Читать книгу Summer of Shadows - Jonathan Knight - Страница 17

As it often does in northeast Ohio, April dawned cold and overcast. After on-and-off snow flurries throughout the first of the month, the temperature remained in the forties for much of the first few days of what is considered to be the calendar’s official proclamation of spring.

In spite of the frosty conditions, Clevelanders were busy preparing for Easter, now just over two weeks away. Department stores such as Halle’s and May Co. unveiled new fashions in bonnets and dresses, along with sales for children’s formalwear. Hough Bakeries was inundated with orders for lamb-shaped Easter cakes, with jelly beans for eyes and the wool made of coconut shavings atop the white frosting. Fathers bought corsages for their wives and daughters to wear to church on Easter Sunday.

Holy Week also would mark the beginning of the baseball season, as the Indians would play their first game on Tuesday, the thirteenth of April. Of course, there would be the usual excitement in each of the thirteen cities that owned a major league team. With none south of Washington, D.C., and none west of St. Louis, the citizens of these areas saw the beginning of baseball season as more than just the start of a new sporting campaign. It was a reward for surviving a cruel winter and a harbinger of the summer days and nights to come.

While three straight close-but-no-cigar finishes may have taken some of the verve out of many Cleveland fans as they looked forward to the 1954 campaign, there were still plenty of reasons for them to take notice of the new season. For the second straight year, the home schedule would include thirty night games—including an unprecedented three on Saturday nights. This was a trend many in baseball felt was counterproductive. “Baseball under the lights has made a big difference in living conditions,” Bob Feller would say that summer. “It’s harder to keep the proper physical edge because no definite pattern for sleeping and eating habits can be established.” Cubs owner Philip Wrigley went so far as to say that attendance would be much higher overall if there was no night baseball. More games during the day was the only way to ensure future prosperity, he claimed, because with the introduction of television into the American family room, there were too many evening entertainment choices against which baseball had to compete.

Wrigley wasn’t alone. The major league 1954 schedule showed that the expansion of night baseball had ceased, making the Indians’ night schedule—particularly the trio of Saturday-night games—a bold decision. But Cleveland was no ordinary baseball town. There was plenty to draw people downtown any night of the week, especially on the weekends. “Cleveland,” Hal Lebovitz wrote in the Plain Dealer, “has become a Saturday-night town.”

Night games were still relatively rare, but the thought of playing games after dark on the weekends seemed particularly risky for the Indians. Roughly half of the Tribe’s weekend home crowds consisted of fans from outside of Cleveland. The team’s Ohio-wide appeal led to the brilliant marketing idea of a traveling box office: a brightly decorated station wagon would cruise from town to town around the Buckeye State selling tickets. Also appealing to out-of-towners were the nine doubleheaders the Tribe was scheduled to play. Originally eight were slated, but when the team refused to play a scheduled game with Detroit on Good Friday, to respect the reverence many of its fans invested in the day, the game was switched to a Wednesday in August, setting up a rare weekday afternoon doubleheader.

The Indians, like all teams, were constantly seeking ways to lure more fans to the ballpark. One method was through a speakers bureau set up to arrange engagements for players. Yet many fans were upset to discover that players were often paid for such appearances. Star players like Yogi Berra even went so far as to employ an “agent” to organize and schedule appearances and endorsements, but Nate Wallack, head of the press office, proudly announced that, going into 1954, “None of our fellows has an agent.” He further attempted to allay these concerns about players being paid for their appearances, explaining that if organizations weren’t required to offer some sort of compensation, players would be inundated with requests. There actually was a precedent for such thinking, since players were paid for appearances on a pregame dugout interview television program. But these honorariums were donated by the players to a clubhouse kitty used to purchase flowers and gifts on behalf of the team.

Another controversial idea to generate interest was proposed by Hank Greenberg prior to the season. He suggested introducing “interleague play” for 1955, in which each American League team would play two home games and two away games against a chosen National League team. It was met with vociferous opposition. “You might have a couple of good hits with three teams,” White Sox general manager Frank Lane commented, “but you would die with the rest. It would also harm the World Series and All-Star Game.” Opponents of the plan were also concerned that such a tradition-shattering concept could open the door to even more wild ideas. What would be next, they wondered. A playoff system?

Another change, albeit not a particularly welcome one, was the Indians’ decision not to televise any home games. Each road game would be televised locally on WXEL Channel 8, and all games would be broadcast on the radio on WERE-AM 1300, but in following with the general thinking of organized baseball, the only way to keep attendance from plummeting was to not give fans the option of watching games at home instead of at the stadium.

Major League Baseball struggled with the question: to televise or not to televise. The benefits were obvious. In 1953, only four of the sixteen teams finished in the black—the Yankees, Indians, White Sox, and Milwaukee Braves. And of that quartet, only the Braves, playing in brand-new County Stadium, were financially sustainable based solely on attendance. The other three finished in the clear because of their profitable agreements with local radio and TV stations to broadcast games. The Indians, for example, drew more than a million fans to home games in ’53, but this was far less important to the bottom line than the $350,000 the franchise collected from broadcasting rights. Yet there was a risk to accepting such bargains. Baseball commissioner Ford Frick proclaimed his opinion that putting baseball on television was “killing the goose that laid the golden egg.”

While television may have been the wave of the future, radio was still the centerpiece of home entertainment. The daily radio programming grid that appeared in Cleveland’s newspapers was still larger and more prominently displayed than the television grid. The broadcast booth was another site of change for Tribe fans in 1954. After serving twenty-one years behind the microphone as the first radio voice of the team, the legendary Jack Graney had retired, leaving play-byplay duties to his partner, Jimmy Dudley.

Two additions to the rulebook also piqued the interest of longtime fans. The first, league-wide, was initially resisted by the players. It required players in the field to bring their gloves with them to the dugout at the completion of an inning and not simply leave them in the outfield grass—a practice that had been in place since the game began. The second required all Indians players to wear plastic batting helmets over their caps when at the plate. And for the first time in two decades the Cleveland caps themselves would be noticeably different. While the red wishbone “C” logo in place since the thirties remained, placed in the middle was the small Chief Wahoo logo that had been created in 1951 and added to the sleeves of the jerseys.

As the team wrapped up spring training and headed back east, the grounds crew put the finishing touches on a new infield at Municipal Stadium. With snow still piled up around the dugouts, workers tilled the old surface, added new dirt, and smoothed it out, a process exercised every five or six years. The Indians, however, wouldn’t get much use of the new diamond at first. Twenty of their first twenty-four games would be played away from home—more than a quarter of the road schedule, which would begin in Chicago.

Even though the event would take place in Chicago, 350 miles away, Tuesday was a day of celebration back in Cleveland. Festivities began at 9:15 that morning at a barbershop in the Hotel Statler with a tradition first established more than two decades before. On opening day 1932, WGAR’s station manager came into the shop for a haircut and bet barber Al Klein fifteen minutes of air time that the Indians wouldn’t defeat the Detroit Tigers that day. Cleveland won, and ever since, Klein had been collecting with a fifteen-minute broadcast live from his barbershop on opening day.

The biggest opening day crowd in the history of Comiskey Park filed through the turnstiles on a surprisingly beautiful afternoon. Though frigid temperatures and howling winds plagued many openers in Chicago, this one was a welcome exception: the April sun shone brightly, and the temperature climbed into the seventies. Many fans removed their coats and jackets and basked in the springtime sun in their shirtsleeves.