the half-game pennant of 1908

Reviewed by by Mark Noe, Pennsylvania College of Technology (retired)

6 november 2018 archive

The summer of 1908 must have been a marvelous time to be a baseball fan. I've had the pleasure in recent years of reviewing a number of studies that either focused on the season or that devoted considerable space to it while covering a broader period. It was the season the Cubs, Giants, and Pirates fought to the bitter end for first place, with the Cubs and Giants needing a playoff to finally settle a winner. Every one of those books looked back a few weeks before the championship game to the controversy that made that playoff necessary: the play that shackled poor Fred Merkle with a grossly undeserved nickname, the play that cinched the view that Johnny Evers was a wily master of rule book minutia, the play that eventually killed Harry Pulliam. It was quite a year in the National League.

Turns out that's only half the story. Charles C. Alexander here captures the ebb and flow of the other pennant race that season, the one in the American League where, until a few days before the end, four teams were in the race, and controversy haunts the ending for the very lack of a playoff game. The four eastern teams forecast to fight for the championship fizzled instead, and the four western teams, expected also-rans, fought for the title. St. Louis finally fell out of the race in the last week, the finish among the remaining three a toss-up till the last day. Chicago ended a game-and-a-half out, Cleveland only a half game back, as Detroit took the pennant.

If the official result suggests an exciting ending, an astute baseball fan might wonder how finishers one and two could have been separated by less than a game, since mathematically, if they played the same number of games, they would have had to be a full game apart. Ah, there's the rub, mate. They didn't play the same number of games. And Ban Johnson, the league president, didn't choose to require the make-up of an early-season rainout that might have generated a playoff. Nor did he choose to investigate the abysmal record some eastern teams put up in their final western trip in late September, a record suggesting gift wins to some western teams. No, to Johnson, all was just fine. And so Detroit was given the championship and went on to be clobbered by the Chicago Cubs, who, as we well know now, continued to dominate World Series play, winning many, many, many championships, right up until recently (with the exception of a little 108-year gap).

Alexander's presentation of this material gives a reader the warp and woof of the events from April to October, detailing every game with a brief summary, generally including score, pitchers, and key plays or players. By the end, even a knowledgeable baseball fan is going to be digging through the well-worn copy of Macmillan or scratching keys on a computer locked on the Baseball Reference site. Minor figures—some long forgotten, others unknown even to one who thought he knew much baseball trivia (can anything in baseball be trivial? heresy!)—are brought out on stage for a brief bow. The quirks of the era—the schedule rotation between eastern and western teams in leagues balanced with eight-team symmetry, local bans on certain visiting players, the use and misuse and abuse of pitchers—come to life in the nitty-gritty of the day-to-day season.

The book might have been helped had the periodic standings recaps been provided in tabular form rather than narrative paragraphs, and more frequently (say, at intervals of two or three weeks). And the weighting of text toward detail over analysis might have been better balanced. But the immersion in baseball history and lore that Alexander gives us here is enlightening.

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