Breaking The Slump; Baseball in the Depression Era

By Charles Alexander, Reviewed by James Floto

Professor Charles Alexander (Distinguished Professor of History, Ohio University) has long been recognized as one of baseball's pre-eminent biographers, having chronicled the lives of Ty Cobb, John McGraw and Grover Alexander in singular fashion. So highly regarded are these biographies that on its book review show, C-SPAN features a frontal view of the Grover Alexander book on its permanent shelf.

Turning his talents to the history of an entire era, Alexander has hit yet another home run. The book is a well-balanced account of both the baseball of the '30s and the larger social history of that turbulent era.

When one thinks of baseball in the 1930s, images of the later stages of Babe Ruth's career and Jimmie Foxx and Lou Gehrig in their prime come to mind. As well as the great Yankee teams of the period, there was the Gas House Gang, some great Chicago Cubs teams and perhaps the most underrated dynasty of all time, the Philadelphia Athletics of 1929-32, featuring Foxx, Lefty Grove, Mickey Cochrane and Al Simmons. John McGraw, at the end of his stellar career, managed some good teams in the early '30s, before being replaced by Bill Terry, who piloted the Giants to three pennants during the Depression.

Those stories are all here in cogent detail, but Alexander also reminds us of many of the changes that baseball underwent. Many fans think that from the turn of the last century, when the National and American Leagues stabilized into the two permanent leagues we've had ever since, to the 1960s, when expansion forever changed the face of the game, that baseball was pretty much static. Not true. In the Depression era, for instance, night ball was added and became a permanent feature of the game. It not only allowed working fans to go to games after closing time, it changed the style of both hitters and pitchers as they adjusted to artificial lighting. Radio also became a permanent staple of the game (the first games were actually broadcast in 1921, but it was during the hard times of the Depression that the image of families sitting around the radio developed.) Minor leagues developed into farm clubs for the major league clubs, changing their former independent status.

Professor Alexander, after many years of teaching his popular baseball history course -- the book is dedicated to "...the more than three thousand people who've studied American baseball history with me at Ohio University" - has noticed certain patterns emerging. For instance, in Chapter One he concentrates on the observation that "what... strikes us is how much smaller, in that long-ago time, were so many things in American life." For starters, there were two fewer states and the population of the U.S. was less than half of what it is now. Most of that population was in the East and all of Major League Baseball's cities, with the exception of St. Louis, were east of the Mississippi. There were only 16 clubs and all but five cities had two teams, three in the case of New York. There was a smaller distance between players and fans in those days. Games were played in the more intimate "parks" or "fields" rather than the "stadiums" of today. These fields were close to commercial districts, connected to street car or subway lines. Even the players themselves were smaller; the 1936 Yankees' pitching staff averaged 6 feet and 180 pounds. By 2000, it would stretch to 6' 2" and 204 pounds. The players of that era made considerably smaller amounts of money, both in absolute and relative terms.

It is observations like these that separate this book from so many baseball histories that are basically just a collection of facts, with little perspective added. After reading Breaking the Slump I had a better understanding of the Depression itself as well as of the baseball of that hardscrabble era. Alexander scrutinizes the Depression years season by season, from "The Last Fat Year, 1930" to "Recovery and War, 1940-1941."

Take, for example, his fourth chapter, "The Leanest Year, 1933." It was the very worst year for the ravaged economy. FDR was inaugurated that year, but it wouldn't be until at least 1934-35 that his New Deal programs began to significantly affect the economy. Likewise, it was a particularly, well, depressing year for baseball.

Attendance was off 40-45% in both the majors and minors from 1930. Familiar old baseball names were disappearing as quickly as Oklahoma topsoil. In a cost-cutting effort, the Washington Senators fired the venerated Walter Johnson as their manager. John McGraw was replaced by Bill Terry as the Giants' skipper and would be dead by the following February. William Veeck Sr., the Cubs' president, and Phil Ball, owner of the St. Louis Browns, also died. In Long Beach, 110 people died in an earthquake and the swaying of the Cubs' minor league Wrigley Field nearly destroyed the spring exhibition between the Cubs and Giants.

Babe Ruth's bat didn't die, but it was obvious that the Babe, now "a pathetic, starched figure in the outfield" was over the hill, even if he did hit .301, with 34 homers and 103 RBI - great numbers for most hitters but not for the Sultan of Swat. His decline seemed to symbolize the nation's general decline. When the Yankees returned to New York from spring training in Florida, sports writer Rud Rennie noted that "we came home... through Southern cities which looked as tho they had been ravaged by an invisible enemy... They even would not come to see Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig."

At the other end of that season, which did not provide as many thrills as magnates, fans and sports writers hoped for, even the World Series was a lackluster affair, with nary a game selling out. The showy Philadelphia A's had an off-year and Connie Mack would dismantle the team the following season. The Yankees lost the pennant to the Johnson-less Senators, who actually fared better under 'boy manager' Joe Cronin. The Giants played good enough ball to win the pennant, but didn't have the pizazz of McGraw's three decade reign.

The one bright event of the 1933 campaign was the first All Star game. Originally planned as a fund raiser whose proceeds would go to aid indigent retired players, the contest between the best players of both leagues became an annual event. Luckily, the greyness of 1933 would not become an annual event. The country still had a long way to go for recovery, but 1934 saw the machinery of the New Deal begin cranking out positive change, and the Cardinals' Gas House Gang would return some of the color to the game.

Alexander also gives extensive coverage to the minor leagues and Negro Leagues. The minors shadow the majors throughout the book; the Negro Leagues, aprropriately, receive a separate chapter. Giving a consolidated history of the Negro Leagues from their founding in 1920 through their glory days of World War Two, Alexander reminds us that Satchel Paige "was, apart from Babe Ruth, possibly the best-known baseball player in the Western hemisphere."

As for major league ball the immediate pre-war years saw a changing of the guard as the DiMaggios, Bobby Feller, Stan Musial and Ted Williams shone in the spotlight. Meanwhile, Babe Ruth sat by the phone, waiting for the call that would return him to the majors as a manager, a call that would never come. Dizzy Dean's dazzling right arm was mined before he reached thirty. Lou Gehrig fell ill at the ballpark after months of masking the disease that would be named for him and kill him off in two years.

Just as one generation was replacing another, a new economic mode was replacing the old economy amidst enormous controversy but with overall success. The Star Spangled Banner became baseball's official anthem and most of the great players joined in the war effort. A new world would emerge after the War, both in baseball and society in general. There were more players from southern and eastern Europe than in previous decades, although, interestingly enough, most ballplayers still hailed from smaller towns and only 11% of all Major Leaguers came from cities that had big league clubs. While integration would have to wait until after the war, blacks and their supporters were pushing harder than ever to wipe out segregation. Just before the War, Satchel Paige's all-stars would face the Bob Feller all-star unit. In 1941 attendance was back up to 10.5 million, besting the old record of 10.1 million in 1930. The number of fans attending games had dipped as low as 6.1 million in 1933.

As Breaking the Slump comes to a close with the outbreak of World War Two, one feels he has a greater understanding of just how that horrendous slump was broken. This is an excellent book, one that reminds me of the work of Professor Harold Seymour.