The author's son at T-Ball
In the minds of many baseball fans, the Red Sox sale of Babe Ruth to the Yankees in 1919 immediately changed baseball. Ruth stopped pitching and started hitting full time, the Dead Ball Era ended, the Black Sox ban ended all talk of gambling in baseball, and the Yankees became baseball's dominant team due to an uninterrupted flurry of Ruth home runs. The same fans revere the 1927 Yankees—its Murderer's Row batting lineup with Ruth's iconic 60 home run season its focal point&mndash;as the apotheosis of Yankee dominance. With the Steroid Era of the '90s and the game's current Livelier Ball era, Ruth's 60 homer year is now actually tied with Cal Raleigh for the 9th most home runs in a season. It turns out that the unmatched feat of '20s baseball was Rogers Hornsby's .424 batting average in 1924, though the inclusion of Negro League's statistics has added an asterisk to Hornsby's accomplishment (the official record is Josh Gibson's .466 in 1943 in 249 at bats).
In fact, Ruth (the Ohtani of his time) was already playing in the outfield regularly for Boston in 1919, though he was still pitching, too. In Ruth's first seven years with the Yankees, the team won one World Series. At the end of 1925, many sportswriters suspected Ruth's career was ending. Injuries and poor conditioning had limited him to 26 home runs, and his Yankees to a 7th place finish in an eight-team American League.
Tom Wolf's Baseball in the Roaring Twenties zeroes in on what may be the real delta point of the Ruth legend, Yankee dominance, and baseball history. In addition to examining Ruth's comeback season and Hornsby's legacy as a baseball anti-hero along with Cobb, Ted Williams, Steve Carlton, and Albert Belle, Wolf incorporates American social history into the telling. Grace Coolidge, Al Capone, and flagpole sitting find their way into the narrative. More significant, while not the first "story of a season" baseball book, Wolf's is possibly the first of the genre to make the Negro League season a full partner. It also sheds light on a second gambling scandal involving two Deadball era stalwarts, both still playing in 1926, that threatened to destroy the game's credibility in the midst of its becoming America's sport. As is often the case, the actual history diverges considerably from the oversimplified version we tend to remember.
I took the opportunity to chat with Tom about his second baseball book (he has also published two historical crime books with his wife Patricia Bryan) to add some perspective to the 2025 Major League Playoffs of a very different yet somehow still familiar sport 99 years later. This issue of Eclectica includes a separate review of the book.
Marko Fong Who or what got you interested in baseball?
Thomas Wolf I was just eight or nine when I got interested in baseball. I was raised in a small town in Ohio, and the only organized sport for young boys was Little League baseball. I played first base for my team. I collected and traded baseball cards with friends and played pickup games in a neighbor's side yard. I followed baseball on the radio and listened, late at night, to the great baseball announcers of the 1950s and 1960s: Bob Prince, Ernie Harwell, Harry Carey, Waite Hoyt. I also played thousands of dice baseball games featuring the Yankees against various National League teams. I recorded the results in spiral notebooks and tabulated results.
MF When did you get interested in baseball history?
TW That came much later. I read a biography of Babe Ruth in elementary school and then became a Yankees fan. I followed the pennant races and the exploits of Mickey Mantle. I had a subscription to The Sporting News, read the box scores in the paper, and watched World Series games in the fall, but I didn't get serious about researching baseball history until sometime in the early 2000s. I had written two true crime books with my wife, Patricia Bryan, and I was looking for a new project. I was aware of the controversy about Babe Ruth's called shot in Wrigley Field in Game Three of the 1932 World Series, and that prompted me to go back and start researching baseball in the 1920s and 1930s. I was excited to be returning to a primary interest I'd had as a very young boy.
MF After writing The Called Shot about the 1932 baseball season, why did you decide to write Baseball in the Roaring Twenties about the 1926 season?
TW I realized after writing The Called Shot that I wasn't done with baseball as a subject. The 1920s and 1930s had a vibrancy that appealed to me, and I wanted to explore and write more about baseball in the Roaring Twenties and what was going on in the culture at large, not just on the ballfields. I centered the book on 1926 baseball season because that season in the middle of the decade had a lot to offer: two iconic franchises, the Yankees and the Cardinals, plus Babe Ruth and Rogers Hornsby, the outstanding players of their respective franchises, whose careers collided dramatically during the historic seven-game World Series of 1926. The pitching hero of that series was 39-year-old Grover Cleveland Alexander. The other significant baseball story of that year involved Ty Cobb and Tris Speaker. There were great characters and multiple storylines to follow and develop.
MF What can you say about Babe Ruth and Rogers Hornsby as players and personalities since they are key figures in both of your books? How do they compare? Do people recognize how good a player Hornsby was?
TW Both were outstanding ballplayers but distinctly different in their skill sets and personalities. Ruth was an excellent all-around athlete, an outstanding pitcher early in his career and later the most powerful and prolific home run hitter of his generation. He became a celebrity: brash and boastful and reckless. Sportswriters loved him. The public adored him. Fans flocked to ballparks to see him play. He had a reputation for overindulging in hot dogs and beer, but in mid-career he dedicated himself to getting in better physical shape. Before the 1926 season, Ruth hired a boxing trainer named Artie McGovern to help him lose weight and build strength.
Hornsby had a very different lifestyle, personality, and public persona. He didn't smoke or drink. His diet consisted of foods high in protein like eggs, whole milk, steak, and ice cream. He thought that reading or going to the movies ruined a player's eyes. He didn't like air conditioning. Like Ty Cobb, Hornsby was intense and fiercely competitive, but he didn't need or seek the public adoration that Ruth received. As a batter, Hornsby was simply the best right-handed hitter in baseball history. He hit for average and with power. He batted .380 or above seven times and won two triple crowns. He irritated umpires, teammates, managers, and owners, but no one questioned his ability to hit.
MF Other than Ruth and Hornsby, what players had a significant impact on the 1926 baseball season and World Series?
TW Tony Lazzeri, the rookie second baseman of the Yankees, was the first prominent Italian American ballplayer in the major leagues and a key contributor to the Yankees during the regular season. His most famous at-bat of his career came in Game Seven of the World Series when he struck out with the bases loaded in the seventh inning, but he went on to have a Hall of Fame career. As for the Cardinals, they made two key roster changes in mid-season that impacted the National League pennant race, acquiring Billy Southworth, a hard-hitting outfielder, and Grover Cleveland Alexander, a pitcher. Alexander was to be the pitching hero of the World Series. Bob O'Farrell, a much-underrated catcher, anchored the defense and supported the pitching staff. After the season, O'Farrell was named National League Most Valuable Player.
MF One of the more interesting choices you made was to include the material about Black baseball history and the 1926 Negro League season. Can you discuss your reason for doing this?
TW If I was going to write about baseball in America in 1926, I had to acknowledge the importance and excellence of organized Black baseball, which existed as a kind of parallel universe in the 1920s and beyond. I included one chapter on the history of Black baseball and the importance of Rube Foster, an outstanding player and later the visionary who created the organized Negro League in 1920. A second chapter tells the story of the dramatic post season and the Colored World Series of 1926. The series was scheduled as best-of-nine contest but eventually eleven games were played over a period of two weeks in four different ballparks. The pitching star of the post-season was Rube Foster's much-younger half-brother, Willie Foster, who led the Chicago American Giants to the championship (they may have been the most impactful brothers in baseball history). In those two chapters, I wanted to familiarize readers with the glamor and importance of Black baseball.
MF What were the special challenges you faced in researching your account of the Negro Leagues?
Researching the history of Black baseball was one of the most challenging and most rewarding aspects of working on this book. The lack of box scores and the brevity of many of the news accounts of various games made it harder for me to follow Black baseball in 1926 than it was to follow the white major league season. Many Black newspapers were published just once a week, so it was difficult to find articles that would provide both game details and player profiles. That said, there were some excellent Black sportswriters working in the 1920s. Fay Young, Wendell Smith, and Sam Lacy, to name just a few. Their reports and documentation have been vital for historians who want to learn about the Negro Leagues and document the history of Black baseball in America.
MF In 1926, Grover Cleveland Alexander was at the tail end of his career and Satchel Paige was just starting his. Can you compare and contrast their careers and significance?
TW Alexander and Paige are two of the greatest pitchers the game has ever seen, and their backstories are as fascinating as their careers. Both Alexander and Paige overcame hardship—alcoholism in Alexander's case; segregation in Paige's—to achieve success and fame. In 1926, Alexander was 39 years old and considered to be washed up, but he came through with a remarkable and historic performance in the 1926 World Series, then pitched three more years with the Cardinals, winning 46 and losing 27 games. Alexander's life story has been told in the Hollywood movie The Winning Team, which starred a young Ronald Reagan as Alexander. Paige was just starting his professional career in 1926. Over the next ten years, he was, in my opinion, the best right-handed pitcher in all of baseball, Black or white. In 1948, at the age of 42, he signed with the Cleveland Indians—he became the oldest rookie in major league history—and helped to pitch the Indians to a pennant and World Series win. Like Babe Ruith, Paige was a bigger than life personality and a showman with a great deal of charisma, who pitched in front of adoring audiences from coast to coast during his barnstorming days. Mark Amour, director of the Society of American Baseball Research's Baseball Biography Project, has documented that Paige pitched in more than 1900 games in 46 of the 50 states. Paige is one of the legendary figures in all of sports.
MF What were some of the more surprising things you discovered in researching the book?
TW I didn't know much about Dutch Leonard's claims of a fixed game in 1919 and his accusations about Ty Cobb and Tris Speaker, two of the game's iconic figures from the dead-ball era. Leonard's allegations surfaced in 1926 and became one of the biggest baseball stories of the year. Cobb and Speaker were loved and respected by fans and important figures in the history of baseball. Judge Landis, in his role as commissioner, stepped in and confronted the issue. That story intrigued me and prompted me to do more research into the prevalence of gambling on sporting events in the early 1900s.
MF The book is about more than just the baseball season of 1926. What was your goal or ambition in the parts of the book that deal with other societal figures?
TW I wanted the reader to get the same feeling of exhilaration about the 1920s that I did. There are vignettes in the book about people like Billy Sunday, the former Chicago White Stockings ballplayer-turned evangelist, and Aimee Semple McPherson, another evangelist who was a key figure in the Temperance Movement. Al Capone appears briefly in one chapter. So does Mae West. The young swimmer Gertrude Ederle, who became the first woman to successfully swim across the English Channel, is featured. The first Tunney versus Dempsey fight, witnessed by 130,000 boxing fans, is highlighted. And I note that the biggest baseball fan in Washington, DC, in 1926 was our first lady, Grace Coolidge.
MF What books about social history were important to your research?
TW The Perils of Prosperity by William Leuchtenburg was helpful. Frederick Lewis Allen's Only Yesterday, one of the first truly popular books of social history, also provided insights into America of the 1920s and 1930s. I also read several books on Prohibition and a book on the rise of the KKK. All provided context so that I better understood the years I was writing about. It was one of the most colorful and exciting decades in our history.
MF What are your favorite books on baseball history?
TW I have dozens of favorites. Here's a brief list of books I will read again when I want a taste of good baseball writing and good stories. Crazy 08 by Cait Murphy, 1921 by Steve Steinberg and Lyle Spatz, Baseball in '41 by Robert Creamer, One Day in the Bleachers by Arno Hano, The Summer Game by Roger Angell, The Glory of Their Times by Lawrence Ritter, Bottom of the 33rd by Dave Barry, Wait Till Next Year by Doris Kearns Goodwin, Only the Ball was White by Robert Peterson, The Boys of Summer by Roger Khan, Luckiest Man by Jonathan Eig, and The Teammates by David Halberstam.
MF Where would you rank the 1926 World Series in terms of both drama and significance?
TW I admit to some bias, but I would rank the 1926 World Series as one of the ten best, maybe even one of the five best, due to the competitiveness of the games, the players involved, and the significance of the series for both franchises. Either the Yankees or the Cardinals won 15 of the 21 World Series played between 1926 and 1946. The great Yankee team of 1927 consisted almost entirely of the players on the 1926 team. As for the Cardinals, the 1926 team didn't stay together for long—in fact, Hornsby was traded shortly after the end of the season—but the Gas House Gang version of the Cardinals appeared in the early 1930s as the dominant National League team of that decade. Other contenders for best World Series ever might be (in chronological order) 1912, 1924, 1956, 1968, and 1986. But it's hard to beat the 1926 series for game-to-game drama.
MF Can you reflect on some of the differences between 1920s baseball and baseball 100 years later?
TW I don't like some of the sillier rule changes—the ghost runner, the restrictions on where infielders can position themselves, the size of the bases—but the essential rules and strategy of the game remain basically the same. Modern changes like the designated hitter and inter-league play have changed the game, but not in major ways. There are some major differences in the culture and society that we should remember. Teams in the 1920s traveled by train. Road trips lasted as long as three weeks. There were no night games. Salaries were low. White players and Black players did not compete against each other, except in barnstorming or post-season tournaments. In the last 50 years, the most significant changes have not been to the rules of the game but to the economics of the game: free agency for players, corporate ownership and partnerships, media contracts.
MF What aspect of Baseball in the Roaring Twenties are you proudest of?
TW I hope readers find the book to be lively and informative—a good read. The book opens with a look back at how the two franchises were formed and evolved and then as the story of the baseball season evolved, I inserted material reflecting on the larger culture of America in the 1920s. The challenge was to bring together the various parts of the story so the book would read as a complete and coherent narrative. I'm especially pleased with the chapters on Grover Cleveland Alexander, Black baseball, the Cobb/Speaker gambling scandal, and the seven games of the 1926 World Series. As the title suggests, the book tells the story of a great baseball season and a thrilling seven-game series. I wanted the book to be entertaining and capture a sense of that era. If I've done that, and if readers appreciate the story, then I've done what I set out to do.
