Before the Machine. Mark J. SchmetzerЧитать онлайн книгу.
was its easy familiarity. Baseball was in its fifth decade of virtually no changes in its basic framework. As far as at least two generations of Americans were concerned, there always had been two major leagues, American and National, each containing eight teams. The teams always had played in the same cities. Four cities—Boston, Philadelphia, Chicago, and St. Louis—each had two teams, one in each league. New York, of course, had three—two in the National League. Five had to settle for serving as the home of just one team: Cincinnati and Pittsburgh in the National League, the so-called Senior Circuit because it was older than the American League, home of teams in Washington, D.C., Cleveland, and Detroit. All of the teams were located in the northeast quadrant of the country, none of them farther west than the Central Time Zone.
The scarcity of teams made following them easy. Listening to the games on the radio and reading about your team and others in the local newspapers and The Sporting News—the weekly “Bible of Baseball”—gave you a level of information that would make even an Internet junkie jealous.
One man, Maxwell H. Lapides, put it quite well in a comment he made to Roger Angell, the long-time fiction editor for The New Yorker magazine who dabbled in writing about baseball. Angell quoted Lapides in a story about three devoted Detroit Tigers fans called “Three for the Tigers,” which ran in the magazine as well as in a collection of his columns published in 1978 entitled Five Seasons.
“You have to try to remember how much easier it was to keep up with all of the baseball news back then,” Lapides told Angell. “For us, there were just the Tigers and the seven other teams in the American League, so we knew them by heart. All the games were played in the afternoon, and none of the teams was in a time zone more than an hour away from Detroit, so you got just about all the scores when the late-afternoon papers came. You could talk about that at supper, and then there were the stories in the morning papers to read and think about the next day. Why, in those days we knew more about the farms than I know about some of the West Coast teams right now. By the time a Hoot Evers or a Fred Hutchinson was ready to come up from Beaumont, we knew all about him.”
There also was a certain level of comfort in following a particular player. The reserve clause still was in affect, restricting player movement to the whims of owners and general managers or to retirement. Fans who wanted to follow, say, Joe DiMaggio or Ted Williams or Pee Wee Reese could feel much more secure in the knowledge that their favorite player would be with the same team for the bulk—if not all—of his career. Heck, one guy—Cornelius Alexander McGillicuddy, better known as Connie Mack—managed the Philadelphia Athletics for exactly fifty years, from 1901 through 1950.
The continuity was downright impressive, especially when compared to the current state of the game, which can be traced in part to Lou Perini’s decision to move his National League franchise from Boston to Milwaukee for the 1953 season. That opened the floodgates. Franchises started following the post-war migration of the United States population to the west and south. The St. Louis Browns, forever the second team in the Gateway City behind the beloved Cardinals, bucked the trend by moving east to Baltimore after the 1953 season, but the Orioles still thrived. The Athletics left Philadelphia for Kansas City the next year.
The seismic shift came after the 1957 season, when both New York National League teams, the Giants and the Brooklyn Dodgers, made the transcontinental leap to the West Coast. The Dodgers ended up in Los Angeles, while the Giants landed in San Francisco.
Suddenly, almost nothing could be counted on. Fans in other cities had to be wondering which team would be the next to seek greener pastures. Among the more nervous were the fans in Cincinnati.
The Reds by then already had a proud history. They invented the all-professional team back in 1869 and were among the original National League teams in 1876. Their track record wasn’t as glowing as, say, the Giants or Dodgers or Cardinals, but they’d had stretches during which they were regular contenders and could boast of three league championships and two World Series titles.
By the late 1950s, though, the legs of this franchise were shakier than others. The team had enjoyed a sensational season in 1956, cracking home runs at a near-record pace and attracting one million fans to the ballpark for the first time in franchise history. The Reds hit 221 homers, tying what was at the time the major league record. Slugging first baseman Ted Kluszewski and his biceps—so bulging that the sleeves of his uniform jersey constricted them, forcing him to play bare-armed and eventually prompting the Reds to adopt vest-type jerseys—were fan favorites. Frank Robinson, at twenty-one years old, tied a league record for rookies with thirty-eight home runs. Cincinnati contended for the pennant for much of the season before settling for third place with ninety-one wins, snapping at eleven the team’s streak of consecutive losing seasons.
Unfortunately, they couldn’t build on that improvement. Cincinnati slipped to fourth place in 1957, fourth place again and under .500 in 1958—costing manager Birdie Tebbetts his job—and fifth place in 1959, which included the dismissal of Mayo Smith as manager after just a half-season. Picked to replace Smith was Fred Hutchinson, the former Detroit pitcher who’d previously managed the Tigers and Cardinals with no notable success. Hutchinson was thirty-nine years old when he took over the Reds.
“The franchise had been under .500 seemingly forever, except for 1956 and 1957,” recalled Jim Ferguson, who helped cover the Reds for the Dayton Daily News from 1959 through 1972 before becoming the team’s publicity director. “They were a pure power team, but they had terrible pitching. They couldn’t score enough runs to win. They hadn’t had any success, with the exception of those two seasons, for a couple of decades.”
The managerial changes did little to calm the nerves of Reds fans. Cincinnati’s home ballpark, Crosley Field, was the smallest in the league in terms of seating and offered little room for parking, a growing problem in a society that was spending more and more time behind the wheel. Folks didn’t take trains or buses or trolleys to ballgames any more. They drove, and they were more inclined to visit places where they figured they could safely leave their cars.
The Reds needed only to look over their right field fence to see the future. A stretch of Interstate 75—part of the United States Interstate Highway System, the country’s version of Germany’s Autobahn—was being built almost within arm’s reach of Crosley Field.
Options to aging, tiny Crosley Field had been discussed in Greater Cincinnati since the late 1940s, but nothing had come of those talks. Meanwhile, New York had a vacancy that was screaming to be filled. Cities such as Atlanta, Houston, Dallas, and Denver—growing in population and vibrancy—also were hoping to get a piece of the major league action. A Denver sports leader named Bob Howsam participated in efforts to start a new “major league”—the Continental League, the brainchild of New Yorker William Shea.
Major League Baseball moved quickly to nip that in the bud. The American League allowed its Washington franchise to be moved to Minneapolis-St. Paul and awarded new franchises to Washington, D.C. and Los Angeles. The AL expanded to ten teams and a 162-game schedule in 1961. The disparity in the number of games played by each league and the desire to see the seasons start and end at the same time meant that the NL teams would get more days off—leading to situations such as the Reds getting back-to-back days off in the middle of the last week of the season.
The National League awarded new franchises to New York and Houston but decided to wait an extra year before putting them in play. They would start in 1962 in a 162-game schedule.
While those moves calmed fears of any imminent departure of the Reds from Cincinnati, they did nothing to improve the ballclub. The 1960 Reds finished sixth, their worst since the 1953 team also finished sixth, and their .435 winning percentage (67–87) was the lowest since the 1950 team went 66–87 (.431) while also finishing sixth. They limped home with seven losses in their last eight games, including being swept in three games at Philadelphia in the final series of the season, and nine losses in their last eleven games, going 0–3 against Pittsburgh, 1–5 against the Phillies, and 1–1 against Milwaukee.
Just as bad, if not worse, they drew just 663,486 fans to Crosley Field, the lowest in the majors that season and the franchise’s worst single-season attendance figure since the 1953 team attracted 548,086.
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