Free Cooperstown Confidential by Zev Chafets Page B

rogues or racists. Many were great players and model citizens. Christy Math-ewson was a college graduate and an officer in World War I who was gassed in a training exercise, later contracted tuberculosis, and died at the age of forty-five. Honus Wagner was beloved in Pittsburgh. Walter Johnson was known throughout baseball for his unwillingness to throw at batters, and he retained his good reputation even after retiring and entering politics. Connie Mack reached great old age without a serious blemish on his record. Henry Chad-wick was a saintly figure, and his rival A. G. Spalding was a highly respectable citizen who, if he perpetuated a lie about the origins of the game, did it for unselfish, even patriotic reasons. The early Hall of Famers were probably neither better nor worse human beings than other players of their day, or any cross-section of red-blooded young men with money in their pockets and time on their hands. There is no evidence that they were deluded about their own level of sportsmanship, integrity, and character. That was Cooperstown’s standard, not theirs.
    Cooperstown has been aided and abetted in the public relations sham of the Character Clause by its appointed electoral college, the BBWAA. The Hall of Fame’s own newspaper archive reveals the extent to which the national pastime was (and to some extent remains) sanitized by the journalists who cover it. Long before the Hall opened its doors, reporters were complicit in image building and preservation. The ethos of the press box in the early days was summed up by Abe Kemp, a San Francisco baseball writer (and horse-racing reporter) whose career spanned sixty-two years, from 1907 to 1969. “When I broke in . . . the only advice [the sports editor] gave me was, ‘Abe, I’m not telling you to do this, but if you can’t write something nice about a ballplayer, don’t mention his name.’ ”
    Writers were a part of the team. Not only did they travel with the players, they sometimes roomed with them on the road, at the team’s expense. Writers and players socialized and kept each other’s secrets. When the public somehow did learn about Babe Ruth’s whoring, Grover Cleveland Alexander pitching drunk, or Tris Speaker betting on games, these lapses were spun by reporters as harmless and even charming examples of the sporting mentality.
    Why did the writers protect ballplayers? Start with self-preservation. In most cities, there was a close relationship between the local team and the local newspapers. What ever journalistic ethics applied elsewhere in the paper didn’t seem relevant to the toy department. Disillusioning the public about its heroes wasn’t good business. If writers got too cranky, teams would simply deny them access and that was the end of them.
    For some, though, it was less a professional instinct than a personal one. Grantland Rice, the most famous sportswriter of the twenties, once told a colleague, “When athletes are no longer heroes to you anymore, it’s time to stop writing sports.” This is exactly the right approach for a public relations shill or a team-employed baseball announcer, and precisely the wrong one for a self-respecting reporter, in any field, in Rice’s time or today.
    Great rewards were in store for compliant writers. When they went out with players, they drank and ate on the house, and they sometimes benefited from the surplus of enthusiastic Baseball An-nies. They got to spend their afternoons watching baseball, a plum job on any newspaper, and travel in major-league style. Many writers took their relationship with players—and major-league teams—beyond hero-worship and revelry into something closer to partnership. They served as ghostwriters for players they were supposedly covering, or even took part in salary negotiations by writing puff pieces about their friends at contract time or tamping down a player’s value on behalf of management. * The most avaricious, like Marshall Hunt, worked both