“An Uninteresting, Second Class Sport”
Late in the 1899 season, The Chicago Tribune editorialized on the state of the game. The paper was convinced that baseball’s best days were behind it:
“Once upon a time this city put on mourning when its ball club lost a game and when the club returned from a victorious tour it had a Dewey welcome. Men left stores and offices to go to the ball field. They knew the players on the home team and exulted in their powers. There is no more of that. There is no longer any civic pride in the local team. Businessmen no longer attend the games. In this city and in other cities baseball has ceased to be a high-class sport. It has become a low-grade pastime. It is patronized by the class of people who are interested in bicycle races, long-distance pedestrian contests, gamblers, horse races and poolrooms. Baseball, once the sport of men and women of taste, is now the diversion of hoodlums.”
As for why the game was no longer of interest to “men and women of taste,” The Tribune said:
“There is no room for doubt as to what has pulled it down from its former high state. Commercialism in part has done it. The players have become chattels. Teams are bought and sold and are transferred from city to city as if they were livestock. The men who are playing in Chicago this year may be playing in Cleveland or New York the next. That cuts up all sense of local pride in a club…There have been teams which really belonged to Chicago. Of late years, there have simply been organizations of hirelings whose owners instructed them to hail from here.
“Professional baseball is in the hands of a few men whose sole object is to make all they can out of a sport they have ruined. There is no competition among them. That championship, in the winning of which cities took so much pride once, has become a farce.”
The actions of Frank DeHass and Martin Stanford “Stanley” Robison was a particular source of the paper’s ire. The Robison brothers, owners of the Cleveland Spiders, purchased the bankrupt St. Louis Browns and transferred Cleveland’s best players, including Cy Young, Nig Cuppy, and Jesse Burkett to the St. Louis club, now called the Perfectos. What was left of the Spiders finished with a 20–134 record.
“Sometimes one man owns two clubs and makes draft on one to help out the other. If it becomes evident that Cleveland must be at the tail of the procession, its best men are shifted over to the St. Louis organization, both being under one ownership. Requisitions are made on Baltimore for the benefit of Brooklyn and on New York for that of Boston. No city can have any feeling of city proprietorship in a club under such circumstances.”
The behavior of fans was of equal concern:
“Rowdyism has come in along with commercialism and has finished what interest was left in the game. Quiet, decent people can no longer go to baseball games because of the vulgarity and ruffianism displayed there.”
The Tribune felt current players were of lower moral character than those of the previous generation:
The morals of the players have deteriorated. They used to try to behave like sportsmen. They act now like foul-tongued bullies. When a question comes up for the umpire to settle, the players surround him and blackguard and threaten him. He is fortunate if he escapes without bruises. Fair decisions cannot be expected from a man in danger of being mobbed. Occasionally the contending players come to blows and the spectators, who went to see a game of ball, have to witness a game of slugging, garnished with profanity.”
How low had the game gone?
“Baseball has fallen so low that gamblers do not think it is worth paying any attention to. They have not dropped it because they fancy it is not ‘on the square,’ but because it has become an uninteresting, second-class sport. It does not interest them now any more than a race between professional bicyclists does. Baseball has become a recreation of the people whom commercialism, vulgarity, and Rowdyism do not displease.”
The Tribune continued their crusade against the “uninteresting” sport a month later, with an “account of the more disgraceful of the many rows witnessed by spectators of baseball games.”
