Robert Weintraub’s ‘The Victory Season’

Still, one couldn’t help but compare the modern World Series with the games of yesteryear. For that— and for the status of baseball itself in our distracted, digitized culture— we have Robert Weintraub’s recent chronicle of the 1946 pennant races, The Victory Season.

Professional baseball has always been heavily commercialized, but in an earlier age the messaging— epitomized by Abe Stark’s famous “Hit Sign, Win Suit” above the scoreboard at Brooklyn’s Ebbets Field—was more stationary and less intrusive. If World Series games are now Wagnerian in length, it’s partly because each half inning is lengthened by a relentless feedback loop of commercials that pay the TV bill and freeze the action on the field.

Packaged entertainment

The rhythm of the game, so important to its experience, is thus diced and sliced. Batter-by-batter late inning pitching changes don’t help either, all of which serve as excuses for more commercial breaks (and are, for all we know, as much dictated by them as by actual game strategy).

The game itself, in short, is framed and packaged as “entertainment,” and the Series pops up not as the climax of the regular season but as the tagend of a monster called the postseason, a round robin of elimination games that now includes one-third of all Major League teams. By the time the Series rolls around, the weather is inclement and the football season is in full cry.

The Fox announcer Joe Buck prefaced his calls of one Series game by saying, “If this is the first time you’ve tuned into a baseball game this year,” thus acknowledging the number of strictly casual viewers drawn in by the brand name of the World Series rather than by any true interest in the sport itself.

Underpaid heroes

It was different in 1946. Baseball had little competition as the national pastime, and, after four years of ersatz baseball while the nation waged war, fans were starved for their heroes: Joe DiMaggio, Ted Williams, Stan Musial, Bob Feller, Hank Greenberg, Johnny Mize. Attendance surged, and the daily scores were followed with passionate interest.

All, however, was not well. A retooled domestic economy wasn’t yet meeting Americans’ pent-up demand for consumer goods, leading to shortages— even of staples— and widespread price gouging. It was one thing to endure this privation in the form of wartime rationing, but quite another when there was no patriotic necessity to justify it.

Workers, too, were no longer willing to toil for frozen wages, and paralyzing strikes took place throughout the year. Prosperity would return sooner or later, and labor meant to get its fair share of it.

Ballplayers were workers, too, and the baseball salary level— dictated by owners through the infamous reserve clause that tied players to the teams that had signed them— hadn’t budged either. Even the great DiMaggio, who had lost three years to the war, was “offered” a contract for the same $43,750 he had earned in 1942. (Stan Musial, already a superstar, was earning all of $14,000 from the stingy Cardinals.)

Jumping to Mexico

An enterprising organizer, Robert Murphy, made strenuous efforts to unionize the Major Leagues, and a majority— but not the required two-thirds— of Pittsburgh Pirate players actually voted to strike in June. But it would be two decades before Murphy’s pioneering efforts bore fruit.

An even more serious threat to baseball peonage was the upstart Mexican League, whose promoter, Jorge Pasqual, flashed wads of cash in front of star players to induce them to jump. Musial was offered a five-year, $125,000 contract (multi-year contracts were of course completely unknown in Major League baseball then). He elected to stay home, but the Cardinals prudently if not very generously raised his salary by $5,000. The Cardinals’ best pitcher, Max Lanier, did jump, as did others, although no marquee names were among them.

The Lords of Baseball, meanwhile, took preemptive action. The MacPhail Committee, chaired by the Yankees’ flamboyant owner, Larry MacPhail, was well aware of the threat posed by unionization. It also privately conceded that the reserve clause couldn’t survive a court challenge.

To protect the status quo, the committee suggested that token concessions and representation be offered the players— “pap for noisy brats,” as the sports columnist Red Smith put it— to defuse the push for a union. Where the carrot didn’t work, the stick would be applied: Anyone jumping to the Mexican League was to be banned from professional baseball for five years.

Breaking the color line

The MacPhail Committee took another hard-line stand as well. It voted all but unanimously to maintain the color bar that had kept African-Americans out of professional baseball. The lone opposition came from Branch Rickey of the Brooklyn Dodgers, who had already signed a former UCLA star athlete named Jackie Robinson to a minor league contract.

The committee’s motives were financial as well as racial, because rent from the Negro Leagues for the use of stadiums was a significant source of revenue, and the owners correctly foresaw that admitting black players to the Majors would doom the Negro League system. These deliberations were secret, of course, and those involved were instructed to destroy all record of them.

One copy survived, to wind up in the hands of a Congressional committee five years later. By that time, Jackie Robinson had been joined in the majors by a number of African-American athletes, including a young Alabaman named Willie Mays. The Lords of Baseball remained unscathed.

One happy ending

Some of Weintraub’s most compelling chapters trace Robinson’s year with the Montreal Royals in 1946. The Royals’ manager was a deep-dyed Southerner named Clay Hopper, who when told that Robinson was joining his club asked Rickey in genuine bewilderment whether he really thought that Negroes were human beings. That’s a fairly famous story.

Less well known is that at the season’s end, when the Royals had won the Little World Series with Robinson as their star, Hopper walked up to the departing Jackie, shook his hand, and said, “You’ve been a great ballplayer and a fine gentleman. It’s been wonderful having you on the team.” Some stories do end well.

The 1946 season itself ended, as the 2013 one did, with the Red Sox facing the Cardinals in the World Series. The Cardinals won that one on the burst of speed and daring that scored Country Slaughter from first base on a single, a play still debated nearly seven decades later.

History, as Marx said, repeats itself the second time as farce, so perhaps the obstruction call on Allen Craig’s head-first tumble over Will Middlebrooks that ended Game Three of this Series will similarly remain a topic of discussion. Tart it up as you will, baseball generates such moments as nothing else in our national conversation does.

Standing room: $750

For all its pleasures, the 2013 Series nonetheless left this viewer with a deep sense of irony. In 1946, America was putting a great war behind it; in 2013, our wars seem unending, and the relentless promotion of them through the “heroes” saluted at each contest, not to mention the collateral-damage victims of the Boston Marathon bombings, gave the games the aura of a Pentagon-National Security Agency propaganda show. The players solemnly lined up midway through Game Five for Cancer Awareness Month seemed similarly a giant advertisement for America’s omnivorous medical industry.

World Series seats have always been pricey, but standing room tickets for Game Six in Boston were selling for $750. In effect we had a game played by millionaires before an audience that was nearly as privileged. (It was Larry MacPhail who introduced corporate suites and boxes to Yankee Stadium in 1946.) This development, too, has distanced the people’s game, although all sports are now played by and increasingly for the rich, at least at their upper levels.

I don’t suggest a return to the MacPhail era. But the monetization of sport, like so much of American culture, has drained much of the fun from our games.

Finally, there was the hero of this World Series, Boston’s David Ortiz, almost the only black face on the diamond for either team in the sport that Jackie Robinson once integrated. That, to be sure, was an irony. But Ortiz is also an outed steroid user whose late-career spurt entails skepticism at the very least. Looking at the bunting, listening to the hoopla, watching the whole slickly packaged spectacle glide by, I had to wonder what in it was not somehow tainted, somehow fake.