should allow some intelligence to creep into a mind that has plainly been warped.
— Ban Johnson

"Ruth sat out nearly a third of the 1922 season and hit only 25 home runs. Attendance fell off."

1922 World Series; Despite Ruth's off-year the Yankees win the pennant again and face McGraw's Giants in a rematch, with identical outcome. Ruth hits a dismal .118.

Just pitch him low curves and slow stuff and he falls all over himself.
— John McGraw

This has been a tough epoch for kings, but not even those harassed crown-heads of Europe ever ran into greater grief than the once-reigning monarch of the mace fell heir to this week. He hit the ball out of the infield just three times, and during the remainder of the engagement he spent most of his afternoons tapping dinky blows to the pitcher or first. In his last 12 times at bat the once-mighty Bambino from Blooeyland failed to hit the ball hard enough to dent the cuticle of a custard pie.
— Grantland Rice

1922 postseason;

"That winter, at a baseball writers' dinner, State Senator Jimmy Walker, whose own private life would not have borne close scrutiny, lectured Ruth on the wages of dissipation. The Babe was letting down the little dirty-faced kids, Walker said. Ruth began to cry. He would do better, he promised, get back in shape, concentrate on the game again. I've had my last drink until next October, he told reporters, I'm going to my farm. I'm going to work my head off, and maybe part of my stomach, and then you watch me break that home run record." — KB

1923; The Eastern Colored League (ECL) is formed by white financiers to profit off competition with the NNL, luring off Rube Foster's players with better pay.

April, 1923; Yankee Stadium opens on the site of an old lumberyard in the Bronx; the largest baseball park in the country. Sportswriters would dub it The House That Ruth Built.

It is reported on good authority that, when the Babe first walked out to his position and looked about him, he was silent for almost a minute while he tried to find adequate words to express his emotions. Finally he emerged from his creative coma and remarked, "Some ballyard!"
— Heywood Broun

Only one more thing was in demand, and Babe Ruth supplied that. The big slugger is a keen student of the dramatic, in addition to being the greatest home run hitter. He was playing a new role yesterday: not the accustomed one of a renowned slugger, but that of a penitent trying to come back after a poor season and a poor World Series. Before the game he said that he would give a year of his life if he could hit a home run in his first game in the new stadium. The Babe was on trial, and he knew it better than anyone else. The ball came in slowly, but it went out quite rapidly, and as Ruth circled the bases he received probably the greatest ovation of his career; the biggest crowd rose to its feet and let loose the biggest shout in baseball history. Ruth, jogging over the home plate, grinned broadly, lifted his cap, and waved to the multitude.
— New York Times

June, 1923; Lou Gehrig debuts with the Yankees.

1923 World Series; Yankees face the Giants a third year in a row. This time, with their own stadium and a reformed Babe Ruth, the Yankees win; the club's first world championship.

1924; Rogers Hornsby, the "Rajah", second baseman for the St. Louis Cardinals, who would average better than .400 each year from 1921 to 1925, and achieve a lifetime average of .358 (second only to Ty Cobb), hits .424, the twentieth century record.

Mr. Rogers Hornsby is the greatest right-handed hitter in baseball. If consistency is a jewel, then Mr. Hornsby is a whole rope of pearls. He has led the National League hitters for so many years that the name of the man he succeeded is lost to the memory of the oldest inhabitant.
— Joe Williams, New York World-Telegram

"From the mound Hornsby was a fearsome sight. For his part he never disliked pitchers, Hornsby said, he just felt sorry for them. [...] But Hornsby was too singleminded, too colorless, to seize the public imagination the way Ruth did. He would not even go to the movies for fear of damaging his eyes. When his mother died during the [1926] World Series he postponed her funeral until the series was over, then led his team to victory." — KB

Baseball is the only thing I know.
— Rogers Hornsby

"Rogers Hornsby was at bat, and Bill Klem, magisterial umpire, was behind the plate, and there was a rookie pitcher on the mound and the rookie was, quite reasonably, petrified. And he threw three pitches that just missed the plate and Klem said Ball one, Ball two, Ball three. The rookie got flustered and shouted at him, he said, Umpire, those were strikes! Klem took his mask off, looked out at the young man and said, Young man, when you throw a strike Mr. Hornsby will let you know."
— George Will

1924 AL pennant race; Walter Johnson and the Washington Senators, perennial losers, stop the Yankees cold.

"The phrase on the Senators for years was Washington: First in war, first in peace, and last in the American League. This was at a time when Clark Griffith owned the Senators. They didn't have much money, and less talent, and he said one day, The fans like home runs, and we have assembled a pitching staff to please our fans."
— George Will

"His name is in the record books more times than any other pitcher, in more different categories than any other pitcher. And he was a lovable person. In a sense the whole nation knew that Walter Johnson was doomed to play with the Washington Senators, rooted for him to get into a World Series, which he finally did."
— Shirley Povich

"Johnson was 36 years old and had been pitching since 1907. It may have been a new game, a hitter's game, but he was still capable of leading the league in strikeouts, shutouts, and earned run average. Now he propelled his team to the pennant with 13 consecutive wins, edging out the Yankees by 2 games." — KB

1924 World Series; Senators fight the Giants to Game 7, in which Johnson holds the Giant offense through the last 4 of 12 innings, long enough for the Senators to eke out a 1-run victory; Washington's first and only championship, and Johnson's.

1924; First Negro World Series held between NNL Kansas City Monarchs and ECL Philadelphia Hilldales. Monarchs win after 10 games.

1925; The Bellyache Heard 'Round the World

"Babe Ruth's promises to reform did not last beyond the end of the 1924 season, and by the time he got to spring training in 1925 he was a wreck: 30 pounds overweight, feverish, often drunk, torn between his wife, Helen, who had grown desperate over his womanizing, and a pretty artist's model named Claire Hodgson. On April 7 he collapsed in North Carolina with an intestinal illness so mysterious that some sportswriters speculated privately that Ruth might be suffering from venereal disease. London newspapers reported that he had died. His illness was so severe that major abdominal surgery was followed by seven weeks of absolute hospital rest. Newspapers reported that he had merely eaten too many hot dogs and drunk too many sodas." — KB

It is doubtful that Ruth again will be the superstar he was from 1919 through 1924. Next year Ruth will be 32, and at 32 the Babe will be older than Eddie Collins, Walter Johnson and Ty Cobb at that age. Babe has lived a much more strenuous life.
— Fred Lieb

June 1, 1925; Lou Gehrig plays the first of what would become 2,130 consecutive games.

He was the most valuable player the Yankees ever had, because he was the prime source of their greatest asset: an implicit confidence in themselves.
— New York World-Telegram

June 1, 1925; Coincidentally, Ruth returns from his illness that same day.

"He continued to drink and carouse, and to disobey the instructions of his diminutive manager, Miller Huggins. Finally, when he stayed out all night two nights running, Huggins fined him $5,000 and suspended him. Ruth would not be able to come back until he admitted the error of his ways and personally apologized. Ruth refused, saying he would never play for the Yankees again. Then came word that his wife, Helen, had suffered a nervous breakdown, anguished over his infidelity. When Ruth went to see her, cameramen followed him right into her hospital room. They were Catholic, so there was no possibility of divorce, but they agreed to separate. Ruth's suspension lasted only nine days. He could not bear to be away from baseball any longer. And when Huggins demanded that he not only apologize, but do so in front of the whole team, he meekly agreed. Ruth had his worst season in ten years. It seemed that his best years were over." — KB

October 7, 1925; Christy Mathewson, the 'Christian Gentleman', dies of tuberculosis, age 45. His lungs had never recovered from exposure to poison gas in 1918.

Why should God wish to take a thoroughbred like Matty so soon, and leave some others down here that could well be spared?
— Kenesaw Mountain Landis

1925 World Series; Pittsburgh defeats defending champs Washington. Flags fly at half mast for Christy Mathewson.

1926; Rube Foster, under "strain of trying to keep his fledgling league alive, had grown increasingly paranoid and taken to carrying a revolver everywhere he went. Midseason, worn out and suffering from the delusion that he was about to receive a call to pitch in the white World Series, he finally had to be institutionalized [in Kankakee, Illinois]. He died four years later."

1926;

"The last of the great pitchers of an earlier era, Grover Cleveland Alexander, was only a shadow of what he once had been; nearly 40 and almost deaf, subject to seizures, tortured by memories of the Western Front, sodden with drink. In the middle of the 1926 season, Joe McCarthy, the Chicago Cubs unsentimental new manager, let Alexander go. The Cubs had finished last in 1925, McCarthy explained, and if they finished last again, I'd rather it was without him. But Branch Rickey had seen something in the old man. He was sure Alexander had it in him to be a hero one more time, and hired him for St. Louis. The Cardinals won the National League pennant and faced the Yankees in the Series. Few gave the Cardinals much of a chance." — KB

1926 World Series;

"But Alexander pulled himself together to win the second and then the sixth game. He celebrated that night, and during the seventh game sat quietly in the bullpen at Yankee Stadium, nursing his hangover. In the seventh inning the Cardinals were leading 3 to 2, and two Yankees were out, but St. Louis was in trouble. New York had loaded the bases. Next up was Tony Lazzeri, a hard-hitting rookie of Italian descent best known for batting in runs. Rogers Hornsby, now the Cardinal manager, motioned to the bullpen: he wanted Alexander, hangover or no hangover. Alexander took his time walking out to the mound." — KB

I can see him yet, walking in from the left field bullpen through the gray mist. The Yankee fans recognized him right off, of course, but you didn't hear a sound from anywhere in that stadium. They just sat there and watched him walk in. And he took his time. He just came straggling along, a lean old Nebraskan, wearing a Cardinals sweater, his face wrinkled, that cap sitting on top of his head and tilted to one side. That's the way he liked to wear it.
— Les Bell

"Hornsby met him on the mound. When Alexander told him he planned to pitch Lazzeri fast and inside, Hornsby was appalled. You can't do that, he said, Lazzeri was sure to hit it out of the park. Alexander was unconcerned. If he swings at it he'll most likely hit it foul. Then I'm going to come outside with my breaking pitch. Hornsby backed off. Who am I, he said, to tell you how to pitch? Lazzeri was waiting." — KB

"My father, because baseball is dynastic, always said that his saddest moment in life was that famous 1926 last game of the World Series when a drunk and much superannuated Grover Cleveland Alexander was brought in with the bases loaded and Tony Lazzeri almost hit a home run that went foul by a couple feet and then struck out, thereby winning, ultimately, two innings later, the game for the Cardinals."
— Stephen Jay Gould

It was the Cardinals' first championship, and Alexander's first and only.

1927 Yankees; Murderers Row. Babe Ruth hits 60 home runs.

"James Thurber, I guess, he was the one who said ninety-five percent of American males put themselves to sleep at night striking out the batting order of the New York Yankees... Much easier to do now than it was then!"
— George Plimpton

When we got to the ballpark we knew we were going to win. That's all there was to it. We weren't cocky. I wouldn't call it confidence, either. We just knew. Like when you go to sleep, you know the sun is gonna come up in the morning.
— George Pipgras

"The 1927 Yankees may have been the greatest team in baseball history. Babe Ruth, dismissed as a has-been two years before, was back again with a vengeance. And there was no pennant race in the American League that year; the Yankees hammered out 110 victories. Connie Mack's Philadelphia Athletics finished a distant second, 19 games out. The Yankees were in first place from opening day to the end of the season, a feat that would be unequaled for 57 years.

"They did everything well. Yankee pitching was masterful: Waite Hoyt, Herb Pennock, Urban Shocker, Dutch Ruether, Wilcy Moore and George Pipgras. But at bat they had no equal. They were called Murderers Row: Babe Ruth, Earle Combs, Bob Meusel, Tony Lazzeri and Lou Gehrig.

"He was now one of the best hitters in the game, but he was always in the shadow of his close friend and rival. He batted after Ruth; his home runs didn't soar the same way; he didn't swagger. And when the Yankee front office suggested he make his own headlines, by diving for catches he knew he couldn't make, or pretending easy catches had been hard, he gently refused. I'm not a headline guy, he said." — KB

"The combination of Ruth and Gehrig was not only wonderful in baseball terms, but it was aesthetically pleasing because they were so different in character. Lou Gehrig was a good man, a family man, a steady fellow. The exact opposite of Babe Ruth, who was out of control all the time. They both batted left-handed but Ruth's swing was nothing like Gehrig's swing. But think of the pitchers in those days, who had to face Babe Ruth, then Lou Gehrig!"
— Roger Angell

"For most of the 1927 season Lou Gehrig matched Babe Ruth home run-for-home run, and it was, in part, to distance himself from his rival that the Babe resolved to do something that would have been unimaginable a few years earlier: break his own record and hit 60 home runs in a single season. The public eagerly kept score as the weeks passed and the runs mounted up. Ruth did too, notching his bat every time he hit a home run, until it split after the 21st. On July 8 he hit his 27th, an inside-the-park home run. By September Ruth was carrying his new bat around the bases, to thwart souvenir seekers. When he hit number 56 and an overeager boy ran out to grab it, he dragged the bat and the boy along behind him as he crossed home plate. On September 30, the next-to-last day of the season, and needing just one more home run, he faced Tom Zachary of the Washington Senators." — KB

The first Zachary offering was a fast one which sailed over for a called strike. The next was high. The Babe took a vicious swing at the third-pitched ball and the bat connected with a crash that was audible in all parts of the stands. While the crowd cheered and the Yankee players roared their greeting the Babe made his triumphant, almost regal tour of the paths, and when he embedded his spikes in the rubber disk to officially homer 60, hats were tossed in the air, papers were torn up and tossed liberally, and the spirit of celebration permeated the place.
— New York Times

Sixty! Count 'em, sixty! Let's see some other sonofabitch match that!
— Babe Ruth

"It was generally agreed that no son of a bitch ever would." — KB

1927 World Series; Yankees sweep the Pirates in four.

1927; Walter Johnson retires, age 40. His record of 110 shutouts still stands.

1928; The Eastern Colored League collapses and disbands midseason. The NNL carries on.

1928 World Series; Yankees sweep the Cardinals in four.

1928; Ty Cobb retires, age 42. Lifetime batting average .367, the highest in history.

It will be a long time before the game develops a second Cobb, and then it will be just that: a second Cobb. You've seen the first and only.
— Joe Williams, New York World-Telegram

January 11, 1929; Helen Woodford, Babe Ruth's estranged wife, dies in a fire. Three months later Ruth marries his longtime mistress, Claire Hodgson.

"She cared for his daughter, put him on an allowance, and imposed a stern regimen: no hard liquor during the season, no hot dogs and soda before a game, in bed by 10pm. And to ensure that he kept to it, she traveled with him aboard the Yankee train. Claire Ruth acted very like the mother the Babe never really had, and he thrived on it." — KB

1929; Uniform numbers are instituted at the decree of Yankee owner Colonel Jacob Ruppert.

1929 World Series; Connie Mack's Athletics defeat the Cubs. Two weeks later the stock market crashes.

"If ever there were a source for rueful memories, at least for me, it's baseball. A World Series game I could have seen and missed, and it was a memorable one. Nineteen twenty-nine. My friend Jimmy O'Hare says, Let's go, it's the Cubs playing against the Athletics. The Athletics have Lefty Grove, that fireball pitcher; was gonna face Hornsby and Tyler and Stevenson, and Charlie Grimm, Gabby Hartnett — the sluggers! Speedball against the sluggers. Connie Mack puts in a guy he didn't use all season, an old guy named Howard Ehmke, with a ball that's slower than slow. Howard Ehmke strikes out 13 Cubs; they broke their backs swinging at his slowball. I missed that game; Jimmy saw it. A rueful memory of loss."
— Studs Terkel

1930; Grover Cleveland Alexander retires, age 43. His record of 90 shutouts is second only to Walter Johnson.