100 Years of 100 Things: New York Baseball

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Matt Katz: It's The Brian Lehrer Show on WNYC. Welcome back, everybody. I'm Matt Katz, keeping the seat warm for Brian today. Now, we continue our WNYC Centennial series called 100 Years of 100 Things. We are up to thing 7, 100 Years of New York Baseball. Right now we're going to be talking about baseball history and how it intertwines with New York City history. We're at one of those blissful moments right now in New York baseball where both clubs are in playoff contention. If the season ended today, the Mets and Yankees would actually both earn a wildcard spot in the playoffs. That's just a snapshot in time.

Journalist and historian Kevin Baker's new book, The New York Game: Baseball and the Rise of a New City tells us about the pre-Mets, even pre-Yankees history of baseball in the city. It also lays out the case that New York is the beating heart of baseball where the game was not necessarily invented, but certainly refined and defined and carved into America's pastime. Kevin, hi. Thanks for coming on to talk about your book.

Kevin Baker: Thanks for having me, Matt.

Matt Katz: Listeners, does your personal history with New York baseball go back maybe not 100 years, but close, maybe just a few decades? Give us a call to share stories about your family's baseball fandom and your connections to the Mets, Yankees, Brooklyn Dodgers, New York baseball giants. Give us a call to share your oral histories of New York baseball fandom. 212-433-WNYC, 212-433-9692. You can also text your stories to same number. 212-433-9692. Okay, Kevin, let's get this out of the way real quick. Was baseball invented in New York or at least in New York States as many of us grew up to believe?

Kevin Baker: [laughs] Baseball, as we know it today, was invented in New York City. The old story was that it was invented up in Cooperstown by Abner Doubleday who was the Forrest Gump of the 19th century. Abner Doubleday was everywhere anything was going on. He was at Fort Sumter, was almost hit by the first shot of the Civil War, fired the first shot back for the Union, was at Gettysburg, was at the Gettysburg Address, went to the White House to attend seances with Mary Todd Lincoln. He was a bibliophile, theosophist, used to correspond with Ralph Waldo Emerson, but he did not invent baseball. In fact, that's so much of a lie that somebody who's not in the Hall of Fame in Cooperstown is Abner Doubleday.

He probably was named the founder of it, in part because of this committee rigged by A.G. Spalding of sporting goods fame. Spalding and his wife were also theosophists and that's probably why they put him in which to me is hysterical. It's as if tomorrow a bunch of scientologists replaced Dr. Naismith as the founder of basketball with L. Ron Hubbard. It has no real bearing in life. People have played bat and ball games since we got down from the trees and really the New York game is what we think of as baseball today.

Matt Katz: People were playing a game and then New York just refined it and professionalized it or really came up with almost all of the rules that we see today. That all happened in New York City?

Kevin Baker: Yes. That really evolved in New York. You had these very different variations. You had a game in Philadelphia, Philadelphia game, where you hit the ball with something called a DeLille. You can imagine how that would have gone over in Brooklyn. Give me the DeLille. You had the Massachusetts game where you had to hit people with the ball to get them out. You didn't have any foul or fair territory and you could run to first or around the bases however you wanted to. It sounds like a lot of fun, but it's like Looney Tunes cartoon. I don't know how you put a stadium around that.

Matt Katz: My nine-year-old would have liked that version of the baseball game.

Kevin Baker: Exactly. I think a lot of nine year olds would have loved it, but you couldn't put a stadium around that. The sport as we know it with nine innings, three outs to an inning, established batting order and a hardball all evolved in New York and became known as the New York game or the New York rules. This is where it began back really before the Civil War in the 1850s. That was the game we came to know and love. Its heart has always been New York City.

Matt Katz: The first bona fide baseball team was the New York Knickerbockers Base Ball Club. Am I getting that full name right?

Kevin Baker: There were a bunch of early teams and nobody's sure exactly who was first. It was the Gotham or Washington team. In those days when something was first, they were often called the Washington. They may have been the first. There was a New York club, the Eagle club, the Magnolia. There were tons of clubs in Brooklyn and in New Jersey, but the Knickerbockers, [coughs] excuse me, thanks to their shortstop, a guy named Doc Adams, were the ones who first started codifying the new rules, writing this down, making this into the New York game.

Matt Katz: Got it. The factoids in this book will keep any massive baseball fan like myself just hooked and wanting to share all the little facts you share. New York at one point had five baseball teams. The curveball, bunt, stolen base, all invented in New York. First All Star game, first World Championship, all happened in New York.

Kevin Baker: Oh, yes. First World Championship played between Manhattan and Brooklyn, which for New Yorkers, of course, is what other world is it?

Matt Katz: The whole world.

Kevin Baker: Really New York had far and away the best players. They went out. You had this great Cincinnati Red Stockings team, the first openly professional team. They were comprised almost completely of transplanted New York and Brooklyn players, the two boroughs being two different cities then.

You had 1890 with the player strike, fascinating year. The players went and formed their own league and that's when you had five teams in the city, two of them playing right back to back against each other at the Polo Grounds. Then you had these huge championship runs of teams like the Giants, teams like the Yankees and the Dodgers, of course, which really came to exemplify the sport.

Matt Katz: There are some wonderful New York baseball characters in your book. I'd love for you to tell us about Henry Chadwick of Brooklyn, the sports writer who really ushered in our obsession with statistics in this game. You can't have baseball without stats today and he's the one who was the grandfather of that.

Kevin Baker: Oh, yes. Henry Chadwick was really going to breakdown baseball play by play statistically. That is a huge attraction of the game. Americans love statistics. This is how we started American capitalism. It's time-work management. We're always recording everything, trying to break-- I think it comes from being on this enormous, seemingly endless continent and looking at this and thinking, "Okay, how are we going to do this? How are we going to make this work moving into the industrial age?" I think baseball reflects that. Chadwick really initiated that. He gave us the box score, which is a wonderful way of recording the game, wonderful thing to look at, just perfect little measure of each game.

He had various wacky notions. He was very pompous and thought baseball should be played in certain ways. For instance, he decried the home run, which he felt took up too much energy from players and was this big, flashy thing. He didn't like that. More singles. He really overrated the batting average, which has been debunked by the generation of sabermetrics and Bill James, but he was somebody who helped organize it too and push it on.

He would go and umpire a game before the season began out in Brooklyn to see how the various rules were working and what needed to be revised. He said he was too nervous to umpire an actual league game, so that's what he would do and died getting pneumonia after going to see the Dodgers play in 1908. He was quite a character.

Matt Katz: He was, seemed to me, something of a baseball purist. He didn't want the changes even back then. That's American baseball- -tradition is complaining about any small changes and there being purists calling into talk radio to say you can't change the game. He was doing that 100-something years ago.

Kevin Baker: Oh, exactly. I quote a first baseman, a guy named Old Pete, I think in 1868, and he was saying they really don't play the game the way they did in 1858. This is the first, I think start of the good old days that I think Old Pete start was to crying what had happened. Everybody always thinks the old days were better. Sometimes they were, sometimes they were in one way or another. It's amazing how much you can still compare the game today to what it was 100, 150 years ago compared to something like football or basketball, where the size of the athletes has made that meaningless.

Matt Katz: It's The Brian Lehrer Show on WNYC. I'm WNYC reporter Matt Katz filling it for Brian. We are continuing our WNYC Centennial series called 100 Years of 100 Things. We're talking to journalists and historian, Kevin Baker, about his new book, The New York Game: Baseball and the Rise of a New City. Let's go to the phones and talk some ball. Lars in Brooklyn. Hi, Lars.

Lars: Hi. Good morning. My grandfather was born and raised in the Bronx. His name was Garton Del Savio. He had a long career, mostly the minors with the Yankees farm teams and some other teams as well. He started and ended his career playing semi-pro baseball for a team called the Brooklyn Bushwicks that was at Highland Park at Queens. They had night games at this place called Dexter Park. I know he would talk about the games, how they were retelevised on television in the early days of television in the early '50s. He also did it in the 1930s when he started his career. Then when he ended, he went back to playing as a ringer in these teams. I was wondering if you guys hadn't mentioned of these semi-pro teams that were playing in the boroughs at the time.

Kevin Baker: Yes. I do mention them, Bushwick and Dexter Park. That was also one of the parks where one of the many so-called Negro League teams had to play back in the day. New York has a wonderful tradition of that too. From the very start, you had all these different teams being played by people in different professions. There were teams made up of policemen, of firemen, of milkmen, of eye doctors who formed their own clubs and played against each other. That's a great part of the New York tradition too. I'm not sure if there are so many industrial leagues left today, but you do see a lot of terrific play just going to the parks and looking at guys playing in Central Park or elsewhere just on an amateur level, it's great to see.

Matt Katz: Hey, Lars, what job other than baseball, did your grandfather do?

Lars: My grandfather on the off-season usually worked for the Department of Sanitation or for the post office because you couldn't make enough money playing the game. He actually continued, like you mentioned, he played for the Department of Sanitation Industrial team once he quit baseball professionally. There's actually a photograph that we have in our family of him rounding third base at Yankee Stadium because they would've exhibition games for the regular games.

Also, I know that he would tell stories. Back then, it was the segregated days of baseball. A lot of times when he played in the Southern League or sometimes locally, he would be on a white team but he would play against Negro League teams. I remember one time I asked him, I said, "Was Satchel Paige as good as they say he was?" He said he was better. He could yell out [unintelligible 00:14:01] he was about to pitch and they would still just whiff when he would he go across the play.

Matt Katz: Oh, yes. Hardcore.

Kevin Baker: He was a great performer and a great player. Incidentally, my father was also born and raised in the Bronx and worked for the post office. Paige was a great player and there was a lot of play between the Negro League teams and white teams. A lot of exhibition play. The Negro League teams more than held their own. They were tremendous players who we all miss that the mainstream America missed seeing. Like New York City itself, baseball was very early on a melting pot or a gorgeous mosaic, if you will. One of which almost everybody could meet and work and play together in the stands as well as on the field. That was one of the great things about it. A very democratic mix and very much like the city.

That almost is also crucial because it's another one of the great tragedies in this country, particularly for people of color, but also for everybody that we didn't get to see these great African American players. They were systematically very early on excluded from the sport. I'm sorry, up to 1898, you had 55 players, known Black players playing in the minors or the majors, the so-called organized baseball, but then they were just absolutely excluded. This was terrible.

In New York in the 1910s, for instance, you had this great team, the Lincoln Stars, one of the best baseball teams ever assembled, and they were forced to play at places like the Olympic field at 136th and 5th, or the Lenox Oval at 145th and Lennox, just really sandlot conditions, these rugged rock-strewn fields. Later, you had the Cuban stars who built their own park at the Dykeman Oval. This was the edges of the city that these amazing players, some of the best in the history of the game were marginalized in.

Matt Katz: Wow. Let's go back to the phone lines Michael in Bethpage. Hi Michael, thanks for calling in.

Michael: Hi. It's terrific listening to the guest reiterate the history of baseball in New York. My story is more current. I was a 10-year-old growing up in the Bronx in 1957, '58 when it was announced that the Dodgers were going to leave New York, leave Brooklyn, and go to LA. I became a Dodger fan, although I grew up in the Bronx because my father and I had a very difficult relationship. He was a New York giant fan. He keep berating the bums from Brooklyn, so I became a Dodger fan. Of course, I took a lot of heat from my Yankee friends in the Bronx at least until 1955 when we finally won our first world championship.

Then they moved several years later. Of course, it was very disheartening, but I remained a Dodger fan even though they moved to LA because the team was essentially the same. My heroes were just in a different city. I recognized at that time why they moved. Unfortunately, it was all about money and building a new stadium and having enough parking. There were powers that controlled these things in New York at that time, I think it was Robert Moses, who just wouldn't let them build a new stadium where they wanted to in Brooklyn, and they couldn't get the city to cooperate.

Of course, from a financial perspective, it was a fabulous move for the Dodgers and the Giants followed them. It's a shame really that we lost those two teams. Now, while I am still a Dodger fan, my heartstrings go out to the Mets because raising my son, my son became an instant Met fan when he was old enough to understand the game.

Matt Katz: Nice.

Kevin Baker: That's great, Michael. I had a similar relationship with my father. He was an old New York Giants fan, born on Fordham Road, and the Giants were the Irish team in the city for many years. They were gone by the time I came around. Growing up, I became a Yankees. The Yankees were in the last place, this is 1966. They weren't very good, but they were my team. We moved to Massachusetts, which was a wonderful place to grow up. I was a Yankees fan there, but he's a Red Sox fan, and my father started rooting for the Red Sox. [chuckles]

To me, this was terrible. Not only were all my classmates against me but my father as well. I think there's a lot of history of fathers and sons. On the other hand, the best times we ever had together, were going to Fenway Park to see games. This book goes through 1945, but there is a second book that is done and will be out in the spring of 2026. That gets into the whole reasons for the Dodgers and Giants moving. There's a whole debate going back and forth between whose fault was it, Walter O'Malley's or Robert Moses's, which is like- -King Kong versus Godzilla, two of the arch-villains in New York history. I put the blame still on Walter O'Malley that was just not heard of at the time to take public land and public monies and give them to a baseball team or any sports team to keep them in a city. I think Moses was right not to do that with the Dodgers and Giants. I think it's become a terrible thing we've done since in all these cities.

The Yankees latest stadium, the other day Hal Steinbrenner was saying how he felt the Yankees payroll was unsustainable. I felt like saying how many free stadiums does your family want? They're up to two. The current Yankee Stadium, they got $1.2 billion in subsidies. Here in a city where we say we don't have any money to improve the transit system. This is absurd. I think this is one of the few things Moses was right about was trying to stop this.

Matt Katz: The power brokers and the baseball teams have always intertwined regardless of the era in New York. That's, I think what you get to in the book in so many respects. Before I let you go, and I can't wait to see the second book. I'm glad that's coming out. Before I let you go, I have to talk about my team, the Mets. I always knew there was an earlier incarnation of the Mets, the Metropolitan or the Metropolitans in the 1880s. I did not know they once played very briefly on Staten Island. You also wrote that they displayed the underdog spirit even in that incarnation.

Kevin Baker: Yes. The Met or the Mets were the first New York team to make a World Series back in the 19th century. Unfortunately, they were owned by the same guy who owned the Giants in the other league. He moved the best players there to the Giants and sold the team. They moved out to Staten Island. You could get the guy running the ferry out to Staten Island, you could get a ticket and a Staten Island ferry ticket for one low price, and go there. In 1886 you could go and see the Statue of Liberty going up just outside the park through the outfield.

What a great thing. Somehow the team still did not make it. It is great in that there has been a major league team in every borough of New York. Just to say one more thing with this too about WNYC's 100th Anniversary, that the second book the first words of the text are literally the old WNYC tagline. I guess still the tagline, which is, "WNYC, the radio station of the city of New York, where over seven million people live in peace and harmony and enjoy the benefits of democracy."

Matt Katz: That's fantastic.

Kevin Baker: You add a million or two people, it's the same thing. I don't know how peaceful and harmonious we are, but we do get on and we enjoy the benefits of democracy.

Matt Katz: Why is that the opening line of the new book?

Kevin Baker: Oh, because that starts in 1945, and that era right after what's considered the golden age of the city, '45 to '50. When it goes from there through the present day. Which are also a lot of amazing moments, including the Mets who are heavily in the second book, the modern Mets. It's an incredible legacy and I hope people enjoy it. It's also even the terrible parts, even for instance, the horrible segregation in the sport. There's an amazing, uplifting story there too, of what Black and Hispanic players made of their time in the Negro Leagues fighting their way into the majors and really changing the game in their own way, contributing great things to it.

Matt Katz: Change the game and change the city and the process. That's how the two-

Kevin Baker: Very much.

Matt Katz: -changed each other and affected each other is what you get to so beautifully in the book. This was thing 7 in our centennial series, 100 Years of 100 Things, Talking New York baseball. My guest has been journalist, historian, Kevin Baker, and his current book is The New York Game: Baseball and the Rise of a New City. It goes to the middle of the 20th century, and the next one, you heard it here first, is coming out in a couple of years. Kevin, thank you so much for coming on and sharing some of these stories with us.

Kevin Baker: Thanks for having me. Always great to be on WNYC.

 

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