Authors: George Vecsey
Collective wisdom says the greatest of all records is Joe DiMag-gio's streak of hitting in 56 consecutive games in 1941, a tribute to DiMaggio's great consistency (to say nothing of his speed, power, and skill). The closest anybody has come to DiMaggio's record was 44, set by Willie Keeler in the pre-modern year of 1897 and Pete Rose in 1978.
However, Frank Robinson, the great slugger and a manager of four teams, has often marveled at another statistic—DiMaggio's matching career totals of 361 home runs and 369 strikeouts, an amazing ratio between power and discipline. (Robinson, hardly a free swinger, hit 586 home runs and struck out 1,532 times.)
One record that seemed out of sight was Lou Gehrig's streak of 2,130 consecutive games, halted only by the detection of his fatal illness, but Cal Ripken, Jr., played in 2,632 straight before sitting out a game in 1998. Ripken had insisted on playing day-in, day-out, sometimes clearly needing a rest from an injury or grueling cross-country road trip.
The old sports cliché that records are made to be broken was
tested in 1961 when Roger Maris hit 61 homers in the 162-game season, thereby breaking Babe Ruth's total of 60, but then Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa raced past Ruth and Maris in the giddy season of 1998, later to be tainted by suspicions that players had been chemically enlarged during that era. McGwire's total of 70 homers in 1998 was itself eclipsed by Barry Bonds's 73 in 2001, but Bonds's subsequent connection to a grand jury investigation into bodybuilding drugs eventually brought more respect back to Ruth and Maris and Henry Aaron. Another memorable statistic was Ruth's 714 career home runs—until Aaron passed it en route to setting the record at 755, while receiving sackloads of racist hate mail.
Some pitching records will never be approached because of the way the game has evolved, with late-inning specialists and limitations on pitch counts. Cy Young's 511 career victories are untouchable and so are his 749 complete games along with Grover Cleveland Alexander's 90 career shutouts, tributes to a vanished age. In more modern times, Nolan Ryan pitched from 1966 to 1993, striking out 5,714 batters and pitching seven no-hitters, three more than Sandy Koufax.
Ty Cobb's 1915 record for stolen bases held up for decades, until 1962, when Maury Wills stole 104. Lou Brock advanced the record to 118 in 1974 and Rickey Henderson stole 130 in 1982. Henderson was so obsessed with his records that sometimes he would stop at second base rather than take a chance trying for a triple, knowing he could steal third base a minute or two later. Pete Rose's record for total games, 3,562, and his record for total hits, 4,256, could last as long as his ban for gambling—that is to say, forever.
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Even the shape and function of the ballparks seemed to go in cycles. The ancient ballparks had been eccentric, squeezed onto plots of land in the old cities, but the new stadiums of the late 1960s were designed to accommodate both baseball and football, which meant they were blandly circular in shape, enclosed, uninteresting, often with artificial turf. These came to be known as “cookie-cutter” stadiums.
There was only one cathedral in baseball, the majestic Yankee
Stadium, which was remodeled in the 1970s and ultimately turned into a sort of electric church, replete with noise and glitter. The architectural trend of the 1990s was unabashed homage to the old days, celebrating the enduring intimate scale of Chicago's Wrigley Field and Boston's Fenway Park by erecting new places with idiosyncratic nooks and crannies, retro brick and grillwork, open spaces to provide a glimpse of downtown. Even though a large segment of the American population had moved to suburbia and exurbia (at least the white population, still the core of the game's support), the new ballparks flourished in the hearts of the cities. It was still an urban game.
These new stadiums contained huge amounts of luxury boxes, with air-conditioning, private bathrooms, refrigerators, and television sets, virtually guaranteeing that some well-heeled patrons could stay inside, near the cheese dip, never actually having to watch the game.
Among the variations in the new places was SkyDome in Toronto (never “the” SkyDome), thirty-one stories high, with a retractable roof that could close down in a quarter of an hour, and a hotel behind the center-field stands. Another variation was Oriole Park at Camden Yards in downtown Baltimore, with an old brick factory behind right field and delicatessen and microbrew stands in an outdoor food court. In Cleveland's Jacobs Field, pedestrians could watch a game in progress through an iron fence behind left field. The scaled-down 1996 Olympic Stadium in Atlanta promptly became Turner Field (not Henry Aaron Field, as many had hoped). Seattle's dismal Kingdome was imploded, replaced by Safeco Field, with a roof that could be wheeled out in case of rain.
As appealing as they were, many of the new ballparks were plagued by the corporate names attached to them. Dot-com companies temporarily awash in money paid millions of dollars for “naming rights,” attaching geeky corporate names to the stadiums. San Diego's stadium, named for a civic treasure—sportswriter Jack Murphy, who had campaigned for a major league franchise—was renamed for a computer-age company, but the stadium itself was soon replaced by another ballpark. In a bizarre trend in all the
major sports in North America, many of the nouveau holders of naming rights went bankrupt, some spectacularly. For example, Houston's new open-air downtown ballpark was tainted by the name Enron Field for months after the scandalous collapse of that company, the large letters taunting investors and employees who had believed in the fraudulent dream. Misfortune continued to strike companies that had purchased naming rights; some kind of righteous Ruthian hex was suspected.
T
he day came when baseball began hearing footsteps—large, loud footsteps. The National Football League took off in the 1950s, as network television brought the sport, previously more popular on the college level, to all corners of the country. Life in America slowed down on Sunday afternoons as fans crowded into dens or bars.
Some people say that football achieved parity on Sunday, December 28, 1958, when the Baltimore Colts won the championship by defeating the New York Giants, 23–17, in overtime, in what is still called “The Greatest Game Ever Played.”
But football's defining moment probably arrived in 1962, when the club owners dealt with the reality of network television revenue. The Giants, a landmark franchise that had struggled for decades just to get New Yorkers to buy tickets, were now being paid $175,000 a season by the CBS network while the Green Bay Packers, another old-time franchise in a small city in northern Wisconsin, were being paid only $35,000.
It was clear, based on viewers and population, that the larger franchises would dominate and eventually force out the lesser franchises. But Wellington Mara, the patriarch of the Giants, spoke up that day for tradition and solidarity.
“Well argued that the N.F.L. was only as strong as its weakest link, that Green Bay should receive as much money as any of the other teams,” Pete Rozelle, the commissioner at the time, later recalled. When Mara spoke, other owners listened, agreeing to spread the network payments equally, ensuring a level playing field in subsequent contracts with the networks. Although some owners would move their franchises, sometimes defying the league to stop them, there was an almost universal sense of stewardship.
By the 1966 season, after making peace with a rival league, football had a championship game, eventually called the Super
Bowl and measured in Roman numerals. Before he died in 2005, Wellington Mara would watch his Giants win two Super Bowls, while tiny Green Bay, able to spend equal network swag on players, would win the first two championships as well as Super Bowl XXXI after the 1996 season. By then, pro football had the television ratings to claim it was the most popular sport, at least around weekends during the season. Baseball's mythic, psychic hold might still be deeper than football's—but hardly anybody held World Series parties the way they did Super Bowl parties.
The difference between football and baseball goes beyond the way the sports divide their television revenue. Football's money comes mostly from a network contract while baseball teams mostly make money from their local cable contracts. One can only imagine if baseball owners had demonstrated the statesmanship of Wellington Mara at key moments in their history.
Instead, baseball has a tradition of fractiousness, going back to John J. McGraw's petulant refusal to let his Giants participate in a World Series in 1904. The bitterness between Ban Johnson's American League and the National League led directly to the White Sox scandal of 1919. The favorable 1922 Supreme Court decision, while greatly appreciated by the avaricious owners, only encouraged them to act for themselves, which came quite naturally.
Many of the old-time baseball owners were not all that different from the football owners. They had come along when their livelihood depended on persuading a few hundred extra fans to pay their way into their rudimentary ballparks early in the century. The Griffiths, Macks, and Comiskeys had morphed from players to owners; the Stonehams had owned the Giants for decades. Even the owners who came with outside wealth tended to be hands-on control freaks who needed to be a major part of the show—autocratic, flamboyant, visionary, or stupid, but often dedicated to the sport. If there was one owner who had the ear of the others, it was Walter O'Malley, but his power was derived from the owners' fear and awe of him rather than from any sense of collegiality.
With football (and later pro basketball and auto racing) putting the squeeze on baseball, the old breed of owners was being forced
out. Owners now needed tax lawyers and contract lawyers to help them run a ball club, and they also needed deep pockets from some significant outside business. They became virtually minority partners with the television networks and growing cable companies, who told them what time to play their games—and how many minutes were needed between innings to sell the sponsor's soft drinks or cars.
One owner realized he was a dinosaur. Bill Veeck had surfaced once again with the White Sox, in 1975, putting into practice the showmanship theories he had elucidated in his classic book,
Veeck as in Wreck.
But Veeck could see he was not going to thrive in this new age. He hated corporate boxes that catered to expense-account types rather than Veeck's democratic ideal of real fans and he also had a healthy (but outdated and self-defeating) disinterest in television.
The last days of Veeck are remembered for the singular disaster of Anti-Disco Night in 1979, a brilliant idea concocted by his aspiring showman son, Mike, that involved fans turning in their vinyl records as a statement against disco music—reasonable enough, on the surface, but with one major flaw: after a few beers, thousands of fans felt the need to sail the records onto the field, thereby causing the White Sox to lose the game by forfeit. Veeck soon sold the Sox to Jerry Reinsdorf and Eddie Einhorn, both better suited for the television age.
Other familiar names began to fade out: Stoneham in San Francisco, the Griffith family in Minnesota, Finley in Oakland. The new breed of owner with corporate backing included Ted Turner, the brash proprietor of WTBS, a superstation that beamed the Braves all over North America. Turner overspent and underachieved with the Braves, once naming himself the manager for a day, until Commissioner Kuhn put an end to that. The Braves reached the postseason exactly once from 1975 through 1990, and Turner bragged of losing millions of dollars. But as sometimes happens with eccentrics like Turner, with that strange look in his eye, he possessed an inner wisdom. At the same time he was being ridiculed for losing money and games, Turner was underwriting 162 games a year—he was subsidizing programming for his vast network.
Turner was a visionary, the only baseball owner I ever met who would lecture about the need to get along with the Soviet Union (“my pinko Commie buddies”) and save the world's environment (“but what about the elephants!”). The public practically laughed in his face, yet he was brilliant.
The owners had a consistent management problem. They could not keep good help. Their erratic, selfish ways kept them from imposing any rational business order on the people they hired to run their business. Ban Johnson, now largely forgotten, was more powerful than the owners he had pulled together to start the American League. There would never be another like him.
There would never be another Judge Landis, either, which is probably a good thing. He was hired on the dubious but classically American premise that baseball needed an authority figure, the hangin' judge, who arrives in the last reel of the western movie and executes all the bad guys. Considering that the frontier had just closed, America was still hankering for a leader who could wield a mighty six-shooter, or maybe just a gavel. Judge Landis gave that impression in 1915 with his favorable decision limiting the Federal League. He pleased the owners as a judge and he continued to please the owners as commissioner, making an example of all eight White Sox players, despite their highly varied degrees of guilt.
Sounding like a populist but probably just doing the bidding of the lazier owners, he tried to squash Branch Rickey's farm system. No doubt expressing his own as well as most owners' essential racial views, he fought off attempts to hire black players in the early 1940s. Yet Kenesaw Mountain Landis survived because the public and the owners felt he looked just like a commissioner judge should look—white, male, tousled head of white hair, and not a shred of indecision or ambiguity to him. Complexity makes folks nervous in these here parts.
The worst thing about Judge Landis's twenty-four-year rule was that he propagated a myth that the commissioner exists for the general good of baseball. Sometimes the commissioners even believed this job description themselves, which was dangerous to their job tenure. The reality is that the commissioner serves the owners. He
is their man. And unless they come up with a job description and goals, his task is virtually impossible.