The Real History of Baseball, Part 1: The Myth of The Pennant Race

 

 

Earlier this year I began a series of articles on the economic history of baseball that I never completed. While I will some day return to it, it has since occurred to me that the history of baseball is another one of those subjects that I not only care about deeply but have nearly as great a knowledge of as of other things. (Some of my articles prior to that may have confirmed that to readers.)

I have always thought that baseball’s history has been one of the things that makes it such a great sport. But as I have written in my series on the economic history, it is also fundamentally the victim of a nostalgia machine that purists have used to harp on any change that could fundamentally improve or make the game better. This has hampered baseball’s popularity as the national pastime in the second half of the 20^th century and has hurt it so much over the last decade that until recently it genuinely seemed like it was going to expire on the vine. Indeed, a recent article for the Atlantic made it very clear how the games refusal to adapt to the new century and to try and win new fans has done more to damage its future as a sport, short term and long term. The article was written arguing that the game had ‘saved itself’  but even it acknowledged it was likely only until the next crisis which it would no doubt neglect until it was nearly lethal.

I have loved baseball throughout my childhood and my adult life. But I am also very aware that, more than any other sport, the media is reactionary beyond all measure to any change in the game. In a sense over the past century they have often-willing co-conspirators in the nostalgia factor that affects baseball more than any other sport. I’ve made those arguments in the story of economic history to a huge degree. But it is worth noting those critiques are basically in play with every major change baseball has made in its career. And much of that has been the celebration of a past that doesn’t really exist.

So to begin this series I intend to deal with one of the most cherished archetypes of the baseball purist: the pennant race. In it I intend to demonstrate that even in ‘the Golden Age of Baseball’ it was barely presence, how divisional play and the changes with expansion and free agency in the 1970s increased competitions rather than hinder it, and how the increase in the number of playoffs and teams in the play-offs have helped baseball far more than they have hurt.

Anyone who reads enough books about baseball written in the 1990s or later about any great team will always bring up how much things like the wild card race or expansion have hurt the game. How have they hurt the game? They destroyed the pennant race. You know that magical event where for six months two or three teams would battle it out, day in and day out, with fans across the country reading the paper, listening to the radio, frantically trying to see who win the pennant for that trip to the World Series. That’s the narrative.

The reality is far different.  As someone who owned the Baseball Encyclopedia, who has read far more books about baseball history, teams and players, who has read more about baseball from this era than you would think possible knows these so called pennant races didn’t happen that often.

This honestly shouldn’t come as anyone who knows the other part of the history of baseball. Considering that at least half of the books about baseball have always had something to do with the Yankees, it really should not come as a shock that for much of this ‘Golden Age’  pennant races in the American League were few and far between. The cry ‘Break up The Yankees’ from 1921 to 1964 was popular for a reason: not only did the Yankees win 29 Pennants during this period, in the lion’s share of those years, the other seven teams didn’t have a chance.  During 1936-1939 when the Yankees won four consecutive World Series, the lowest margin between them and the second place team was 10 games.  It was somewhat closer during the Casey Stengel years of 1949-1960, but they did win nine pennants in ten years and the year they lost in 1954, the Indians had to win 111 games just to be sure.

Indeed most of the great American League pennant races in that era took place when the Yankees were having off years. In 1940 Detroit won the AL Pennant because the Yankees were having an ‘off year’. (They finished in third by two games.) In 1944, the St. Louis Browns which were the worst team in American League history, won their only pennant in large part because World War II was going on and all the able-bodied ball-players were overseas. (The Yankees still finished only three games out.) In 1948, the then Cleveland Indians won a pennant race for the ages when they managed to win a one-game play-off over Boston. The Yankees were in contention all year and only were eliminated on the next-to-last day of the season.

That’s the thing about being the most successful team in professional sports. It doesn’t leave room for anyone else, and that meant the seven other teams in the league. And it is in large part for that reason that the Yankees dominance hurt the American League attendance dramatically during the 1950s and why the popularity of the game began to diminish. Bill James once wrote that he thought baseball’s return to popularity in the 1970s had as much to do with the Yankees being a non-factor as anything else. I’m inclined to agree.

Now you might think the National League was more competitive and it was – to an extent.  During the first decade of the 20^th century, one of the greatest teams of the era was the Chicago Cubs of 1906-1910. In the 1906 season they won 116 games and lost just 36. They never had a year quite that good again but over five years they averaged 106 wins a year which led to four National League pennants and two world championships. They were then overtaken by John McGraw’s New York Giants who won three consecutive NL Pennants and averaged 101 wins a year. They were on their way to a fourth straight pennant when the Boston Braves engaged in one of the greatest stretch runs in history, going from last place on July 4^th to winning the pennant. This did not league to an exciting pennant race, though; the Braves won by ten games. Indeed, during the first twenty years of the 20^th century there was only one truly exciting National League Pennant race: the 1908 race when the Giants, Cubs and Pirates engaged in an exciting race that ended with the Cubs winning on a one-day play-off. (To say that there’s more to that is an understatement, but to tell the story would take a book in itself.)

From 1921-194, McGraw’s Giants retained their touch and won a record four consecutive NL Pennants, all but the last by a formidable margin. Since during this same period the first Yankees dynasty was beginning, by 1924 it seemed the entire country was rooting for the Washington Senators to win their first pennant as much to see the legendary pitcher Walter Johnson finally in the World Series as they were to not have to witness another all New York series. (The Senators did win and just as importantly beat the Giants.) This was where the anti-New York furor in baseball reached a peak it would not achieve again for a quarter of a century.

The play in the National League from that point until 1950 did have a more balanced play and was more competitive.  The 1930s featured several exciting pennant races involving multiple teams. These included the 1930 pennant race, where a four team race between Brooklyn, New York, Chicago and St. Louis finally ended after a stretch run that gave the Cardinals the pennant by two games; the 1934 pennant race when the Cardinals managed an impressive come back to overcome the Giants on the final day of the season and the 1938 Pennant race where the Cubs managed to overcome the Pirates on player-manager Gabby Hartnett’s so called ‘Homer In The Gloaming”

The decade with the most pennant races in both leagues was the 1940s. I’ve already mentioned three American League ones, but during the decade the Dodgers and Cardinals would engage in a series of struggles throughout the decade for the NL Pennant.  (I intend to write a separate series of articles on the Cardinals of that era because many historians consider them one of the most undervalued dynasties in history.)  However after the 1949 season, when the Yankees beat the Red Sox in the American League and Dodgers beat the Cardinals in the National League – both on the final day of the season – baseball would essentially enter what was more or less a dead zone for pennant races – which no doubt was one of the factors that led to a decline in attendance throughout both leagues in the 1950s.

Yes I know, the Shot Heard Round the World, the Giants Win the Pennant. It is one of the great moments in baseball history, I don’t deny it. But I think a large part of the reason that is remembered so fondly it because it happened among two New York teams in the ‘greatest rivalry’ the Giants and the Dodgers.

The truth is the Giants triumph over the Dodgers that year was notable because it was the exception. The Dodgers won four pennants in the next five years and the Giants would not closer than second place in those four races. In 1954, the Giants won the pennant over Brooklyn and famously collapsed into fifth place the next year. By that point, the Giants attendance was absolutely terrible and they were almost certainly going to leave New York. Also that’s not the only time in Brooklyn history that the Dodgers lost a 13 and a half game lead to lose the pennant or the first time they lost a playoff for the pennant. That happened twice before in the 1940s and both lost times they lost to the Cardinals. (Again, I’ll get to that later.)

And I know the purists will hate me for saying this, but it’s not until both the great migration west and the beginning of expansion that pennant races began to get more competitive, Still this was mostly in the National League and even after the Yankee dynasty collapsed there wasn’t much sign of it happening in the American League.

Oh right. 1967. The Impossible Dream season which was the closest pennant race in American League history. Boston, Detroit, Chicago and Minnesota fought it out until the final day of the season. You want to know why so many sports fans were amazed?

Because four-team pennant races were basically non-existent in either league. It was rare enough to have as many three teams competing for the pennant until the end of the season.  I imagine you can count the total in both leagues in the twentieth century on both hands and still have a finger or two left over.

You want to know what was more common in the twentieth century, pre-expansion? Terrible teams.  I’ve seen enough books on baseball to know that while their have been some teams over the last twenty years that have occasionally had wretched seasons a couple of years running, few rank the level of truly horrible play that we tend to see in that era. I’ve actually listed a few of them before in my section on the disastrous baseball teams in Philadelphia, but there were more of them. The Washington Senators in the first decade of the 20^th century, the Pittsburgh Pirates of the 1950s,  the Boston Red Sox of the 1920s, and yes The Mets of the 1960s. There were so many teams in ‘the Golden Age of Baseball’ where a team might be lucky to win fifty or fifty five games a year.

And even that’s deceptive because for all the ‘Great Teams in this era’  - which may I remind you were almost entirely the Yankees – there was so many teams that were sub-par or mediocre. The St. Louis Browns only won a single pennant in the entire fifty years of existence (and that one is a symbol of wartime futility). The Washington Senators only won three pennants before they moved to Minnesota; their expansion replacement did no better.  The White Sox spent nearly forty years between pennants and mostly never got higher than fifth place during that time. The Braves won only two pennants their entire tenure in Boston. During this ‘golden age’, only a handful of teams were regularly and consistently competitive. Most of the other cities spent their seasons hoping to see fifth or sixth place.

Which leads to the other lie: players staying with franchise their whole lives out of team loyalty or because they loved the game. Ernie Banks, ‘Mr. Cub’ was fond of saying ‘let’s play two’ or picking up the Cubs prospects. He was a source of joy at Wrigley Field, but I bet he would have given anything to play on a team that was contending every year.  Roberto Clemente is one of the greatest players in history, but he was always furious that the press never gave him the respect he thought he was worthy because he spent his entire career playing for the Pirates. And as a result, he got terrible press from the Pittsburgh writers who couldn’t understand  why he didn’t seem happy about his play. (There was also, as you might expect, an underlying prejudice about his Latin heritage.)

I don’t think, for the record, this was just something African-Americans or Latinos were angry about; I think its likely that there were so many stars who never got the appreciation they deserved because they played for non-contenders. Luke Appling and Ted Lyons were extraordinary for the White Sox for more than twenty years; few people knew who they were then. Ralph Kiner was one of the greatest power hitters in history; he never played for a single team that contended for the pennant.  (Indeed, when he was negotiating for a raise after leading the league in home runs in 1952, his GM famously said: “We finished last with you. It’s a cinch we can finish last without you.” He got traded and they proved they could.) And those, its worth noting, are merely the Hall of Famers; how many pitchers with teams like the Senators or Phillies could have had winning seasons had they pitched for a team that was capable of giving better offense or defense? Owners and managers could have improved their teams at any time if they’d been willing to negotiate with the players themselves during this period.  But the owners had no interest in improving their teams or attendance records if it meant treating the players as anything other than ‘well-paid slaves’.

So to be clear, during this so called ‘golden age’ there were few of the exciting pennant races that these purists seem to miss so much and there were few teams that even got a chance to compete. It was only when the owners began to make the changes that purists have loathed in the 1970s that competition truly began to improve. In the next article in this series, I will reveal how divisional play and free agency actually did improve competition across both leagues and led to the balance that all the purists claimed they wanted – and the owners decision that they preferred things the old way.