you're listening to the brian d o'leary show your sanctuary for serious content in an unserious
culture all right welcome back we got tom wolf thomas wolf here new book baseball in the roaring
2020s, the Yankees, Cardinals, and the captivating 1926 season.
Tom, welcome.
Thank you.
Great to be able to talk about some old-time baseball.
Absolutely.
Almost 100 years ago now.
Yeah, 99 years ago was the 1926 season.
Yeah, and you weave in a bunch of history before that that sets up why this season was –
I don't know if it would you call it the most compelling season or just the most interesting season?
You picked this season 1926 for a reason.
Yeah, the reason really a couple of reasons.
One of them is that it came out of my research for a book I wrote about the 1932 season, which is the book The Called Shot,
which was about the Cubs and Yankees and the 1932 World Series and Babe Ruth's Called Shot.
and in doing that the research for that book i did a lot of research into ruth of course
and i was interested in hornsby rogers hornsby who was the manager of the cubs in 1932
up until august when he got fired in the middle of a pennant race so in 32 ruth and hornsby didn't
didn't meet and so i was looking back into you know when hornsby and ruth played in different
they played in the same era but they played in different leagues but the one the one season where
they did collide, their careers collided, was 1926.
So that kind of got me hooked on 26.
And then when I looked at the Yankees and the Cardinals
and what their career, what their franchises had been like in 1926,
the Yankees were, the Yankees in 25 had finished 7, 28 games out of first place.
Ruth had a terrible season.
He was basically written off after the 1925 season.
So the Yankees from 25 to 26 went from almost last to first,
and Ruth had this rebound year.
So that gave a lot of dramatic – in a big way.
In a big way.
And then for another several seasons, he had a whole other phenomenal
second half of the career until he went to Boston for the break.
Right, right.
Right.
No, you're exactly right.
And, you know, Ruth's first six years with the Yankees up through 1925, you know, he was kind of the marvel of the American League.
He introduced home runs as the dominant way to score in a baseball game.
And he became a celebrity and, you know, this outstanding player who slumped in 25 at age 31.
And people wrote him off because he was 31 and overweight, clashing with his manager.
But if you look at the career statistics from 31 to 38, the next seven seasons, Ruth averaged more home runs and more RBIs than he did when he was in his 20s.
So he had a complete reversal from 25 to 26 and ongoing up until, as you know, the Boston Braves when he finished his career there in 1935.
Right. Yeah. So we could go any number of ways.
This book is so rich with facts.
And so I guess to give the listeners an idea, not only is it the Yankees, the Cardinals, and the entire 26th season, but you incorporate what else is going on in the sporting world, including the rise of college football, boxing and horse racing, the golden age of sport in the 1920s.
But also an interesting thing you weave in every few chapters is the the nascent Negro Leagues or black baseball in there.
And how that I think 1926 might have been the most impactful season.
season i'm not sure but um you do go back i guess in the in the early teens and it looked like
from what i got out of uh reading you that there was a good chance pre-world war ii
that we were on the track to integration then and then that got stonewalled by you know world
events and other things. And then the Black Sox scandal, which brings in Judge Kennesaw Mountain
Landis, who was really the firm opponent of integration into baseball. Meanwhile, you have
John McGraw in the National League, Connie Mack in the American League, and they had made waves
of signing black ballplayers to their teams. And they got shut down, essentially, by the powers
that be. Do you want to talk about that a little bit? Yeah, yeah. That's a really interesting sort
a facet of baseball in the 1920s that there was this this was like a parallel universe the white
major leagues and then the negro leagues um and the negro leagues really were formed in 1920 um
the visionary you know the person behind it really is a is a very important person in baseball history
his name is rube foster and he started as a pitcher and then he became a manager and then
he became an owner and then he basically became an executive who tried to pull together all the
barnstorming teams that played black baseball into a league with a set schedule and a postseason
and he set that up basically in 1920 and the first colored world series i believe was in 1924
so he was the sort of the owner manager of the Chicago American Giants and then he had a health
crisis in 1926 and was hospitalized in a mental institution in Kankakee Illinois and he kind of
faded out of the game at that at that point but it becomes a pivotal year because that's the year
first of all, it was a really terrific postseason series,
which we can talk about later between the Chicago American Giants
and the Atlantic City Giants, an 11-game postseason.
That struck me.
I had not heard that before.
I'd heard of the nine-game seasons.
I think 1924, perhaps, in the major leagues was the last nine-game series.
I kind of like that, but I've talked with some friends about maybe bringing that back.
But the 11 game season was, or series seemed like a bridge too far to me.
But you got to realize, I think, that they were playing for money.
And the more gate receipts they could get.
And then you had, you know, you're in October and they played these games of this World Series in a number of different cities.
And the weather was a problem.
Some people didn't show up. They showed up in mass, what in Chicago, but not in a couple of the other cities, which I thought was I don't know why.
I'm guessing is, you know, daytime and weather related, but week, weekday and weather related, perhaps.
Yeah And of course the 11 games they played they didn plan to play 11 They planned to play best of nine but two games ended in ties because of darkness And so in order to get five
for either team to get five wins,
they had to go 11 games.
And in four, as you know,
which is really unique,
in four different cities,
they moved around.
The teams moved around
and played the post-season
Colored World Series in four different places,
which allowed different fan bases
to enjoy the games live.
Right.
Yeah.
And so reading this
and knowing a little bit about Rube Foster,
but not a ton,
I gathered that, you know,
but by him, you know,
you mentioned a health crisis.
There was a,
he got stuck in a room
and maybe breathed some fumes
or something on accident
and then was, you know,
mentally incapacitated.
Then health just went downhill quickly.
And I think he died four years later
or something like that.
But it sounded like he was a cult of personality
that may have been able,
and he was a pretty young guy in his early 50s,
I think at this point, correct?
And it was a cult of personality almost
that he sounded like on the track
to bring this organization together.
I think early on,
he had designs on not only
having the best black ball players
play in the big leagues,
but and i'm not sure here maybe you can shed some light on it was his intent to then have
a separate black league just like they had uh the the minor leagues of black or white minor leagues
i guess was that his intent or was that just part of the culture perhaps at the time that you know
you could maybe, maybe put some guys in the big leagues,
but let's leave everything else the way it is.
Do you know anything about that?
Yeah. My,
my take on that is that his ultimate goal was integration of the,
of the two leagues that the best black players and the best white players
would play together in one league.
Basically what happened began, began,
it began to happen in 1948 with Jackie Robinson. Yeah. I mean, that was,
that was his overall vision, I think. And I thought as he thought as a way to get there,
there needed to be more black teams playing white teams. And one of his ideas,
which he threw out to John McGraw, who was favorable towards it, and also to the Chicago
Cubs and White Sox, was that when visiting teams came to Chicago to play the Cubs or the White Sox,
they could have an exhibition game against his Chicago American Giants, which would be an all-black team against an all-white team.
And I think that got shot down by Major League Baseball because owners were really concerned that if the white Major League teams got beaten by the black Major League teams,
this would spur integration at a time when the country wasn't ready for it.
And where white owners were concerned about how it would affect their bottom line also.
Yeah. And I noticed it was right about 1920 when this really came to a head.
And at that time or prior, you'd have black clubs playing, say, in the California Winter League that you mentioned, which had, you know, they bring their whole team.
And it would just be wouldn't be an integrated team, but it'd be an integrated.
it was an integrated league same thing in the cuban winter leagues you'd have the but those
that was an integrated league as far as i understand like there's black and white
ballplayers playing on the same teams and then you of course you have the barnstorming teams later on
in the 30s um and stuff these guys in the winter time barnstorming would play together and that's
why you know a lot of the uh you know big league ballplayers at the time really advocated for
integration. But I see the the this is almost a story of white hats and black hats. And I really
think I see Kennesaw Mountain Landis as the black hat. I don't know what your what your take on
Landis is, but at every stop, he figures in in this story, not only in, you know, you mentioned
a little bit of the Black Sox, but that's been gone over and over.
But there was an interesting tangent to the Black Sox story, which involved perhaps, I'm
a little dubious on the history, but Ty Cobb and Trish Beaker allegedly betting on a game
late in the season in 1919, just before the World Series would have started between the
Reds and the White Sox.
You want to talk about that a little bit?
Yeah, that's fascinating. And it's a bit of baseball history I didn't know. I mean, this was something I came across. I probably had heard of it at some past time, but I certainly didn't register with me until I started doing the research into the book.
So the whole TRIZ speaker Ty Cobb scandal, I should put that in quotes, it was an alleged scandal, really.
It arises from a game that was played late in the season in 1919, right before the Black Sox series for the Cincinnati Reds.
And the allegations were made by a pitcher named Dutch Leonard, who had previously pitched.
He had previously played for the Red Sox as a teammate of TRIZ Speaker.
And he had played as a player for the Tigers when Ty Cobb was a manager there.
So he basically got blackballed out of baseball in 1925.
People hated him.
I mean, Ty Cobb said him.
Okay. I wasn't quite sure about that in any right, but it makes more sense that.
Yeah. So Leonard basically got blackballed out of baseball by Ty Cobb, who sold his contract to the Pacific Coast League after he cleared waivers.
And when the waivers were available, True Speaker could have taken him.
But True Speaker decided not to take him. Cobb sent him to the minor leagues.
Speaker was player managing the Indians at the time.
Right, right.
So this is all happening in the American League.
And so Leonard was very bitter about this,
and he felt like he had participated with Speaker and Cobb in a fixed game back in 1919.
And as evidence, he had letters that were written to him by Cobb and by Smokey Joe Wood,
who was a player with the Indians.
So he had this hard evidence.
Yeah, I want to talk about that a little bit. Are we sure that these letters were authentic?
You're the first person who's raised that with me. It's been reported in the biographies of Cobb and Speaker, and I did not come across anything that suggested they weren't.
And when Cobb and Speaker were interviewed by Judge Landis in December of 1926, they didn't assert that the letters were were fake.
So I think if they had been faked, faked in some way, it would have come would have come out.
Well, the letter, the letter that you quote from Cobb was a bit ambiguous on what may or may not have happened.
And so so let's backtrack a little bit. This happened in 1919.
in the middle of the 1926 season, which makes this story so fascinating, that happens in
26 it six and a half years later roughly and Leonard comes out with this allegation that he keeps more or less under wraps but it six and a half years later he already he been blackballed from baseball uh for several months
now or from the american league anyhow he's moved back to california where he's a rancher farmer
etc and it and he's he's bitter he's he's mad at Cobb and Speaker thinking he they betrayed his
trust or something but as you state nobody liked him so maybe that was the motivation
of getting him get him out like nobody wanted to sign him sorry uh you know that happens in
baseball sorry you're a jerk nobody likes you and you're not gonna play right well I think you've
summed it up really well. Leonard really felt like he'd been blackballed and that it was
Cobb and Speaker's fault and that this, you know, denied him basically two years of salary.
And because in the year that he got sent to the minors or was sold to the minors,
he was 14 and 11. He was 33 years old and still pitching productively. Cobb just didn't want him
on his team. And so I think that over that period of time, from the time he got blackball to the
time he made the letters more public or brought them to the attention of Major League Baseball,
he just got angrier and angrier. I mean, he was prospering out in California. He had a very
prosperous farm. So it really wasn't a money issue. I think it was more of an ego issue and
and a revenge issue.
And he even really admitted that later
that he had gotten his revenge
because he took the letters to Ban Johnson,
who was president of the American League,
and said, I'm going to sell these to the newspaper
unless you buy them.
And so basically Ban Johnson paid him $20,000.
Yeah.
And that was big money at the time.
That was a huge salary.
Yeah, it was hush money, basically.
If Leonard would shut up about it,
Ben Johnson would try to keep it quiet to protect the integrity of Major League Baseball.
But of course, it got out.
It got out.
And this is another fan.
I mean, yeah, read the book.
But for crying out loud, this makes it even more interesting.
I didn't know that Ben Johnson and Judge Landis, Commissioner Landis, had an ongoing feud.
and so this you know johnson had it taken care of most let's say it was going to be it was gonna be
okay um and then landis put his finger in there right right yeah johnson thought he could keep
it quiet and from may until september he did keep it quiet there were only a few people who knew
about the letters or and what had happened but then ban johnson felt he had to tell the other
presidents of the American League. And in that meeting, the president of the American League
said, you have to turn this over to Judge Landis. And that brought Landis in and brought Landis in
in conflict with Van Johnson. The two of them had feuded for a long time. They were very similar men
in a certain way. They were both devoted to baseball, but autocratic and egotistical. And
Van Johnson had been involved in baseball as an executive back into the 1800s. Landis really
started his career in baseball in 1920. So there was a kind of rivalry also over each of their
roles and past histories. Yeah. And so fast forward, they end up coming to an agreement
that both Speaker and Cobb would retire from the game of baseball. Cobb was 39, 40 years old.
Speaker was roughly the same age. They both had long careers. There was no Hall of Fame at the time,
but certain like Cobb was the best player in the game, pardon me, before Ruth came around and
they, they agreed, he agreed to retire, but then there was a settlement that this was interesting.
Like, so Speaker and Cobb were friends and they, they ended up going on a hunting trip.
And I presumably to talk about what they were going to do, they decide, they decide to quote
unquote retire well they still had some playing days left and what happens is you get uh they
decide essentially that they want to play so landis forces the hand and makes their teams
so they were both player managers of their respective teams cob with the tigers speaker
with the indians and then they're essentially somehow or another forced to the tigers and the
Indians were forced to release them.
And Cobb, I've read a little bit about this, but he had, you know, a swan song.
He could go play for the most famous manager in baseball history, Connie Mack, for Philadelphia.
I can't remember whose speaker played for in that intervening year.
Washington, perhaps.
And then he goes and joins Cobb for their final 1928 season.
Well, it turns out that the Philadelphia Athletics had been building up a powerhouse underneath the Yankees.
You talk about the 1927 Yankees, which you mentioned offhandedly in this book.
They were a real powerhouse compared to this 26 team.
But then the Athletics become the premier team and win two pennants after Cobb and Speaker both leave the team.
So I think that's a fantastic thing that, man, this book would have been 700 pages if you, you know, all those stories together.
it. Right. I'd still be writing. Yeah. Yeah. And you're right. I mean, the Yankees, of course,
the 1927 Yankees, the murderers row Yankees was basically the same roster that they had in 26.
It's just that some of their players matured. Ruth had to come back here. You know, he had 60
home runs in 27, but Gehrig was now a third year player. Holmes was a third year player.
You know, they just became a better, better team, same roster, better team. And the Yankees won in
27 and 28 World Series wins four straight sweeps.
And then the athletics won 29, 30 and 31,
three straight American League pennants until they were dethroned in 32 by the
1932 Yankees.
They're called shot year.
So yeah.
Maybe your next book is this interregnum between the two squads.
Yeah.
So I got a couple more questions before we finish.
I don't know where to go here.
I think you mentioned at the top, Hornsby and Ruth.
So I think this is an interesting thing.
You know, the Hornsby's player manager, the Cardinals,
they win the Panette, they win the World Series.
Babe Ruth gets caught stealing.
I knew this, but it still baffles me,
even after reading it and the explanation.
He gets caught stealing down three to two,
two outs in the ninth inning of game seven of the world series and then the game's over the game's
just over and hornsby tags out ruth to end the game on a stolen base and it's like man there's
a lot of weird stuff but i think any coach now would see that and go apoplectic miller huggins
said yeah he's trying to make something happen ruth was like i didn't think he was looking at me i
thought I could take the base. And for crying out loud, I just I don't know if you have any more
insight on that stolen base, because that could be a book in of itself, I think. Right. Right. Well,
I think it sort of exemplifies the era of the era, the era of the 1920s in some ways. I mean,
risk takers. I mean, you had you had people performing on the wings of airplanes. You had
Charles Lindbergh flying across the country People were optimistic and believed in themselves and were willing to take risks And you know the risk Ruth took was a big one of course
And as you set it up, you know,
seventh game of the World Series, bottom of the ninth inning,
one-run game, Babe Ruth, and it's in Yankee Stadium.
And the pitcher, of course, for the Cardinals
is 39-year-old Grover Cleveland Alexander,
who's the pitching hero of the 1926 World Series.
And his entire career.
Yeah.
I mean, and Alexander won two games and saved one in Yankee Stadium.
All three of those games were in Yankee Stadium in front of Yankee fans.
So my take on Ruth stealing second base or attempting to steal second base, there was
only one stolen base in the whole series that the Yankees achieved, which was Ruth stealing
second base off Gorgic, Cleveland, Alexander in game six.
So Ruth had it in his mind.
I've already done this.
I can do it again and Ruth later said the way Alexander was pitching and he hadn't given up a
hit in his relief role the way Alexander was pitching we weren't going to get two hits in a
row to get a to get a run and send us to extra innings so I needed to get to scoring position
and as you said he thought Alexander wasn't paying attention to him and Alexander did have
a kind of slowed, slowed down demeanor on the mound.
So I think he lulled Ruth into feeling that perhaps it was safer to steal or not.
And we forget that the other individual in that whole sequence of four players that were in that sequence is the catcher, Bob O'Farrell,
who was a superb catcher, a really excellent defensive catcher who was the MVP in the National League in 1926.
and he's the one who makes the throw to Hornspeed to tag Ruth out.
Ruth accepts it.
He slides in.
He's tagged out.
He gets up.
He shakes hands with Hornspeed, congratulates him, you know,
kind of good try and game and series is over.
I can't imagine.
What would go on today would be just, you wouldn't hear the end of it.
And, of course, the 26th season, just to go just a step further,
was also kind of a launching pad for the St. Louis Cardinals,
who had never been to a World Series,
but won six of the next 21 World Series.
Yeah, I mean, rivaled the Yankees.
And I mean, still today, they rivaled the Yankees, you know.
Yeah, from 26 to 46, 21 seasons,
15 of those World Series were won by either the Yankees or the Cardinals.
First the Gas House Gang, then the DiMaggio years.
All right. And I got a couple more minutes.
I think this is an important thing to address, the difference between the American League and the National League. One, I don't know if we're going to be able to address this in enough time, but Landis only allowed the aforementioned Cobb and Speaker to be taken a new contract to be signed by an American League team.
He was not going to allow them to go to the National League.
These were two separate leagues.
They were two separate leagues really through the 80s, through the 90s even.
And then in the mid-90s, they kind of coalesced a bit more.
And then really in the year 2000, they came under one umbrella as Major League Baseball.
But they were two different leagues.
And they had different styles, different players.
Players rarely moved between leagues like they do now.
And I think my my contention is that not only you had the American League, you had the National League in 1914.
You mentioned briefly the Federal League. And this is also the time that black baseball was trying to get in.
But there's all these competing leagues with different influences.
and it became, it really became American League and National League as the forces and the two
major leagues that we know of today. There are now considered, I don't know how many, there's
probably eight or 10, 12 statistics or leagues that they pull statistics from, including a lot
of the Negro League stuff.
My contention is that I think the players should be recognized
and all this stuff, but I think there's also many seasons
within the American National League that should not be recognized
as major league quality, 1918 being one, 1943, 44.
I'd argue 1981, 1994, and certainly 2020.
I don't know what you do about the stats.
It's an entirely different question,
but calling them a championship season.
Not my point.
My point is you have the American League and the National League,
and they were rivals.
And they were rivals when I was growing up.
The All-Star game meant something.
They wanted to beat each other's brains in.
It was a different style of game even prior to the designated hitter,
I think is the delineation mark we see in modern times.
But really, they were different leagues.
Yeah, and we've mentioned earlier, there was also the Negro Leagues,
where there was also a different style of ball.
I mean, each league sort of nurtured a kind of strategy
and a kind of way of playing the game.
And as you think back, I think of how exciting it must have been
to be a fan in Chicago or Philadelphia or New York or in Boston,
where you could watch teams from both leagues in the same city.
I guess the point is that the World Series meant something a lot more back then when these two leagues came together at the end of the year.
No interleague play.
They play each other in spring training sometimes, but spring training wasn't even as organized as it is now.
They'd barnstorm their way up the coast and play exhibitions in towns that had decent weather all the way up to north.
They'd start their season mid-April, not March 28th or whatever they do now.
And they'd wait for the weather to be good.
And then they'd end.
I think the 1926 season ended on September 19th.
World Series starts October 2nd.
It's weather-related.
And they packed their schedule in the summertime full of doubleheaders.
And it's not like that today.
But I don't know.
Interesting.
I don't know where we go with that.
But we're running out of time, Tom.
Well, it's part of the great narrative of baseball history, which goes back to the 1800s.
And I mean, there is no other sport that we follow.
Maybe boxing and horse racing would be exceptions.
But certainly no other team sport that we are aware of.
that has such a long history with so many different changes of personnel,
as well as philosophy and style of play.
Well, I appreciate your time here again today, Tom.
It's wonderful.
I really enjoyed the book.
And I enjoyed the other book called Shot quite a bit, too,
because it's a very similar narrative where you're weaving historical characters into the story.
I like that, too.
I encourage you all to pick that up.
baseball in the roaring 20s yankees cardinals and captivating 1926 season you get that from
university of nebraska press uh any last words tom um just go out and enjoy baseball you know
go to go to the park minor league park major league park it's a it's a great game people
should keep going to keep should be filling up the stands there you go all right appreciate your
time we'll talk to you later tom thanks okay thank you appreciate it
you