One Summer: America, 1927

interesting unpredictability. At the Polo Grounds, home field of the New York Giants, the outfield sloped so severely towards the fence that from the dugouts only the outfielders’ heads and shoulders were visible, like ships sailing over a horizon. (Polo was never actually played there. The Polo Grounds were named after an earlier field near Central Park where polo was played.) At Griffith Stadium in Washington, the outfield wall zigzagged crazily around five houses and an overhanging tree whose owners had refused to sell when the park was built, providing arresting angles for caroms and amusing confusion among visiting outfielders. In at least three ballparks, including Yankee Stadium, flagpoles stood in fair territory in centre field, waiting to snag any centrefielder who forgot they were there. At Fenway Park in Boston, left fielders had to scramble up a steep bank to catch balls hit to the wall.
    Perhaps the biggest shock to the visitor from today to a ballpark of the 1920s would be how sloppily maintained they were. Outfields were generally little better than cow pastures, and areas of heavy traffic such as base paths and around home plate were often ragged and bare, and grew more so as the season wore on. After rain, groundsmen sometimes spread petrol around the infield and set it alight to dry out the earth – hardly conducive to a fine, delicate tilth.
    Safety features were almost entirely absent. Batting helmets did not exist. Outfield walls were unpadded. Gloves were so inflexible and primitive that a one-handed catch ‘was apt to cause a sensation’, as Marshall Smelser has noted. Bat racks had not yet become standard, so at most parks the players lined up their bats on the ground in front of the dugout, to the considerable peril of catchers or infielders going after foul pop-ups. Outfielders commonly left their gloves on the field, too, when their team went in to bat. There was, in short, a lot to fall over or crash into. People frequently did.
    For fans, it was considerably harder to work out what was going on in the game. Throughout the 1920s no American ballpark had a public address system. Usually there was just a man with a megaphone who called out the names of batters and very little else. Unfamiliar players weren’t easy to identify because uniforms had no numbers. Putting numbers on uniforms didn’t start until 1929, when the Yankees and Indians introduced it. The Yankees then gave numbers to the starting players in the order they batted (more or less), which is why Ruth was number 3 and Gehrig 4. Scoreboards didn’t list hits and errors, so spectators had to know themselves when a no-hitter or perfect game was in progress. Anyone keeping careful score at his seat would become a fount of information for those around him.
    On the field, players were often a lot more casual about inflicting injuries on others. Ty Cobb, who was only a degree or two removed from clinical psychopathy, always slid into base with spikes raised in the sincere hope of drawing blood, but many other players were only fractionally more considerate of their fellows. Throwing at batters was a common strategy accepted by all. Burleigh Grimes of the Brooklyn Dodgers, who was famously bad-tempered, set a record of sorts by throwing at a batter before he had even stepped to the plate. Walter Johnson of the Washington Senators never intentionally threw at anyone, but he hit more than a few opponents by accident. He ended the career of a Lee Tannehill of the WhiteSox when he broke his arm so badly just above the wrist that Tannehill could never again grip a bat. Two weeks later Johnson shattered the jaw of a rookie named Jack Martin. (Johnson, an intensely decent man, always fell to pieces after hurting a player and usually had to be lifted from the game.) Ruth in his autobiography notes that he once tried to brush back a player named Max Flack, and accidentally hit him bang in the middle of the forehead. Flack fell like a collapsing tower, but survived. Ruth recounted the story merely as an example of the amusing things that happened on the field of play.
    Fatalities would seem a reasonable expectation in such circumstances, but in fact only one player was ever killed during the course of play. It was in August 1920 and Babe Ruth was present when it happened. Late in the afternoon in poor light Yankees pitcher Carl Mays, who was known for being aggressive and was disliked by nearly everyone, including his own teammates,