3,257
edits
Changes
→The Sport Today
By the first decade of the 20th century, players were now becoming national superstars. This included Honus Wagner, who was adept at stealing bases as well as hitting.<ref>For more on the early 20th century development of baseball, see: Ritter, L.S. (1992) OCLC: 24792523. The glory of their times: the story of the early days of baseball told by the men who played it. New York, Quill, William Morrow.</ref> One major difference in the game was the ball itself. Baseballs in the early 20th century were expensive, making a single ball often used in an entire game. Even hitting the baseball out of the park required the ball to be retrieved if possible. This allowed pitchers to use this to their advantage, as they contributed to disfiguring the ball, making it harder to hit. Pitchers such as Cy Young began to dominate the game. This was also the period when larger ballparks were now being built, accommodating the much larger audiences coming to games. In the 1910s, new hitters, such as Ty Cobb, emerged and made the game now more offensive-oriented. However, the biggest event was the so-called Black Socks scandal of 1919 between the Chicago White Sox and the Cincinnati Reds. The Chicago White Sox were by far the best team but purposely lost the World Series by taking bribes.
The big turnaround though came with the Babe Ruth era, as his slugging and popularization of the home run in the 1920s now made baseball an internationally known game and synonymous with the United States.<ref>For more on the Golden Age of baseball, see: Frommer, H. (2004) New York City baseball: the last golden age, 1947-1957. Madison, Wis, University of Wisconsin Press.</ref> The combination of radio, increased offense, and the larger than life appearance of Babe Ruth popularized the game to a level unseen for any other sport in the United States. This was time commonly called as the "Golden Age" of baseball, as its popularity was at a frenzy level across the country. Parallel to the Major League teams were the Negro League created by Rube Foster(Figure 2). It was a league of originally eight teams for African Americans and also Latino players. Earlier manifestations of the Negro League existed, but those folded quickly. The Negro National League and Eastern Colored League formed the two mains leagues that played in their own World Series in the 1920s. Players just as skillful as Major League players emerged, such as Satchel Paige, who became a Major League rookie in 1948 at the age of 42. [[File:Chicago American Giants 1919.jpg|thumbnail|Figure 2. The Nego league produced some of the best players in the 1920s and 1930s, with Whites even going to games during World War 2 in particular.]]
Financial problems occurred soon after, however, with a new Negro league forming in the 1930s. In World War II, many African American players were older and so they did not serve in the war effort. They remained and played, where African Americans working in factories and other work increasingly came to watch their games. In effect, as World War II limited the Major League because so many players left for the war effort, the Negro league proved to be a diversion for those in the home front. This likely helped setup the stage for the integration and raising of the ban on African American players in baseball in 1947.<ref>For a history on the Negro league and the African American experience with baseball in the early 20th century, see: Hogan, L.D. (2014) The forgotten history of African American baseball. Santa Barbara, California, Praeger, ABC-CLIO, LLC.</ref>
