The Year They Called Off The World Series – Benton Stark, 1991 ★

Everybody Loses

The New York Yankees have amassed more World Series rings than any two other baseball franchises combined, but weren’t always the sport’s overlords. The year 1904 found them in the unique role of outsiders and underdogs chasing after their first championship.

They weren’t even the Yankees then, but the Highlanders. How might a Highlander World Championship team be enshrined at Monument Park? We will never know, because they didn’t win the 1904 Series. Nor did anyone else that crazy season, the titular subject of this book.

Benton Stark took on a challenge: How to write a book about a non-event? It’s a challenge he never comes close to surmounting. The Year They Called Off The World Series borrows from, in tone and sometimes in text, well-regarded books on early 20^th-century baseball like The Glory Of Their Times and Eight Men Out, throws up a lot of factual regurgitation, repeats itself, and struggles at narrative flow. Whatever your fascination for baseball lore going in, this will be a chore to read.

“…[I]n 1904, in the heart of the age of relentless, selfish assertiveness, what, today, would be unthinkable was not only thought of but actually carried out,” Stark explains in his Prologue. “In that year, a couple of self-centered, driven men who owned and directed one well-positioned team decided, for purely personal reasons, to call off the World Series.”

Surprisingly, these two self-centered, driven men were not connected to the Yankees or their Highlander forefathers. They were John T. Brush and John McGraw, owner and manager respectively of the New York Giants, an indirect antecedent of my own beloved New York Mets. The Highlanders, in Stark’s telling, were the good guys.

New York City emerges early as the centerpiece of Stark’s book:

The principal characters, their personal quarrels and business interests, and the teams most directly involved in the calling off of the World Series were all located in New York. That one of baseball’s most bizarre historic episodes should occur in this city should come as no surprise. Aside from the normally dynamic, if not agitated, qualities New York infuses into most of its residents and activities, this was the place where baseball, in its modern form, was born, nurtured, and grew up, and this was the place where the great majority of baseball’s organizational schemes were drawn and redrawn right through the early twentieth century.

I knew I was in trouble when Chapter 1 opened on Alexander Cartwright walking along a pastoral Manhattan in 1845, having just devised the first rules of baseball. For the next several dozen pages, Stark plods through sidelong details in a tome just over 200 pages. He’s clearly filling space.

Long sections explain the merger of New York City with Brooklyn, the dimensions of Manhattan’s Trinity Church, and how Pittsburgh was once spelled “Pittsburg.” Much attention is spent on the plight of New York City’s immigrant poor, certainly horrific but unconnected to the non-playing of a World Series.

Worse than the sense of treading water is Stark’s clumsy style. He has an annoying Dr. Evil habit of employing quotation marks excessively. He puts them around “Cy” Young and “Honus” Wagner, a first in my experience which gets more glaring with repetition.

Ban Johnson, president of the American League, strove in Stark's telling to differentiate his product from the rowdier, older National League: "Rowdyism and profanity have worked untold injury to baseball," he once declared. Image from https://baseballhall.org/hall-of-famers/johnson-ban.

Speaking of repetition, Stark does that a lot, too, repeating certain factoids such as how Giants pitcher Iron Joe McGinnity got his name or why Brooklyn’s baseball team called themselves the Superbas for a time. I can understand his forgetting he brought it up before; there’s a lot of forgettably-presented information here.

The more I read, the more I wondered: Where was the editor? Stark was a high school teacher writing his first book; clearly he needed help that Avery Publishing Group was unable or unwilling to offer.

Stark just needed some help getting out of his own way:

A cruel truth regarding a man’s fate is that it is sometimes abruptly rerouted by an event that subjectively obtrudes heavily at a particular moment even if it shouldn’t mean a great deal by any objective measurement.

He could made the same point in plainer, shorter form, say “little things mean a lot,” but Stark is not that kind of writer.

If I was Stark’s editor, the first thing I would have done was scrapped the tedious opening chapters and told him to focus more on the year 1904 and the specific situation of that year – like how strong the New York Giants were in the National League that season and the surprising emergence of the New York Highlanders in the American League – then detail what became the conflict between them over the hearts of New York City baseball fans. When Stark does get down to business explaining what happened in 1904, the result is fairly readable.

Take his description of how the Giants played all the angles, right down to groundskeeper Tom Murphy:

He could take the third base line and shape it so that bunts had to remain fair; he could mix, wet, and roll the infield to make sure that “Baltimore chops” would bounce out of reach for base hits; and he could hide finely shaved soap around the mound so that enemy pitchers who tried to dry their perspiring hands on the dirt would see their best deliveries sail off in various unplanned directions.

You can’t lose writing a book about foul-tempered winners as McGraw, who tangled with umpires, league executives, and his own players. “I got along with him fine,” shortstop Al Bridwell recalled. “He only suspended me once, for two weeks. It was on account of I socked him.”

New York Giants manager John McGraw, pugnacious-looking even at ease. "In playing or managing, the game of ball is only fun for me when I’m out in front and winning," Stark quotes him saying. "I don’t care a bag of peanuts for the rest of the game." Image from https://www.investors.com/news/management/leaders-and-success/john-mcgraw-played-hardball-to-win-pennants-and-world-series/.

Stark took that quote, and a couple of others I noticed, from Lawrence Ritter’s The Glory Of Their Times, without direct attribution. He does cite that classic in a long bibliography, but without footnotes or any attribution in the text, his use of it felt sloppy to say the least. Here and throughout, I felt Stark merely collecting information and depositing it in raw form, without much writerly sensitivity.

Again, where was the editor?

However deep his research, factually, I didn’t feel like Stark was on solid ground. For example, he keeps mentioning the Chicago “Colts” rather than the Cubs, saying the team switched names later on. But it was already the Cubs by 1904; they stopped being the Colts in 1897.

Most damaging to the merits of The Year They Called Off is the way Stark details its core thesis, when he finally gets around to it. Essentially, the problem that year was one of jealousy and bitterness. Being in the more established baseball league, the Giants thought the Highlanders interlopers on their turf. Add to that the fact that McGraw had briefly managed in the American League before falling afoul of its president, Ban Johnson. Johnson had been instrumental the year before in setting up the first modern World Series [between the Boston Americans and the Pittsburgh Pirates, won by the Americans] and craved a rematch.

Giants’ owner Brush had none of it: “There is nothing in the constitution or playing rules of the National League which requires its victorious club to submit its championship honors to a contest with a victorious club of a minor league.”

An interleague rivalry had simmered in Gotham for awhile. When Boston traded star slugger Patsy Dougherty to the Highlanders for an injured rookie, National League President Harry Pulliam cried foul, saying the deal “savored of the hippodrome.” However in keeping with future Yankees steals involving Babe Ruth and Giancarlo Stanton, it did strike observers then as fishy. As Stark notes, New York City was baseball’s major market; as the less established of the two major leagues, the American League had a clear interest in propping up its local property.

But Stark doesn’t tie down his points with hard evidence. He presents them instead in the form of inferences gleaned from the public record of the time. Pulling back the curtain on the machinations of the National League and the New York Giants from an 87-year remove in time is a formidable task, but Stark doesn’t seem to try in any investigatory way. Instead, he just retells the known record with a bit of commentary.

What was the record? That Brush, in response to an outcry in and outside New York City, would help ratify a new arrangement between the leagues that made the World Series into an annual affair. This ends up being the whole point of the story.

Stark does get in some gameplay, focused on the Giants and Highlanders, with some secondary attention given to their main respective rivals, the Cubs and the Americans. [Stark refers to the Boston team as the “Pilgrims,” a more understandable error than the Cubs/Colts one as Pilgrims has been used for years in baseball histories, erroneously. He does also correctly say “Americans” was an alternate name, so I won’t dock him anything on that.]

I did like some of the detail Stark provides on the players of the day. Highlander pitcher Jack Chesbro won 41 games in 1904, but would be haunted until death by a wild pitch thrown in the last game that season. Giants pitcher Christy Mathewson, tied for third place in most career wins, came to games draped in “a long linen duster.”

But Stark hardly makes history come alive. More often it feels deader than a mackerel. The Year They Called Off The World Series takes an intriguing footnote of an idea and transforms it into a stubbed toe.