Life During Wartime | Baseball Prospectus

True story: In the winter and early spring of 1926, Brooklyn and Queens, New York experienced a rash of burglaries. The burglar or burglars broke into homes, stole their radios (the consumer electronic of the day), and sold them to a fence for $6 or $8 a pop. There were over 30 such robberies in a small area, so the police sent in 70 officers every night and attempted to catch the burglars in the act. They did, too. The crimewave proved to be the work of one man, 26-year-old Brooklynite Paul Hilton. Though the police succeeded in surprising him on multiple occasions, he kept getting away. Officers confronted him four times and four times were shot. Tragically, one of the victims, Detective Arthur Kenny, died of his wounds. 

Now Hilton wasn’t just a thief but a real threat to public safety. Detectives delved into his background, trying to figure out how to find him, and learned he had a weakness: The guy loved baseball. As the Brooklyn Times Union put it, “an unconquerable fondness for baseball carried over from the days when he was a crack player on the sandlots of Brooklyn.” After one prior arrest he had even given his name as Frank Merriwell. 

Opening Day 1926 was approaching. That year the Dodgers began the season against the Giants at the Polo Grounds in Manhattan. The police gambled that Hilton couldn’t stay away and staked out the ballpark. They guessed right. At gametime, he showed up at the Polo Grounds ticket booths, standing in line with the rest of the fans. The police surrounded him and demanded he identify himself. “I’ll show you some ID,” Hilton said, and reached into his coat. With one dead and three wounded, the police weren’t taking any chances. One of them whacked Hilton over the head with a blackjack before he could withdraw his hand. Indeed, he had been going for a gun. The cops disarmed him, hauled him off to jail, to trial, and, in February of the next year, the electric chair at Sing Sing.

Question for the class: Is this a baseball story?

Before you answer, here’s another tale with which to test that question. It also happened at the Polo Grounds, and as before the visiting team was the Dodgers. On the Fourth of July 1950, a 54-year-old man named Bernard Doyle took in the holiday double-header at the ballpark. He was escorting Otto Flaig, the 13-year-old son of a neighbor. Just as the game began, Doyle had turned to Flaig and was about to speak when, suddenly, he died. He just dropped back in his seat and was gone. The obvious inference was that the heavyset middle-aged man had suffered a heart attack, but the bullet-hole in his head argued otherwise. Someone nearby, well outside of the ballpark, had fired a gun into the air. By cruel chance, the bullet came down on Bernie Doyle’s head and—ZONK—he was dead.

Restating my question for the class: Is this a baseball story? 

In 1942, Babe Ruth supported the war effort by buying $100,000 of bonds. “We’ve got to knock those guys—Hitler, Mussolini, and the [Japanese]-out of the box.” In 1961, Twins manager Cookie Lavagetto argued that there were too many Latino players in the major leagues. “I’m just trying to save the national game,” he said. “How will you ever fill the stands for the World Series if you have nine Yankees from Venezuela playing nine Giants from Puerto Rico? And don’t forget, it could come to that.” In 1987, Dodgers general manager Al Campanis appeared on the late-night news show Nightline and said that he believed that Black people “may not have some of the necessities” to be managers or general managers. 

Class, are these baseball stories? If these events happened today, how should Baseball Prospectus cover them? Hint: There isn’t one answer to this question. 

We could, in each case, simply not acknowledge that these stories had happened. There’s always another Cleveland Guardians story to publish, so we wouldn’t lack for columns. We could turn the site into the Baseball Daily Will Chase DeLauter Ever Stay Healthy? Prospectus. That would be a legitimate approach, and it would satisfy some readers. Alternatively, we could make reference to these stories, but take a neutered, see-no-evil approach: “Despite Al Campanis’s controversial remarks last week, the Dodgers have player of color Pedro Guerrero. He’s one of the best hitters in baseball, so functionally what the GM said doesn’t matter. Guerrero went 4-for-4 last night as the Dodgers beat the Cubs 7-2, so you see what we mean. The real question is whether they’ll add another pitcher, Black, white, or whatever.” That is, we might have strapped on blinders and limited ourselves to Dodgers wins and losses, period.

Conversely, we could have chosen to participate in what became a national conversation on race, trying to give the readers perspectives that were informed by our area of expertise. Since absolutely none of us went to college and majored in baseball studies, that includes a number of subject areas in addition to what we know about the game. That fund of knowledge is an asset to our work, because it allows us to view the game from non-horsehide perspectives. Again, we could alienate ourselves from that knowledge and only provide you with a fraction of what we think and know. This is not, and has never been, a publication that was about rote baseball reportage, but a journal of well-reasoned opinion. If it had been that there would be no reason for it to exist now, because what was once fringe saber-thought is now mainstream. Still, it might be what you want. Again, there is no single answer as to how limited or expansive our definition of baseball should be.

Consider possible approaches to the Babe Ruth story above for our staff in 1942:

Ignore it. Babe Ruth was still a celebrity, but he hadn’t been an active ballplayer for over six years. Instead, write about who is going to play first base for the Yankees with Johnny Sturm in the army.
Write about it, but only to note that Ruth’s stance clashed with that of several anti-administration (read: Republican) owners, so the Babe probably just shot himself in the foot if he still happened to be looking for managerial jobs. Dumb move, Babe! Note that this version would inevitably be read as political in one sense or another.
Write about it in an attempt to contextualize what Ruth’s remarks meant. Was Ruth coming out as a patriot or an antifascist? Doesn’t his specifying the three fascist nations at war with the United States unavoidably mean that he’s both? Is there a way to be only one or the other in January 1942 America? 
Write about it and expand the canvas even further: What would the defeat of fascism mean for the nation and therefore for baseball? What would the victory of fascism mean for the nation and therefor for baseball? This approach, by its nature, would have to consider serious issues beyond who would be playing third base for the Browns in a postwar world, including, “Is Hank Greenberg coming back? Will he be allowed to come back?”

When the events of the day drag the nation out of whatever we pretend is normality and an approach must be devised that will return us to the status quo ante bellum, the potential answers will be political or politicized, and there is very little that one can say that won’t be viewed by some as taking a position on one side or the other. Speaking is a political act. Not speaking is a political act. Often just trying to reason through the problem will seem to some readers a political act. This publication experienced that at the height of COVID (to be clear, COVID is not over; it has been deemphasized). The question for a baseball site was, “How do we safely get the players back on the field and ourselves back in the stands?” Since the answers to that question were approximately the same as they were for the rest of society, that meant grappling with the major controversies of the day. 

We find ourselves in a similar position now. On Monday of this week, January 26, we published “Inside and Outside,” Matthew Trueblood’s reflection on the simultaneous occurrence this past weekend of the Twins winter fanfest and the summary execution of Alex Pretti on the streets of the city. As is sometimes the case when we publish a story that is not strictly about what happens inside the foul lines, we received the comment reproduced above. (I’ve blacked out the name of the commenter because it is not my intention to stigmatize the commenter, but to discuss the issue they raised.)

Matthew’s piece was about baseball, even if it was neither a scouting report nor an “entertainment.” It was about the cognitive dissonance induced by the simultaneous occurrence of a Twins fan event, which is a peacetime frivolity, and a fellow citizen being shot down on the street by soldiers, which is a wartime atrocity. Matthew said that Pretti was killed “without provocation, reason, or responsible thought,” a characterization that some might view as political but is no different than his giving his evidence-based view of Byron Buxton’s future possibilities. Without it, his takeaway for the reader, his baseball takeaway, would have been unsupported: First, that “the Twin Cities are not currently in a place where baseball can be savored without interference,” and second, that whereas we yearn for escapism, “Neither baseball nor any other distraction will keep you above the fray.” 

That is a form of baseball analysis, one that unfortunately may turn out to be more timely and indispensable than, “Don’t believe the hype about catcher Kyle Pufferson; he went 0-for-100 against sliders and word has gotten out.” This, more than Kyle Pufferson (or, alas, Konnor Griffin) is what is happening right now, to all of us, and to baseball too, and it would be strange and irresponsible to ignore it.

Though I risk repetition, let me clarify this one more time for the TL; DR crowd:

Matthew was analyzing a baseball problem, an old one: Is there a place for sports in times of emergency? One could ask the same question of art, poetry, theater, anything that isn’t the emergency itself.
His conclusion was that yes, there is, but it doesn’t obviate the emergency, which is growing.
This is entirely appropriate subject matter for a baseball site. What happens to the nation affects the game. To insist that we not comment on something that has and will affect both players and spectators in myriad ways is akin to saying the PA announcer on the Titanic should have stuck to saying, “Shuffleboard is now available on the Lido deck” up until the point the ship went down.

Again, there is room to disagree about whether this is mete for a baseball site. I like to say, “baseball is everything and everything is baseball,” meaning that society at large is reflected in the game and vice-versa, so those connections are always there for us to observe. Craig Goldstein’s version is the pithier, “Baseball is everything it touches.” Your mental construction of the ideal baseball site could be as narrow as ours is expansive: Just the projections. Just the prospect reports. Just the transaction analysis. You’re entitled to feel that way, even if that’s never all this site has been. 

Let’s conclude by going back to the two episodes of gun-violence at the Polo Grounds with which we began. There is no one way of writing about them, even today. We could tell you that on Opening Day 1926 the fine southpaw Jesse Petty pitched a one-hit shutout as the Dodgers triumphed 3-0; although the Bums made two errors on the day, it was Giants left fielder Irish Meusel’s dropped fly ball that put the home team behind for good. We could reassure you that the Giants were still going to be the better team in the long run. We could also, should we choose to do so, talk about the over-availability of guns in society, and while many of us like to pretend that our Second Amendment rights make us safer, often the reverse is true. Paul Hilton was caught in a spot that, in a modern ballpark, would have preceded the ballpark metal detectors. Your only protection from someone like him is to hope that he never gets hold of a gun in the first place.

Finally, if we really wanted to make a point about today using yesterday, we might observe that those century-ago New York cops did not execute Hilton even though he had already killed one of their number. They disarmed him without killing him, and whatever happened to him afterwards was in accordance with his right of due process as an American citizen. I’m not saying we would do that, only that we could, and without ever leaving the baseball context. The late murderer Mr. Hilton provided us that opportunity because, like us, he really loved the game, and also like us on occasion, he loved it far too much for his own good. 

There’s no need to go through the pitiful death of Bernie Doyle the same way, but one imagines it would end in the same place that Matthew’s story did, asking in one sense or another, in a world in which roving gangs can yank you from your home or your car without provocation or warrant, in a world in which one can receive a fatal gunshot at any time, if there is a place in our lives for baseball. 

Asking “Can there be baseball?” seems like the most basic, essential thing a baseball publication can do. You might not like that we have to ask it, but don’t get mad at us for that. Be angry at the world in which we’ve chosen to live.