One Summer: America, 1927

threw an inside pitch to an Indians player named Ray Chapman that Chapman never saw at all. Since balls were seldom replaced during a game they tended to grow dull and scuffed as the day wore on, a fact that pitchers often exploited to their advantage in fading light. Mays moreover had a submarine-style delivery, which made his pitches even harder to pick up. In any case, Chapman never saw it. The ball struck him on the side of the head at the temple with a sickening thud and with such force that it bounced straight back to Mays, who fielded it and threw it to the first baseman, thinking it had come off Chapman’s bat. Then everyone realized the full horror of what had just happened. Chapman, gravely injured, dropped his bat and began walking in a dazed manner towards second base, evidently making for the clubhouse in centre field. After a few steps, his legs gave way and he collapsed. He was taken to St Lawrence Hospital and died the next day. He never regained consciousness.
    Ruth said nothing of the incident in his autobiography other than that it provoked so much bad feeling among the Indians that Mays wasn’t played against them again that year. Chapman remainsthe only major league ballplayer to have been mortally injured on the field of play.
    The most dangerous part of the ballpark was actually the stands. In the worst incident in baseball history, in 1903 at Baker Bowl in Philadelphia, a wall at the back of the grandstand on which fans were perched gave way without warning and hundreds of people were pitched backwards on to the street thirty feet below. Twelve died and two hundred were injured, many seriously. Remarkably, an even worse catastrophe nearly happened at the same stadium in the spring of 1927, the week before Charles Lindbergh’s flight to Paris. In the seventh inning of a game between the Philadelphia Phillies and St Louis Cardinals on 14 May, a sudden cloudburst – part of the same intractable storm system that was keeping the Atlantic flyers pinned down on Long Island – prompted hundreds of fans in the bleachers to rush for shelter under the covered upper terrace of a double-deck grandstand along the first base line. In the previous inning, the Phillies had staged an eight-run rally, an event so rare in Philadelphia that the fans had reacted with joy, and it is thought that their exuberant stomping may have stressed the ageing structure beyond its frail limits. Now under the extra weight of several hundred people, the grandstand issued a long, plaintive moan and abruptly and spectacularly collapsed. Miraculously, no one was killed outright, though a fifty-year-old lithographer named Robert Haas was trampled to death in the panic that followed. Fifty people were injured seriously enough to require hospital treatment, but all but two were released within twenty-four hours. Never in American history had a sporting disaster been more spectacular and merciful at the same time.
     
    A simple if not very noble reason lay behind years of slack maintenance at Baker Bowl and many other ageing ballparks: economics. Baseball was a treasured institution but a poor investment. Its most elemental problem was that its games were played during the day when most people were at work. In many cities – Boston until 1929,Pittsburgh and Philadelphia until 1933 – Sunday baseball was not permitted either, so many teams had just one day a week, Saturday, when they could hope to draw a good crowd. Even the most successful teams often played before more empty seats than full ones. Yankee Stadium broke all attendance records with a crowd of over 70,000 (including a lot of standees) when it opened for the first time on 18 April 1923, but the next day just 12,500 people turned up. Altogether in the 1910s, average major league attendance was about 4,000. Ballparks were often pretty quiet places in Ruth’s day.
    Apart from a percentage on concessions and profits from exhibition games, teams had almost no source of income beyond ticket sales, and from these they had to fund a formidable range of costs – salaries, spring training, road trips, uniforms and equipment, clubhouse staff, a network of scouts and a home stadium. This last could be staggeringly expensive. In 1913, Charles Hercules Ebbets, owner of the Dodgers, spent $750,000 – as much as the cost of a big office building in Manhattan – building Ebbets Field in Brooklyn, then spent the rest of his life vainly trying to fill it. On the day that Lindbergh