1940's Baseball

[poetman]

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

Thanks for the recommendations!

[LizzieMaine]

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

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

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

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

[dhermann1]

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

[dhermann1]

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

[dhermann1]

A slightly better studio version:

[poetman]

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

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

[LizzieMaine]

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

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

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

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

[skyvue]

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

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

[LizzieMaine]

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

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

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

[Espee]

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