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Baseball and the Great Depression (1929 to 1940)

the great depression, a severe economic downturn that started with the stock market crash of October 1929 and lasted through the 1930s, devastated America. By the end of 1929, stocks had lost half their value. By 1932, the worst year of the Depression, the value of stocks dropped another 30 percent, and by the next year thirteen million Americans—a quarter of the workforce—were unemployed. In the first four years of the Depression, industrial production fell by 50 percent and the Gross National Product dropped from $105 billion to $60 billion. And between 1929 and 1933, eleven thousand banks—44 percent of the US banking system—failed. In addition to numbers on a balance sheet, the Great Depression had a very real human cost. Without unemployment benefits, the jobless waited in breadlines or went to soup kitchens for food. In cities, the homeless lived in shacks or lean-tos on vacant lots, called “Hoovervilles,” after President Herbert Hoover. In 1932, in response to the Great Depression, the country elected Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who promised a New Deal for the American people. During his first hundred days in office, Roosevelt signed fifteen major pieces of legislation, including bills providing aid to bankers, farmers, industrialists, workers, homeowners, and the unemployed. Mostly, however, Roosevelt restored hope among desperate Americans. Despite the economic crisis, he was confident and cheery. He promised Americans that the only thing they had to fear was “fear itself.” The New Deal created the Works Progress Administration (WPA), a $5 billion jobs program that put unemployed people to work building thousands of public projects, including schools, post offices and other public buildings, roads, airports, and a number of minor league ballparks, including Roosevelt Stadium in Jersey City and War Memorial Stadium in Buffalo. The WPA also erected a steel-and-concrete grandstand at Doubleday Field in Cooperstown, New York. The Great Depression would continue for the rest of the decade, until the United States returned to massive spending in anticipation of World War II. During the Depression, baseball was forced to make some critical adjustments to survive as well.

On July 6, 1933, the greatest names in baseball gathered at Comiskey Park in Chicago to participate in the very first Major League All-Star Game. In the third base dugout, a sturdy man in street clothes named Cornelius McGillicuddy, better known as Connie Mack, stood at the helm of the American League squad. Born in 1862, during the second year of the Civil War, Mack spent his entire adult life in baseball. He had been a major league catcher in the 1880s and 1890s before becoming the manager of the Pittsburgh Pirates in 1894. Fired by Pittsburgh after his third season, Mack ended up managing the Milwaukee Brewers of Ban Johnson’s Western League. When Johnson transformed his league into a major league circuit in 1901, Mack signed on as the manager and co-owner of the American League’s new Philadelphia franchise.

Unlike Jacob Ruppert, the owner of the New York Yankees and the Jacob Ruppert & Company brewery, producers of Knickerbocker beer, or Philip K. Wrigley, the owner of the Chicago Cubs and the chewing gum company, Mack had no source of income outside of baseball. But he knew how to manage. In the mid-1920s Mack assembled a powerful team built around four future Hall of Famers—catcher Mickey Cochrane, first baseman Jimmie Foxx, outfielder Al Simmons, and pitcher Lefty Grove. In 1929 his Philadelphia Athletics won 104 games, finishing 18 games ahead of the second-place Yankees, and took the World Series from the Cubs in five games. The A’s repeated as World Series champs the following season, this time defeating the Cardinals in six games, and returned to the World Series in 1931, only to lose to St. Louis in seven games.

By 1933 Mack stood at the top of the baseball world. Following his 1929 World Series championship, civic leaders honored Mack with Edward W. Bok’s Philadelphia Award for his service to the city. Major League Baseball recognized his contribution to the game by selecting him to manage the first American League All-Star team. But the Great Depression had already started to take its toll. No longer able to afford Al Simmons’s $33,333 annual contract, Mack sold him, along with two other players, to the Chicago White Sox for $100,000. Without Simmons, the A’s slipped to third place in 1933. The Depression continued to decimate the team. In 1934 Mack traded Mickey Cochrane to the Tigers and Lefty Grove to the Red Sox. Two years later he sent slugger Jimmie Foxx to the Red Sox for $150,000. The Athletics continued to fall in the standings, finishing in sixth place in 1934 and falling to last place in 1935. The team would remain in last place through the 1943 season, and the Athletics would not become contenders again until the early 1970s—forty years and two cities later.

The Great Depression forced Philadelphia Athletics owner Connie Mack to trade or sell four future Hall of Fame players. The Library of Congress Online Photo Archive

Just as it had on the economy and the American psyche, the Great Depression had a damaging impact on baseball. Many fans could no longer afford to go to a baseball game. And, like businesses in other industries, baseball teams and leagues that had been operating on a shoestring shut down. The Depression was especially hard on Negro league and minor league teams. The Negro National League folded in 1931, and half the minor leagues disappeared during the first four years of the Depression. In 1929, twenty-six minor leagues, consisting of 182 clubs, operated in the United States; four years later only fourteen leagues, with a total of 93 clubs, were still in business. No major league team went out of business during the Great Depression, but many were operating very close to the brink. Major league clubs experienced a steep drop in attendance. In 1929, 9.6 million fans attended major league games, but in 1933 only 6 million went to a game, a decline of 36 percent. Attendance at major league games would not return to 1929 levels until 1940.

The Great Depression, however, did not affect all major league teams equally. While some clubs barely made it through the hard times, other teams survived without much difficulty. The New York Yankees, a successful team that continued to win, prospered during the Depression. With Babe Ruth’s leadership, the Yankees won the 1932 World Series. By 1934, however, Ruth was aging, so the Yankees sold him to the Boston Braves when the season ended. But with Lou Gehrig at first base, the Yankees kept winning. In 1936 a rookie named Joe DiMaggio joined the Yankees. That year, Gehrig hit forty-nine home runs, DiMaggio hit twenty-nine, and catcher Bill Dickey hit twenty-two. It was during this period that the Yankees were first called the “Bronx Bombers.” Starting in 1936, the Yankees won four straight World Series. In 1940, however, Gehrig was diagnosed with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS, which would become known as Lou Gehrig’s disease), which forced him to retire after playing in 2,130 consecutive games, a record that stood for fifty-six years. He died in 1942.

The New York Giants were another successful team during the Great Depression. In 1932 John McGraw, who had managed the Giants since 1902, retired. Giants first baseman Bill Terry replaced him as manager. Terry had been the last National League ballplayer to hit .400, hitting .401 in 1930. As manager, he led the Giants to the National League pennant in 1933, 1936, and 1937, and to the 1933 World Series championship over the Washington Senators. New York’s pitching staff was led by Carl Hubbell, whose money pitch was a screwball, a curve ball that broke in the opposite direction.

The St. Louis Cardinals also thrived in the 1930s. The Cardinals paid lower costs for players as general manager Branch Rickey’s farm system kept the stream of inexpensive talent flowing to St. Louis. The Cardinals won the 1931 and 1934 World Series and an additional National League pennant in 1930. The scrappy 1934 Cardinals were nicknamed the “Gashouse Gang,” after plants that generated heating and cooking gas from coal. Pitcher Jay “Dizzy” Dean and his brother, Paul “Daffy” Dean, led the team in pitching, with thirty and nineteen wins, respectively. That season, Daffy Dean pitched a no-hitter in the second game of a doubleheader. Dizzy, who had pitched the first game of the day and was famous for his outlandish quotes, bragged to a reporter that he, too, would have pitched a no-hitter if he knew his brother was going to throw one. St. Louis also had a potent offense led by second baseman Frankie Frisch. Nicknamed the “Fordham Flash” after the university he attended, Frisch was a rarity in the 1930s: a college-educated ballplayer. Future Hall of Famer Joe “Ducky” Medwick roamed left field. In 1937 Medwick won the Triple Crown, leading the National League in home runs, batting average, and runs batted in.

Other teams, however, barely survived. As noted earlier, the Depression forced Connie Mack to trade or sell many of the stars of the Philadelphia Athletics. The St. Louis Browns also struggled. During the first two decades of the twentieth century, the Browns had been the most popular team in St. Louis, but in the thirties the Cardinals surpassed the Browns in popularity. The Browns, never having not won a single American League pennant, saw their total attendance drop from 280,697 in 1929 to 80,922 in 1935, an average of fewer than 1,100 fans per game.

The Brooklyn Dodgers were another team that faced hard times during the Great Depression. The Dodgers had been in disarray since owner Charlie Ebbets died in 1925. Having last won a National League pennant in 1920, by the 1930s the team was viewed as a joke by many people. The club’s incompetence earned it the nickname the “Daffiness Boys.” The Brooklyn faithful, however, affectionately referred to the team as “Dem Bums.” Wilbert Robinson—nicknamed “Uncle Robbie”—managed the club from 1914 to 1931, a period when the team was usually called the Brooklyn Robins. Like Giants manager John McGraw, Robinson had played for the National League’s notorious Baltimore Orioles of the 1890s. Even the Dodgers’ stars seemed unprofessional. In one instance, due to blunders by Brooklyn base runners, according to some reports, what should have been a clean triple hit by slugger Babe Herman resulted in a triple play. By the late thirties, the Dodgers were deeply in debt. In 1938 the telephone company shut off the club’s phone service for failure to pay the bill, and the Brooklyn Trust Company, to whom the Dodgers owed more than a half million dollars, notified the club that they could not borrow any more money. The Dodgers were on the verge of bankruptcy.

Under severe financial pressure, many teams looked for ways to encourage people to come to the ballpark. Clubs adopted new innovations to bring out fans, some of which were merely gimmicks, but others would have a lasting impact on the game. In an effort to excite bored New England fans, in 1936 the last-place Boston Braves, a team that had finished 61½ games out of first place the previous season, changed its name to the Boston Bees. The gimmick did not work, as the new name never caught on, and by 1941 the team was again known as the Boston Braves. Other teams attempted to lure fans with newer, more colorful uniforms. In 1937 the Brooklyn Dodgers changed the color of its caps, stockings, and trim to Kelly green, a very nontraditional baseball color. In 1938 the Philadelphia Phillies added gold trim to their uniforms, and in 1940 the Pittsburgh Pirates placed a pirate head on the team’s jerseys.

Some clubs tried to attract fans by adding famous old names to the roster. In the 1930s there was no ballplayer more famous than Babe Ruth, and after the 1934 season, the Boston Braves bought Ruth, who was well past his prime, from the Yankees. After struggling through the first two months of the season, Ruth retired from the game. In 1938 the Brooklyn Dodgers hired Ruth to be the team’s first base coach. Hoping to attract fans who wanted to see Ruth swing a bat, the Dodgers let the slugger take batting practice before each game. Realizing that he was being exploited, Ruth quietly quit at the end of the season.

Some of the experiments attempted by baseball in the thirties were more than gimmicks; they became innovations that changed the game. In 1933 the city of Chicago hosted a world’s fair, called the “Century of Progress International Exposition.” The fair gave Arch Ward, the sports editor of the Chicago Tribune, an idea: If Chicago could host the fair of the century, why not stage the baseball game of the century? Ward organized the first Major League All-Star Game, in which the stars of the National League played the stars of the American League, which was played at Comiskey Park on July 6, 1933. The game was so successful that it became an annual tradition.

During the Depression, many unemployed fans could not afford to go to a ball game, while those who had jobs often worked during the daytime, when games were played. One way to increase attendance was to schedule games at night, when fans with jobs were free to attend. Night games were not new. In 1880, teams representing two Boston department stores played a night game in Hull, Massachusetts, to demonstrate lighting installed by the Northern Electric Light Company. Three years later a minor league night game was played in Fort Wayne, Indiana, and by the 1920s several minor league teams were playing night games. In 1930 the Negro leagues’ Kansas City Monarchs traveled with portable lights so they could play at night. But the major leagues, believing that night games were a gimmick and not “real” baseball, resisted the trend to play games at night. The pressures caused by the Great Depression convinced some teams to change their position. In 1935 Larry MacPhail, the general manager of the Cincinnati Reds, installed lights at Crosley Field, where the first major league night game was played against the Philadelphia Phillies. A switch installed in the White House allowed President Franklin Roosevelt to turn on the lights for Major League Baseball’s first night game. With their higher attendance, night games soon became a fixture of the major league schedule.

By 1938 the situation in Brooklyn had become desperate. The Brooklyn Trust Company was demanding payment from the Dodgers, and the club turned to the National League for help. National League president Ford Frick suggested the Dodgers hire Larry MacPhail to be the club’s new president and general manager. The club took Frick’s advice, and MacPhail, in turn, hired Leo Durocher to be the Dodgers’ new manager. Durocher had a very volatile temper, but he turned Brooklyn into a contender. MacPhail also adopted innovations designed to bring fans back to the ballpark. Even though the club had little money to spare, MacPhail thought spending $75,000 to renovate Ebbets Field was an important investment. As a part of the renovation, MacPhail ordered lights installed in the ballpark, and on June 15, 1938, the Dodgers hosted MacPhail’s old club, the Cincinnati Reds, in the first night game at Ebbets Field. Four days earlier, in his previous start, Cincinnati starting pitcher Johnny Vander Meer had pitched a no-hitter in Boston against the Bees. On June 15, in the first night game ever played in New York City, Vander Meer became the first and only pitcher to throw two no-hitters in a row.

MacPhail also put the Dodgers on the radio. Fearing the broadcasting of one team’s games would hurt the attendance of the other two, all three New York City teams had previously agreed to keep off the radio. In 1939, however, MacPhail withdrew the Dodgers from the agreement. He brought Red Barber, the broadcaster he had employed in Cincinnati, to Brooklyn to broadcast Dodgers games. Barber was a southerner who had a gift for homespun language. With the club’s games available on the radio, the Dodgers became very popular in New York City, giving the team a jump on the Yankees and Giants. Under MacPhail, attendance at Ebbets Field increased dramatically, from fewer than five hundred thousand fans a year before he took over the team to almost a million fans in 1940.

By the end of the thirties, the Great Depression was lifting. Still, in order to augment attendance, many major league teams continued to schedule night games. In 1941, Cubs owner Philip K. Wrigley decided to install lights at Wrigley Field. He bought the hardware and planned to have lights put up in early 1942. In the meantime, although the Depression was subsiding, the St. Louis Browns were finding it harder and harder to compete against the Cardinals. In late 1941 the Browns obtained permission from the American League to move to Los Angeles for the 1942 season. Shortly after that, on December 7, 1941, Japanese bombers attacked the US naval base at Pearl Harbor in Hawaii. After the attack, Wrigley decided to not install the lights, instead donating them to the government to be installed at an army or navy base. Lights would not be installed at Wrigley until 1988. And with the United States at war with Japan, the West Coast suddenly no longer seemed like an attractive location to play baseball. The Browns decided not to move to Los Angeles and remained in St. Louis, at least for the immediate future.