BATTER UP!

[Fading Fast]

Scenes from the third inning of the first game of the 1916 World Series between the Red Sox and the Dodgers.

Boston home games for this series were played at Braves Field, which had a much larger seating capacity than Fenway Park. The structure visible in the foreground is the edge of the left field pavillion, which still stands as part of Boston University's Nickerson Field.

Awesome and love that the structure still exists.

Whole lots of men in hats and suits at this game - and a lot of smoking.

They moved the games to Braves field for the extra capacity? Clearly Fenway had not yet become the heart and soul of the Sox and Boston. Heck the Yankees just played the Marlins at Citi Field (the Mets stadium [which should still be called Shea]) owing to the Hurricane and that felt incredibly weird.

 

[HudsonHawk]

Whole lots of men in hats and suits at this game - and a lot of smoking.

I would actually love to attend games in a suit and hat, smoking a cigar. Of course, that's one of the reasons I wouldn't make it through Lizzie's Purge.

They moved the games to Braves field for the extra capacity? Clearly Fenway had not yet become the heart and soul of the Sox and Boston. Heck the Yankees just played the Marlins at Citi Field (the Mets stadium [which should still be called Shea]) owing to the Hurricane and that felt incredibly weird.

Both stadium were fairly new, Fenway being only a few years old, and Braves Feld being basically brand new (it opened midway through the 1915 season). If I'm not mistaken, they were really close to each other...like a mile or less. Braves Field was the largest stadium in the Major Leagues at the time. On a side note...the Braves used Fenway for the 1914 World Series, when they played teir regular season games at the South End Grounds, which I believe was a tiny yard. I think it only held like 5,000 people.

 

[Fading Fast]

I would actually love to attend games in a suit and hat, smoking a cigar. Of course, that's one of the reasons I wouldn't make it through Lizzie's Purge....

Well, at least when they toss your corpse in the ditch, my corpse will be there to break your fall as she'll definitely have to kill the libertarians first.

 

[LizzieMaine]

I'll compromise and allow bubble gum cigars. Even though they smell bad when lit.

Braves Field is a short walk from Fenway, and it's worth taking the time to visit -- there's quite a bit of it still standing. Along with the right field pavillion, there's also the ticket/administration building -- which now serves as the BU police station -- and a part of the outer perimiter wall. And it's not evident from the ground, but three BU dorm buildings occupy the footprint of the main grandstand, which is obvious when seen from the air.

The original park was torn down in stages between 1955 and 1960 -- the left field pavillion and center field bleachers went first, and the rest operated as a football field thru the Patriots first season, when the main grandstand came down.

Braves Field very nearly became a dog-racing track before it became a football field -- long before the Braves left town. After the team's disastrous 1935 season the owner, Judge Emil Fuchs, went bankrupt and couldn't afford to pay what he owed on his ballpark lease. The James Gaffney Estate, which owned the field, evicted the Braves, and began negotiations with a promoter who wanted to put on greyhound racing at the field. The National League got involved, and the Braves franchise was very nearly contracted before Fuchs sold out and the new owners successfully negotiated a new lease with the Gaffneys.

The Boston papers had a field day with this during the early months of 1936, and it was the bad taste left in everyone's mouths by the whole affair that led the new owners to re-name the team the "Bees." Braves Field, after an abortive attempt to rename it "The Beehive," became "National League Field" until saner heads prevailed and the team became the Braves again in 1942.

 

[HudsonHawk]

On another note...Braves Field was an enormous yard. It was 402 down the LF line, and a whopping 550 to CF. By comparison, the Polo Grounds in NY at the same time was 277 to LF and 433 to CF.

 

[LizzieMaine]

Yep, as it was originally laid out the playing field went all the way to the exterior wall -- James Gaffney was a fan of triples and inside-the-park home runs, and wanted to see lots of them. After he died, those bleachers and that little pavilion they called "The Jury Box" were built to try and bring in the fences a bit.

There are still fans in Boston who will tell you the fried clams served at Braves Field were the very acme of ballpark cuisine.

 

[Ghostsoldier]

Boston Red Sox, American League, Aug. 19, 1914

Brooklyn baseball club, 1911

Rob

 

[Ghostsoldier]

Brooklyn Federal League baseball club

Browns of 1909

Rob

 

[LizzieMaine]

The Brookfeds were owned by the Ward Baking Company, official purveyor of hot dog rolls to most of the teams on the East Coast, and were called the "Tip Tops," after the Wards' brand of white bread. Commercialization is going to ruin the game, they said in 1914.

The Tip Tops played in a new concrete-and-steel park built on the site of old Washington Park, in the neighborhood now known as Park Slope, just a nose's blow from the Gowanus Canal. This was a pretty snazzy field for 1914-1915 -- it was built according to the same grandstand plan as the Feds' park in Chicago, which survives today as Wrigley Field -- and had the Federal League lasted into 1916, it would have been the first major league park to be equipped with lights for night baseball.

"New Washington Park" lasted into the late 1920s as a venue for miscellaneous events until Brooklyn Edison bought the property and demolished most of the structure in order to build storage yards. But a small fragment of the ballpark wall was left intact -- and it remains intact today along a short stretch of Third Avenue, once the right-field side of the ballpark.

 

[Ghostsoldier]

Awesome stuff, Lizzie.

Rob

 

[ChazfromCali]

I really like the St. Louis Browns sweater/cardigan! Wish I had one.

 

[LizzieMaine]

Here is a real baseball rarity -- one of the only surviving recordings of a telegraphic re-creation of a baseball game.

The broadcast features Red Barber in one of his first New York-based broadcasts. He had been hired by station WHN to broadcast Dodger games during the 1939 season, but is here heard doing a fragment of a spring-training broadcast of a game between the Yankees and the Reds, the club he had broadcast from 1934 thru 1938. The game is in Tampa, Barber is in the WHN studio in New York, with the game informantion provided by the Western Union play-by-play ticker service. Until the late 1940s, nearly all "road" games were done by this method -- local broadcasters broadcast only the home games direct from the ballpark.

Unlike most other broadcasters, Barber refused to jazz up his recreations with sound effects, or to pretend he was actually at the game. He insisted that the ticker be placed within range of his microphone -- you hear it in the background thruout this recording -- and when he received incorrect information thru the ticker, he frankly admitted this. He took this stand from the idea that he was foremost a journalist, not an entertainer, and he placed accuracy above showmanship in his reporting. He disdained broadcasters who hoked things up and did things like pretend a hitter fouled off ball after ball to cover the wire going out.

Note also that the commercials are directed toward women -- most listeners to local baseball broadcasts in the 1930s were female, and advertisers realized they could use baseball as efficiently as they used soap operas to reach the housewife audience.

 

[HudsonHawk]

I really like the St. Louis Browns sweater/cardigan! Wish I had one.

I was just gonna post...those are really sharp looking.

 

[Fading Fast]

I really like the St. Louis Browns sweater/cardigan! Wish I had one.

I think it was a pretty common part of the attire pros had for when they were off the field back in that day. Note these cardigans from the movie "Take Me Out to the Ball Game" which is set in the early 1900s (if memory serves). This was the best picture I could find of them on a quick search, but in the movie, the sweaters really pop:

 

[LizzieMaine]

The Philadelphia Athletics show some sweater solidarity as they head out to face the Giants in the 1911 World Series. The white elephant logo was a specific "up yours" to Giant manager John McGraw, who had several years earlier dismissed the A's as "the white elephants of the American League."

"Chief" Meyers of the Giants and "Chief" Bender of the A's compare notes about stereotypical ethnic nicknames at that same Series.

 

[Fading Fast]

⇧ that is freakin' fantastic. Love that they did that and awesome that you knew about it.

 

[LizzieMaine]

The A's have used the elephant as their logo, on and off, in Philadelphia, Kansas City, and Oakland ever since.

 

[Fading Fast]

Here is a real baseball rarity -- one of the only surviving recordings of a telegraphic re-creation of a baseball game.

The broadcast features Red Barber in one of his first New York-based broadcasts. He had been hired by station WHN to broadcast Dodger games during the 1939 season, but is here heard doing a fragment of a spring-training broadcast of a game between the Yankees and the Reds, the club he had broadcast from 1934 thru 1938. The game is in Tampa, Barber is in the WHN studio in New York, with the game informantion provided by the Western Union play-by-play ticker service. Until the late 1940s, nearly all "road" games were done by this method -- local broadcasters broadcast only the home games direct from the ballpark.

Unlike most other broadcasters, Barber refused to jazz up his recreations with sound effects, or to pretend he was actually at the game. He insisted that the ticker be placed within range of his microphone -- you hear it in the background thruout this recording -- and when he received incorrect information thru the ticker, he frankly admitted this. He took this stand from the idea that he was foremost a journalist, not an entertainer, and he placed accuracy above showmanship in his reporting. He disdained broadcasters who hoked things up and did things like pretend a hitter fouled off ball after ball to cover the wire going out.

Note also that the commercials are directed toward women -- most listeners to local baseball broadcasts in the 1930s were female, and advertisers realized they could use baseball as efficiently as they used soap operas to reach the housewife audience.

If more people in the world - whatever field / whatever they do in life - had Barber's philosophy / values many of the world's problems would disappear.

Were commercials directed toward women as games were played during the day when (as a percentage, many exceptions) more women were doing housework with the radio on versus (as a percentage, many exceptions) more men were at work that didn't allow for radio?

 

[LizzieMaine]

Pretty much -- the conventional wisdom of the time was that the daytime radio audience in general was overwhelmingly female. This is borne out by many of the sponsors who backed early baseball broadcasts -- most of them were household products traditionally marketed to women, like soap or packaged foods, or "neutral" products that were marketed to both sexes, like cigarettes and gasoline. It wasn't until after the war, and the increasing popularity of night games, that "masculine" beer and cigar sponsors became dominant factors in baseball broadcasting.

Some of the early broadcasters were aware of their popularity with women, and played it up. There's a surviving White Sox broadcast from 1937 where Hal Totten's pre-game guests are several women chosen from the stands, who talk knowledgeably and at length about the great Sox teams of the 1900s and 1910s. Baseball had never really paid much attention to women as fans until radio reinforced just how many there actually were.

 

[LizzieMaine]

If more people in the world - whatever field / whatever they do in life - had Barber's philosophy / values many of the world's problems would disappear.

Barber wrote a number of extremely candid books late in his life about baseball and broadcasting, and elaborates over and over on the proper role of a baseball broadcaster -- he wasn't, in Barber's view, supposed to be a shill for the team, or simply a mouthpiece for the sponsor. His job was to "broadcast the ball."

He says he learned this from Judge Landis when he was picked to broadcast his first World Series in 1935. CBS broadcaster Ted Husing had earned the Judge's wrath by editorializing on the air about poor umpiring during the 1934 Series, and Landis banned Husing from ever broadcasting the Series again. Landis lectured all the broadcasters selected in 1935 that they were not to comment and not to analyze -- they were there to *report.* If, he said, a fan or a player walked up to him and spit tobacco juice in his face, the broadcaster was to report how much juice was spit, and how the Commissioner reacted to it, and what action was taken, but he was not to have any opinion about it at all.

That moment stuck with Barber the rest of his life, and he lived by it as long as he was on on the air. This put him very much at odds with management -- Walter F. O'Malley hated his guts and arranged matters to get rid of him as soon as possible after taking over the Dodgers, and the Yankees, in turn dumped him as well when he defied management's order not to mention the record-low attendance at the last game of the 1966 season. And it also put him at odds with "personality" broadcasters like Joe Garagiola and Howard Cosell, who specialized in second-guessing the action on the field, something Barber refused ever to do.

Barber also talks about how this philosophy got him thru his own crisis of conscience when Jackie Robinson came along. As a Southerner, he believed in segregation -- and when Branch Rickey told him was was going to happen, his first impulse was to quit. But then he thought about it, and realized that his job was not to have a point of view on race, but simply to "broadcast the ball." Watching Robinson in 1947 and "broadcasting the ball" turned out to be the most transformative experience of his life.