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$Title{Baseball Reporting}
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Lang, Jack}
$Subject{Baseball Reporting news Chadwick BBWAA Frick Young Award}
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Total Baseball:  The Game off the Field


Baseball Reporting

Jack Lang

If baseball really was invented by Abner Doubleday at Cooperstown, N.Y., in
1839, we have only the findings of the Mills Commission to support the theory.
That commission, formed in 1905, relied heavily on the rambling recollections
of an old mining engineer named Abner Graves to reach the conclusion that
Doubleday indeed "devised the first scheme for playing baseball." Graves'
testimonies were later found to be chock full of inaccuracies.
     There can be no dispute, however, as to when the art of writing about
baseball began. In the mid-1850s William Trotter Porter gave a decided lift
to the game with extensive coverage in his publication Spirit of the Times.
Until Porter's reports began appearing regularly, baseball in America was
ignored in most publications.
     John Rickards Betts of Tulane University, in his American Quarterly paper
"Sporting Journalism in Nineteenth-Century America," credits Porter with being
the greatest "antebellum sports editor" in America. On December 10, 1831, he
published the first copy of Spirit of the Times. It was, for a while, the
country's leading sports journal. But while it carried great reports on
racing, prize fighting, and even cricket, it did not devote space to baseball
until the 1850s.
     When he did start reporting on baseball, Porter is credited with having
given it the title of "the national game" and also with having printed the
first box scores (although this claim is questionable) and "dope" stories.
     Shortly thereafter, Frank Queen and Harrison Trent founded the New York
Clipper, which devoted even more space to baseball. One reason was the
addition to the staff of Henry Chadwick, who had begun his career as a
journalist in 1844 by contributing to the Long Island Star. Chadwick, who had
played baseball briefly in his youth, was a devotee of the game and wrote of
it voluminously.
     Alfred H. Spink, in his book The National Game, published in 1910,
credits William Cauldwell, editor of the New York Mercury, as being the first
man to write about baseball for a daily newspaper. Spink's authority for this
assertion is a gentleman named William M. Rankin, one of the nation's leading
reporters on sports in the late 1880s. Rankin, who was the official scorer
for the Mutual Club, also wrote extensively for such New York papers as the
Times, Tribune, World, Mail, and Express. He was considered one of the game's
leading authorities. According to Rankin, Cauldwell was writing about
baseball by 1853. But Cauldwell found the work of editing his newspaper and
writing about baseball too exhausting, and he soon hired Chadwick to write on
baseball for the Mercury. It was not long before Henry Chadwick became the
leading baseball authority in America.
     If weekly and daily publications were slow to catch on to the popularity
of baseball, they caught up in the late 1880s. Magazines like The Police
Gazette and Sporting Life devoted considerable space to the game. Soon
editors of daily newspapers recognized the interest in baseball. James Gordon
Bennett, one of the world's most respected newspapermen, who was editor of the
New York Tribune, was one of the first to increase coverage of the game.
     In time every newspaper in America devoted a full page to sports . . .
focusing on baseball. Charles Dana of the New York Sun and Joseph Pulitzer of
the New York World are recognized as pioneers in the creation of entire sports
departments. By the 1890s, most newspapers in America had created a sports
staff. It was in the final decade of the nineteenth century that sports
writing began to develop as a full-time job on the nation's newspapers.
     At the time of his death in 1908, Chadwick was clearly established as the
nation's leading baseball authority. Chadwick, who even in his youth had been
honored with the nickname "Father Chadwick" for his role in the development of
baseball, was such a busy writer that the history of his various affiliations
is in conflict. He is credited in some publications as having worked for the
Brooklyn Eagle in 1856 and the New York Clipper in 1857. In others, Chadwick
is reported to have written for the Mercury before any of the others, or for
both at the same time.
     Whatever his affiliations, Chadwick was the most prolific of the
early-day baseball writers, and eventually he abandoned daily reporting of the
game to concentrate on weekly roundups and books about the game.
     Chadwick originated what is known today as The Baseball Guide, published
by The Sporting News. He wrote and edited the first baseball guide in 1860,
the Beadle's Dime Base Ball Player. Later he edited the DeWitt's Guide from
1869 to 1880 and, finally, Spalding's Baseball Guide from 1881 until his
death.
     Chadwick's involvement in the game was more than just writing of it. He
was instrumental in changing several rules, is credited with having perfected
the box score, and was most concerned about drinking, gambling, and rowdyism
at ballparks. He led campaigns to clean up the game. Baseball officials of
the day heeded his advice.
     As early as 1868, Chadwick wrote the first hardcover book in America
devoted strictly to baseball. Appropriately, it was titled: The Game of Base
Ball.
     Chadwick's writings on the game led to honors that would be unheard of in
the modern era. In 1894, the National League elected Henry an honorary member
and two years later voted him a lifetime pension of $600 a year. If a major
league today awarded a baseball writer a pension, it would result in an
investigation.
     Honors continued for Chadwick thirty years after his death. In 1938, one
year before the Hall of Fame opened, Chadwick was elected to the Cooperstown
shrine as one of the great contributors to the game along with Alexander
Cartwright. It was the same year that Grover Cleveland Alexander was elected.
Although baseball writers are now honored with the J.G. Taylor Spink Award
and scrolls in their honor are mounted in the Hall of Fame Library, Chadwick
is the only former baseball writer with a bronze plaque in the main hall,
alongside those of Babe Ruth, Ty Cobb, Joe DiMaggio, Cy Young, Mickey Mantle,
Ted Williams, and others.
     Another early-day baseball writer who earned great respect from the
leaders of the game was Timothy H. Murnane, known as the Silver King. When
Murnane died in 1917, he was so highly regarded that the American League paid
for and erected a huge marble tombstone over his grave in Old Calvary Cemetery
in Roslindale, Massachusetts.
     The tombstone cites Murnane as a "pioneer of baseball . . . champion of
its integrity . . . gifted and fearless writer."
     Murnane was a baseball player who turned to writing after his playing
days were over. He founded the Boston Referee in 1885, and his writings
attracted the editors of the Boston Globe, who in 1888 hired him as their
baseball writer, a job he held until his death. In his thirty years as
baseball editor of the Globe, he was one of the most influential writers in
the country and even found time to serve as president of the New England
League for twenty-four years.
     Upon his death, it was learned that Murnane left only a small estate to
his widow. Immediately, a benefit all-star game was scheduled between great
players of the American League and the Boston Red Sox with all proceeds to go
to Murnane's widow.
     On September 17, 1917, 17,119 Boston fans attended the game which
included a pre-game show featuring Ziegfield Follies stars Will Rogers and
Fanny Brice. The all-star team included such names as Grover Cleveland
Alexander, Walter Johnson, Johnny Evers, Wally Schang, Shoeless Joe Jackson,
Buck Weaver, Stuffy McInnis, Eddie Collins, Ty Cobb, and Tris Speaker.
Heavyweight boxing champion John L. Sullivan coached first base and Babe Ruth
pitched the first six innings for Boston.
     All appeared without pay. That was evidence of the esteem in which
Murnane was held.
     Until the creation of full-time sports staffs in the late 1890s, writing
about baseball was, in many cities, a hit-and-miss affair. In many areas, the
reports of games were turned in by club secretaries or part-time
correspondents. It was often less-than-objective reporting.
     With the advent of full-time sports reporters and sports editors in the
early 1890s, especially in New York, other major cities suddenly followed
suit. This resulted in localized styles of writing and language familiar to
the areas. John Rickards Betts describes it in his American Quarterly article
on nineteenth-century journalism: "The most important developments in
sporting journalism outside New York were taking place on the Chicago
newspapers. Charles Seymour of the Herald, Finley Peter Dunne of the News and
a reporter for the Times were creators of a novel style among baseball
writers, a style based on picturesque jargon, lively humor and grotesque
exaggeration."
     Hugh Fullerton, who was one of the great turn-of-the-century baseball
writers in Chicago, noted that "the style of reporting baseball changed all
over the country."
     In New York and Boston the style of baseball writing emphasized expert
knowledge of the game. In Chicago and other western cities, the style
involved more humor and cynicism. Often the final score of the game was
secondary. Reporters described games with a great flourish and seemed intent
on capturing readers' interest with their individual writing styles. Here is
the way one Chicago Times writer reported a Chicago Cubs game on September 26,
1888:
     "The ninth inning of yesterday's ball game was a marvel of beauty. To
describe it one needs a big stretch of canvas, a white-wash brush, a pan of
green paint, and an artist's hand. Words are hardly expressive enough . . .
Mr. Schoeneck is a large secretion of fat around considerable bone and
muscle, and he knocked the ball out of the diamond and puffed down to first
base . . . Immediately after which Mr. Buckley bunted the ball and went to
first, his fatness moving to second.
     "The inning had not been particularly gorgeous up to this moment, but
with the hitting of a fly by Mr. Hines it took on a resplendent and glorious
aspect, for Mr. Van Altren [Van Haltren] got under the fly, gauged it with
his blue eye, and muffed it beautifully. When the ball reached Capt. Anson
it had lost much of its virulence and was bounding gently long, smiling the
while. But if it had not been for a chunk of lava fresh from the earth it
could not have had more fun with Capt. Anson, for it rollicked out of his
hands and into them again and all over his person, blithely tapped him in the
face, and danced away. Indeed, it was a beautiful error, that one of
Anson's--a regular sunset error flushed and radiant with shadings of purple
and a mellow border.
     "Mr. Van Altren picked it up and looked about irresolutely. He was
debating whether he should sacrifice skill to art, and being a young man of no
high culture in this respect, he esteemed art as naught, but hurled the ball
to the plate to catch Mr. Hines. But art was triumphant for all, for Mr.
Van Altren's irresolution had been fatal. The ball came to the plate a second
after Mr. Hines crossed safe, and Mr. Raphael, Mr. M. Angelo, and Mr.
Turner will have to take a seat near the door."
     A reporter describing a game in that manner today would not be assigned
to cover the next day's game. But it was in that style that games were
recorded around the turn of the century. A baseball writer, covering a game
at three o'clock in the afternoon, had until three o'clock in the morning to
write his story. This enabled many to write what some journalists later
referred to as "fabulous narratives." Writers were bent on influencing the
readers with their imaginative use of the language in long, descriptive
phrases. Space in newspapers was plentiful, and baseball writers frequently
used two and three columns to describe a single game. It gave writers an
opportunity to develop their own style in an effort to capture the imagination
of the readers.
     Nowhere was this more evident than in Chicago, where such writers as Sy
Sanborn, Ring Lardner, Hugh Fullerton, and Charles Dryden were winning over
readers with their often humorous accounts of baseball games. Lardner came
out of South Bend, Indiana, and covered the Chicago Cubs for the Inter-Ocean,
the Examiner and later the Tribune. Eventually he abandoned daily baseball
writing and made his mark as an author of short stories, many with a baseball
theme. You Know Me Al and "Alibi Ike" are two of his baseball classics.
     Fullerton was considered the most remarkable forecaster of his day, and
his predictions on the outcome of games were sought in every major league
city. When he died at age seventy-two in 1946, he was hailed in his
obituaries as "the game's original dopester." But for all the expertise and
humor that he brought to his readers, Fullerton is best remembered in
journalistic circles as the writer most responsible for exposing the Chicago
White Sox for throwing the 1919 World Series.
     Prior to the 1919 Series, the fearless forecaster had predicted an easy
victory for the Sox against Cincinnati. But early in the Series Fullerton was
convinced that the Sox were not giving it their best effort. In his summary
of the Series after Chicago lost, Fullerton suggested as much. But he was not
about to let go of it there. Fullerton went to New York, where he followed up
leads that tied some of the White Sox to gamblers. The New York Evening World
published a toned-down version of his theory, and Fullerton was criticized by
members of his own craft. But his persistence continued until he convinced
American League president Ban Johnson to investigate the matter. Using much of
the information Fullerton supplied, Johnson brought the investigation to a
head late in the 1920 season. The result was a trial in which eight players
were found innocent. But the same eight were later banned from organized
baseball for life by Judge Kenesaw Mountain Landis, the newly appointed
commissioner of baseball. Fullerton's investigative reporting was responsible
for the findings of the commissioner.
     Fullerton was a baseball purist, and his Ten Commandments of Sports
were widely published. They read:

  1. Thou shalt not quit.
  2. Thou shalt not alibi.
  3. Thou shalt not gloat over winning.
  4. Thou shalt not sulk over losing.
  5. Thou shalt not take unfair advantage.
  6. Thou shalt not ask odds thou art not willing to give.
  7. Thou shalt always be willing to give the benefit of doubt.
  8. Thou shalt not underestimate an opponent or overestimate thyself.
  9. Remember that the game is the thing and he who thinks otherwise is no
     true sportsman.
 10. Honor the game thou playest; he who plays the game straight and hard
     wins even when he loses.

     It was common at the turn of the century for baseball writers to begin
their stories with a few lines of verse. Grantland Rice, who came out of
Nashville, where he had been sports editor of the Tennesseean, to join the
staff of the Cleveland Plain Dealer, was perhaps the most widely known writer
in this style. His poetic jingles were read throughout the American League
and many attempted to copy his style.
     Rice did not remain long in Cleveland. He longed for the South and
returned there. But then he returned North to New York, where his syndicated
column appeared throughout the country. Rice actually was better known for
his football writing than he was for his baseball work.
     Besides Rice, another leading baseball writer of the early twentieth
century who frequently began his stories with a few lines of verse was
Franklin Pierce Adams, who wrote under the byline of "F.P.A." He wrote what
is known as "Baseball's Sad Lexicon" during a New York Giants-Chicago Cubs
series in 1908. Quoted to this day, it read in part:

     Ruthlessly pricking our gonfalon bubble,
     Making a Giant hit into a double,
     Words that are weighty with nothing but trouble,
     Tinker to Evers to Chance.

     That verse, as much as their actual records on the field, is credited
with leading to the induction of the Chicago Cubs' infield trio into the Hall
of Fame.
     Charles Dryden, born in 1857, moved about as much as any baseball writer
in the late 1890s and into the 1900s. He covered the California League for
the San Francisco Examiner and then moved to the New York American and on
again to Philadelphia with the North American. But in 1905 he was offered
what was then considered the highest salary paid a baseball writer and moved
to the Chicago Examiner. The salary was reported to be $100 weekly.
     It was in Chicago that Dryden gained fame with his nicknames for the
baseball people he wrote about. He called Charles Comiskey, the White Sox
owner, "the Old Roman". He termed the light-hitting White Sox the "Hitless
Wonders." Chicago Cubs' manager Frank Chance was dubbed "the Peerless
Leader." It was also Dryden who coined the phrase about the hapless
Washington Senators: "Washington . . . first in war, first in peace and last
in the American League."
     Dryden was a charter member of the Baseball Writers Association of
America (BBWAA), which was formed officially in 1908. It was an association
born of necessity when baseball writing in the early years of the twentieth
century was attracting some of the nation's outstanding young writers and
baseball itself was dominating the sports pages. Only the baseball owners
failed to recognize the importance of this feisty band of scribes. They were
treated--or mistreated--as a necessary evil.
     At the 1908 playoff game between the Chicago Cubs and the New York Giants
at New York's Polo Grounds, Hugh Fullerton arrived to find actor Louis Mann in
his seat. This was not uncommon. Giants manager John McGraw loved to hobnob
with Broadway actors and often told them to sit in the press box. When
Fullerton asked Mann to vacate the seat, Mann refused. No Giants official
would order him to move. At first Fullerton attempted to write his story
sitting on Mann's lap, but eventually he sat on a box in the aisle next to him
and covered the entire game from that seat.
     Baseball writers continued to suffer mistreatment during the Chicago
Cubs-Detroit Tigers World Series that followed. The writers covering the
Series were outraged at the treatment accorded them. In Chicago, out-of-town
writers were placed in the back row of the grandstand. In Detroit, the
writers were compelled to climb a ladder to the roof of the first base
pavilion, where they were forced to write in the rain and snow that hampered
the Series. Finally, unwilling to endure these conditions another year, the
writers decided to organize. At the request of Jack Ryder of Cincinnati and
Henry Edwards of Cleveland, Joseph S. Jackson, sports editor of the Detroit
Free Press, arranged a meeting room in the Hotel Ponchartrain on the morning
of the final game. That was October 14, 1908. Present at that first meeting,
the founding fathers of the Baseball Writers Association of America, were:
Tim Murnane and Paul Shannon, Boston; Charles Hughes, Hugh Keough, Malcolm
McLean, Hugh Fullerton, Bill Phelon, and Sy Sanborn, Chicago; Ed Bang and
Henry Edwards, Cleveland; Jack Ryder and Charles Zuber, Cincinnati; J.W.
McConaughy and Sid Mercer, New York; William Weart, Philadelphia; George
Moreland, Pittsburgh; Joseph Jackson and Joseph Smith, Detroit; James
Crusinberry, Hal Lanigan, W.G. Murphy, and J.B. Sheridan, St. Louis; and Ed
Grillo, Washington.
     Joseph Jackson was appointed temporary chairman and Sy Sanborn,
secretary. Tim Murnane was appointed treasurer, and he passed the hat to
collect $1 dues from each of the founding fathers.
     A more formal meeting was held in New York in December 1908 at the annual
winter meetings of the two leagues. Fullerton, Edwards, and Weart, who had
been appointed in Detroit to draw up a constitution, listed four items as the
main objective of the BBWAA. They were:

  1. To encourage a square deal in baseball.
  2. To simplify the rules in scoring baseball games and promote uniformity
     in scoring.
  3. To secure better facilities for reporting baseball games and better
     regulation of the scorers' boxes during both championship seasons and
     World Series at the parks of the American and National League Clubs,
     hereinafter to be designated the major leagues.
  4. To bring together into a closer bond of friendship the writers of
     baseball throughout the United States and Canada.

      The organization was enthusiastically endorsed from the start by both
leagues. Promise of full support was received by league presidents, who
appointed the local representatives of chapters in each city to serve as
custodians of the league press boxes.
     Immediately conditions improved throughout baseball. No longer did
writers have the problem of outsiders occupying seats in the press box.
Interlopers were immediately escorted out by park security men upon orders of
the local BBWAA representative. The writers had the backing of the league to
police their own work area.
     By 1910-11, the baseball writing fraternity was accepting into its ranks
some of the bright young writers of that era--men who would go on to greater
heights in the field of literature. Covering the Giants in New York that year
were men like Grantland Rice, Damon Runyon, Heywood Broun, and Fred Lieb.
Rice later became recognized as the dean of America's sportswriters; Runyon
became the chronicler of Broadway night life and the characters who inhabited
the Great White Way, while Broun went on to the editorial side of newspapers
and founded the Newspaper Guild of America. Lieb was a prolific writer who
was one of baseball's leading biographers.
     Elsewhere in the country, other fine young writers were honing their
skills covering baseball. Some of the greats who were regular beat writers in
those days were Red Smith, Frank Graham, John Kieran, J. Roy Stockton, Warren
Brown, John Carmichael, Shirley Povich, John Drebinger, and Tom Meany.
     There was a coterie of writers in that era whose names were synonymous
with baseball for the simple reason that they covered baseball from the first
day of spring training until the final out of the World Series. A writer
assigned to the Tigers or Cardinals or Pirates or any other club stayed with
that team the entire season, traveled to the cities in each league, and made
every road trip. Writers associated with one club were almost as well known
as the players they wrote about.
     Baseball coverage did not vary until after World War II. It was standard
practice up to then for the writers on morning newspapers to wait until the
end of the game and write on who won or lost, and how. The final score might
not appear until well down into the story, but the reporter was writing up the
details of the game. Writers for afternoon papers also often sat in the press
box after the game and wrote their versions, with considerable editorial
opinion and second-guessing. Talking to ballplayers after the game was not
considered a necessity. Occasionally, but not always, writers did visit the
clubhouses after games for some conversation and verification with
ballplayers.
     The style of writing changed after World War II. The need to know was of
primary importance, and reporters for afternoon papers made it a habit to get
down to the clubhouse after a game for what was then known as "the second-day
angle." The afternoon papers of the next day had to offer the readers
something they had not learned in their morning paper.
     But starting in 1946 and in the years that followed, a change in the
style of covering a baseball game was evident--especially in New York. No
longer did the writers on afternoon papers have the ballplayers to themselves
after a game. Dick Young was an enterprising young baseball writer for the
New York Daily News, a morning newspaper. Because of the multiple editions of
his newspaper, he had the time to visit the clubhouse and "pick up quotes" or
find out why certain plays had occurred.
     Young changed the style of baseball reporting with his hustle, and ever
since he arrived, the work of the morning newspaper reporter has not been the
same. No beat reporter nowadays would dare turn in a story unless it had
clubhouse quotes. Editors demand it.
     Along with the enterprise of Dick Young came radio and the television
age. Fans were now able to listen to and watch games at home. What they
wanted in their papers the next day was inside stuff from the players and
managers. For reporters working night games with deadlines approaching, the
job of writing baseball was no longer the sinecure it had been in the first
four decades of the century.
     Picture the baseball writer of the 1930s. All games started around 3 PM.
There was no need for a pregame story, since most newspapers did not go to
press until around midnight. A baseball writer in that era was finished
working around 6 or 7 PM and was free again until game time the next day.
     Today's baseball writer, what with virtually every game being played at
night and early editions at all papers, finds himself working around the
clock. The average writer covering baseball today, especially for a morning
newspaper, will find himself writing three or four stories in a single day.
     Night games and travel have also made it difficult for the modern-day
writer. Before plane travel, all clubs moved from city to city by train, and
the writers traveled with them. Trains left around midnight and arrived early
the next morning in the team's next city. At least there was a night of rest
and time to fraternize with the ballplayers. Today, teams fly out right after
a game, and writers find it impossible to catch the team plane. They most
often travel alone and must handle their own luggage, an added chore the
earlier-day writers did not encounter.
     The result is that fewer writers remain on the baseball beat for any
length of time. The travel, the long hours, and the night games have made it
an arduous task. Before the age of television, it was quite common for a
writer to remain on the beat for twenty to thirty years. Today, a writer
feels "burned out" after just a few years.
     The baseball beat writer's job was always considered the glamour
assignment on any sports staff. Baseball writers were envied for what was
considered an easy lifestyle: spring training in some warm climate around the
middle of February and then a ballgame every afternoon for six months followed
by the World Series. From mid-October until mid-February, the baseball writer
had a relative vacation, covering only signings, trades, and trivial matters.
     The job of the baseball writer became even more difficult in the 1960s
with the advent of the labor movement that created the Major League Baseball
Players Association, the free agency that group won, and the proliferation of
baseball players' agents. Whereas baseball was an eight-month-a-year job for
writers before the union was formed, it is now a year-round chore.
     The job suddenly became more demanding, wearying, and less glamorous. One
New York tabloid in the mid-1980s was forced to change beat writers four times
in five years. The deadline pressures and arduous travel schedule were too
much.
     Despite the constant changes, the BBWAA retains the prestige it earned
shortly after being founded in 1908. Much of this is due to the
organization's annual awards and its responsibility for voting on the Hall of
Fame.
     The major awards the BBWAA votes on each year are the Most Valuable
Player, the Cy Young Award, the Rookie of the Year, the Manager of the Year,
and the Hall of Fame, since the Cooperstown shrine's creation in 1936.
     The idea of a Most Valuable Player Award was first devised by the
Chalmers Motor Company of Detroit in 1911. The company abandoned the award
after four years. In 1922 the American League resurrected the award, but it
was not until two years later that the National League followed suit. By
1929, however, both leagues had quit their sponsorship.
     At the December 11, 1930, meeting of the Baseball Writers Association,
the group voted to make the Most Valuable Player Award their official award.
Three writers from each city in both the American and National Leagues were
selected to vote. The first "official" winners selected by the BBWAA were
announced in the fall of 1931. Since then, the BBWAA has voted on the award
every year. In the late 1960s, the BBWAA copyrighted the award. In early
years, The Sporting News awarded a trophy of sorts to the players selected by
the BBWAA. At their 1944 meeting, the writers decided to make the award on
their own and renamed the MVP trophy the Kenesaw Mountain Landis Award. The
commissioner died one month later, but his name remains on the award to this
day.
     In 1955, Ford C. Frick, then the baseball commissioner, had the feeling
that pitchers were not getting their just recognition--this despite the fact
that five American League and six National League pitchers had already won the
award. Frick, a former baseball writer himself, suggested that a new award be
created honoring the best pitcher in baseball each year. There was to be one
award to cover both leagues. Frick suggested it be called the Cy Young Award.
     The writers went along with Frick. But in 1956, the first year of the
award, Don Newcombe of the Brooklyn Dodgers not only won the Cy Young Award
but also was recognized as the National League's Most Valuable Player.
     After voting a singular award for eleven years, the BBWAA voted in 1967
to award the Cy Young in each league. Frick had expressed strong objection to
the dual awards, but fifteen months after his retirement, it was approved by
then-commissioner Will Eckert.
     In 1947, after Jackie Robinson broke baseball's color barrier, the BBWAA
decided to create a Rookie of the Year Award, naming Robinson as their first
choice. The Chicago chapter of BBWAA had its own rookie award from 1940 to
1946 but dropped it when the entire association decided to sponsor an award
for freshmen. At first, the writers voted for just one rookie in all of
baseball. After Robinson was named in 1947 and Alvin Dark of the Boston
Braves in 1948, the writers elected to choose a candidate from each league
starting in 1949.
     The Manager of the Year Award did not gain sanction from the BBWAA until
1983. Up to then, the Associated Press, the United Press International, and
The Sporting News all had their own awards for managers. Often, three
managers would be named. But the BBWAA Award is now considered the official
Manager of the Year Award.
     Of all the responsibilities of the Baseball Writers Association, none is
taken more seriously than voting for the Hall of Fame. It is, perhaps,
because more members participate and because of the honor accorded a player
elected to Cooperstown. In the first election in 1936, 226 members voted.
More than 450 members now vote in the annual January election.
     The idea for a baseball Hall of Fame was first discussed in 1935 to
celebrate the hundredth anniversary of baseball in 1939. The National
Baseball Centennial Commission was formed. Ford Frick, then the National
League president, was the moving force behind the creation of the Hall of Fame
and the decision to name Cooperstown as the site for the museum. That same
year, the Baseball Writers Association was asked by the Commission to vote for
players to be elected to the Hall of Fame and inducted officially when the
Hall opened in 1939.
     The BBWAA has been charged with that responsibility ever since. Another
group, known as the Veterans Committee, also votes on players, former
executives, managers, and umpires.
     Baseball, especially in recent years, has been the most written-about
sport in America. No longer is it a sport covered solely by the beat writers
for newspapers. It is a game that captures the imagination of authors, a fact
born out by the Hall of Fame Library. By the middle of 1990, the library
contained approximately 25,000 books about baseball.
     By the end of 1990 the library was unable to handle the volume of books
and magazine and newspaper articles that were being written about the game.
Under the directorship of Hall of Fame President Edward Stack, an expansion to
the library was undertaken. The completely refurbished library opened late in
1993 and will include over 30,000 books. In addition, the written words of the
game on file at the library include copies of the New York Clipper from the
1850s, Sporting Life, and The Sporting News. Also, over 250,000 photographs
are on file.
     So important have the contributions of the Baseball Writers Association
of America been to the Hall of Fame that in 1962, the Hall decided to honor
the outstanding writers with an award and a place of honor in the library. The
award was named in honor of J. G. Taylor Spink, former publisher of The
Sporting News. Since 1962, over 40 writers have had their names enshrined in
the writers' wing of the Hall, among them Damon Runyon, Ring Lardner,
Grantland Rice and Dick Young.
     Leonard Koppett, the 1993 honoree, noted in his Cooperstown acceptance
speech: "The daily baseball writer has played an indispensable role in the
creation, growth and maintenance of baseball's popularity. Its commercial
success, as well as its place in American culture, have been based on daily
newspaper accounts, from Henry B. Chadwick down through Red Smith.
     "Even today, when radio and television have surpassed newspapers in
impact, it is the daily baseball coverage from which all other media get their
information about what they decide to emphasize. And even the call-in talk
shows, which set so much of the news agenda, exist only because callers form
opinions from what they read about that they cannot see."
     It is a sport that has encouraged political columnists like George Will
and Pulitzer Prize-winning authors like James Michener to publish books about
the game. Statisticians like Bill James and Pete Palmer publish books annually
with their own theories. The Elias Sports Bureau, statisticians for the major
leagues, issue their own annual Elias Baseball Analyst edited by Seymour
Siwoff and the Hirdt brothers, which tells you, among other things, that in
1989, only 29 percent of the fair balls Tony Pena hit to the outfield were
pulled.
     No sport in America is covered more extensively or comprehensively than
baseball. It all begins with the game and the beat writers who cover it.
Everyone else just wants to get in on the act.