The 34-Ton Bat

by Steve Rushin

  In 1916, Wilson ordered that the anthem be played at military functions. Two years later—with America engaged in World War I, ballplayers getting drafted, and the World Series moved back to early September by government decree—it was played before the Cubs came to bat in the bottom of the seventh inning of Game 1 at Comiskey Park, which the Cubs had rented out for its larger capacity. (This game is frequently—and mystifyingly—cited as the first time the anthem was ever played at a major-league baseball game, though it was nothing of the sort.) And though “The Star-Spangled Banner” was played throughout the Series, in Chicago and again in Boston, when the Series had shifted to Fenway Park, it wasn’t until the next World War that it became a staple before all games.

  Flag at Ebbets Field, Opening Day, April 14, 1914. (Library of Congress)

  Rud Rennie, an artilleryman in World War I, was by World War II a baseball writer for the New York Herald-Tribune. In 1942, Rennie was thrilled by the new practice of standing for the anthem at every game. “It reminds us that we’re in a war,” he said. “We need to be reminded at every opportunity. And remember that this goes on in every big league park every day that there’s a ball game on foot.”

  Ever since, this tune composed as a cue for Londoners to lift their drinks has been exactly the opposite for American sports fans. It is the only reliable cue for them to put down their beers, and but for a moment.

  Chapter 7

  “THE REDHOTS WARMED

  WITH MUSTARD SAVED

  MANY A LIFE”

  So the fan has removed his cap, and the cap has been removed from his beer—by the concessionaire, to prevent the bottle from being used as a missile—and that fan is now hungry.

  Had that fan been in Brooklyn on August 22, 1867, when the Eckford Baseball Club hosted the Athletics of Philadelphia—two leading teams of the day—he would have been spoiled for choice. “Mr. Cammeyer again had the grounds in fine order, and Sam Lewis attended to the inner man in the manner for which he is well known,” went the game story of the Brooklyn Daily Eagle correspondent, who evidently hadn’t eaten on his way to the grounds. “Sam’s chowder is becoming celebrated. There is another institution coming prominently before the ball-playing public, and that is the cocoanut-candy man—‘fifteen cents a quarter of a pound, ten for five cents.’ ”

  While Sam Lewis attended to the inner man, Charles Hercules Ebbets took care of his other appetites. In Brooklyn in 1883, when the Dodgers began life as the Atlantics, the twenty-three-year-old Ebbets printed his own scorecards and sold them at Washington Park, “disposing of them to fans before the ink was dry.”

  At the same time, a twenty-seven-year-old milkman immigrated to the United States from Derby, England, and settled with his wife and sons in Niles, Ohio. There, Harry Mozley Stevens went to work in a steel mill, and later as a door-to-door salesman of books. When Irish Orators and Oratory proved difficult to move in Middle America, Stevens tried to find work more consonant with the interests of his new nation.

  Attending a baseball game in Columbus, Stevens thought the scorecards on offer there were confusing. They were also devoid of advertising. He set about designing a better and more lucrative one, filled with paid ads. He bought the rights to be the exclusive scorecard provider at the Columbus ball grounds, and eventually expanded into the big leagues, moving to Pittsburgh and then to New York, where he got the Polo Grounds concession in 1892. “Harry Stevens always has some new idea on tap,” Sporting Life noted two years later. “He is preparing the score card and it will be profusely illustrated.… His latest scheme is to attach a ballot to each card, so that the cranks can vote for their favorite players.”

  By then, Charles Ebbets was no longer printing his own scorecards. He had moved on, in rapid succession, to become a ticket taker for the Brooklyn club, and later club secretary, team president, briefly its manager, and most famously the owner of the Brooklyn Dodgers and namesake of baseball’s most beloved ballpark.

  Stevens, on the other hand, went all in with concessions. He couldn’t help but notice—on arrival at the Polo Grounds as the “champion score-card seller of America”—that the ballpark’s food was an afterthought. For the better part of a decade after he moved to New York, ham-and-cheese sandwiches were the sole option at the Polo Grounds as an accompaniment to beer, which cost $0.05 a serving in thick glasses with handles.

  Harry M. Stevens, left, with Polo Grounds builder John Foster, center, and Giants owner John Brush, 1911. (National Baseball Hall of Fame Library, Cooperstown, NY)

  Fans needed something to eat. Many fans brought their own food, for eating or otherwise. In 1895, a spectator “who thought perhaps that Fred Roat was hungry threw a chunk of bologna sausage at his head,” according to the Sporting Life account of an Indianapolis Indians game that June.

  In St. Louis, by some accounts, Browns owner Chris Von der Ahe served bunned sausages at his saloon, and introduced them to patrons at Sportsman’s Park, in keeping with its other novelties: the Shoot-the-Chutes water slide behind the right field fence, the open-air beer garden, and the Wild West Show, the non-game-day horse races that lay waste to the playing field.

  Owners elsewhere did what they could to encourage the thirst of their patrons. In baseball as at the circus, peanuts were a staple from the start, for spectators and participants alike. “His success this season in lining out the ball has filled Pete Browning with joy and increased his insatiable appetite for hot roasted peanuts,” reported Sporting Life in 1890. The Washington Senators hired one of their former players, Edwin Yewell, as their concessionaire in 1891 because he “had experience in the matter of printing score-cards and selling peanuts and soft drinks to base ball crowds sufficient to let him know what sort of service such folks want.”

  Peanuts were cheap and plentiful, if insufficiently delicious. Or so thought a German immigrant named Frederick Rueckheim, who created—with the help of his brother Louis—a confection of peanuts, popcorn, and molasses. “Cracker Jack” was an instant sensation when the brothers introduced it at the 1893 World’s Fair in Chicago. Three years later, on the Phillies’ scorecards in Philadelphia—among the ads for bicycles and cigarettes and unguents described as “toilet requisites”—was a small box that asked: “Have You Tasted Cracker Jack? The New Confection. So Good!! Try It!! The More You Eat The More You Want. 5c Per Package. Sold Everywhere. Exclusively On These Grounds.”

  Peanuts required no such hard sell. They weren’t just popular but populist. When Richard Olney, secretary of state under Grover Cleveland, attended games in Washington in 1896, the Boston Daily Globe noted: “He declines to be a special guest of the management, but prefers to sit on the left field bleachers, where he can eat peanuts, kick at the umpire and root for the home team. To see the secretary of state at a ball game, he would never be taken for the great diplomat of this generation.”

  Owners kept sacks of peanuts stacked like sandbags in their ballparks, securing them against the ravenous appetites of their customers and employees alike. In Brooklyn, where Charles Ebbets had risen to the presidency of the Superbas in 1900, pitcher Iron Man McGinnity raided the team’s concession stores after starts. “McGinnity’s one weakness is peanuts,” reported the Brooklyn Daily Eagle. “After every game in which he pitches he invades the office of Secretary Simpson and demands his reward in the shape of a bag of the Virginia product. On the days when he is not called on to pitch he does not demand the toll.”

  When President Taft cheered on the Senators on April 19, 1909, he and Vice President James Sherman shared a nickel bag of peanuts in their box. Peanuts and Cracker Jack were inseparable—from each other, and from the national game. They were baseball in a nutshell, thanks to a man named Jack Norworth.

  Norworth was a vaudevillian and Tin Pan Alley songwriter who had never before attended a major-league baseball game on that day in 1908 when he was riding the Ninth Avenue elevated train past the Polo Grounds, whose marquee announced the day’s Giants game. In less than an hour on the train, o
n a scrap of paper pulled from a pocket, inspired by the sight of the advertised game, Norworth wrote a song that included the lines “Buy me some peanuts and Cracker Jack/I don’t care if I never get back.”

  “How did I know about peanuts and Cracker Jack?” Norworth said years later. “I saw bush [league] games as a boy and got the ‘feel’ of the game.” The lines were set to music by Norworth’s writing partner, Albert Von Tilzer, who likewise had never seen a game live. “Take Me Out to the Ball Game” was a smash from the moment of its release. Thirty-two years later, on a day he was honored for writing baseball’s unofficial anthem, Norworth went to Ebbets Field to see his first big-league game.

  As baseball fare, not everything worked as well as peanuts and Cracker Jack. Ballpark tripe grills declined as the American appetite for stomach lining did the same. But by 1902, Harry Stevens had settled on at least one inviolable item. He sold hot dogs on cold days at Giants games, and their appeal was pretty instantly universal. “At the counters in the rear of the Polo Grounds,” he later recalled, “you would find a prominent banker eating a frankfurter and drinking a glass of beer, and beside him would be a truck driver doing precisely the same thing.”

  “Take Me Out to the Ball Game” songwriter Jack Norworth, dressed to the nines, at a stage door. (Library of Congress)

  Hot dogs, from very early on, became the game’s staple food. The only proper way to watch the World Series, wrote Chicago Tribune baseball writer H. S. Fullerton in 1906, was by “eating a red hot in the first inning, a cheese sandwich in the second, a bag of popcorn in the third, drinking a white pope in the fourth, eating a ham on rye in the fifth, another red hot, another cheese sandwich, another ham on rye.” Hot dogs weren’t inducing coronaries, at least in the near term—they were doing something like the opposite: In the chill of that October, the paper’s Charles Dryden wrote, “The redhots warmed with mustard saved many a life.”

  The following October, at Bennett Park in Detroit, as the Tigers hosted the Cubs in the World Series, “Ernie Whelan’s ‘red-hots’ at 10 cents each were in great demand.” Among their devotees was the owner of the Cubs. As he watched his team win the fifth and final game in Detroit, Charles Murphy took no chances at being left empty-handed, sitting “close to the hot dog counter.”

  Given the ravenous appetites he helped awaken, Stevens had become by 1908 so wealthy—a multimillionaire when the average annual income was less than $700—that he tried and failed to buy the Brooklyn club from Ebbets. By then it was hard to imagine that either man, never mind both, had begun their baseball careers as printers of scorecards. Stevens by then owned the concessions at both Boston ballparks, and Madison Square Garden and Saratoga Race Course.

  A fixture at those parks in his bow tie and boater hat, Stevens was more recognizable than many of the men on the field. When the 1912 World Series opened at the Polo Grounds, a small contingent of Red Sox fans were brave enough to attend. “With heads erect the Hub horde marched to their places in the stands back of first base never flinching under the taunts that were heaped upon them in company with a fusillade of sandwiches,” wrote one newspaper correspondent. “There is a suspicion that Harry Stevens, holder of the sandwich concession at the Polo Grounds, had something to do with the planning of that fusillade.” That Stevens sold out of 100,000 sandwiches on a day that 35,730 came to the Polo Grounds remains a wonder, but then he was a salesman of abundant charms.

  He was great company, despite having a propensity to quote long stretches of Shakespeare and the Bible from memory. In his office at the Polo Grounds, Stevens frequently hosted sportswriters postgame. While the day’s take was being counted out, he poured them a drink from his liquor stash. It was, in the words of one scribe, “the only place I’ve seen where they keep the money out in the open and the liquor in the safe.”

  And yet his largesse toward writers and other unfortunates balanced a predatory instinct for making money. When umpire Bill Klem, not ordinarily camera-shy, turned his back on photographers on his way into Fenway Park before Game 3 of the 1914 World Series, a writer joked: “Harry Stevens giving away his peanuts wouldn’t occasion more surprise.”

  “He charged high prices for his goods,” wrote his friend John Kieran. “He would wrestle a man from here to San Francisco for a dime if he thought it was his.”

  Stevens couldn’t rake those dimes in fast enough. He and others continued to experiment with stadium comestibles and their delivery. In 1914, at the new Weeghman Park in Chicago, vendors used a long-handled basket to pass hot dogs to patrons, and in turn to collect their money. The device, like a church collection basket, completed the metaphor of ballpark as cathedral, in a place soon to be renamed Wrigley Field.

  The cocoanut-candy man of 1867 was long gone, but Boston Braves fans in 1915 were urged to buy Huyler’s candies individually—Lemon Sour Drops for a nickel, Old-Fashioned Molasses for a dime—or better still in bulk. “Ask the Boys,” the program urged, “for a pound of assorted chocolates and bonbons supplied directly to the ground fresh daily.” A box of chocolates turned out not to be the ideal treat in the midday sun of an urban August, but again, ballpark cuisine was in its early adolescence.

  When a sportswriter complained on a cold day at the Polo Grounds in 1916 that there was no hot beverage on offer, Stevens introduced coffee with great success. Popcorn, on the other hand, failed to catch on in New York—except as a spectacle, the popped kernels blown around a glass display case that resembled a snow globe. As a self-taught Shakespearean scholar, Stevens was acutely aware of the theater of the ballpark. His vendors, wearing crisp white coats and hats, had to pass inspection before every game.

  During Prohibition, baseball fans in grudging acceptance of soda but still in search of a vice bought cigars for $0.15 or $0.20. But peanuts, and to an even greater extent hot dogs, remained far and away the most popular wares of the Harry M. Stevens company. Stevens leased land in Virginia to grow the peanuts he hawked at the Polo Grounds, Ebbets Field, Yankee Stadium, Madison Square Garden, and Churchill Downs, among many other places. Stevens was the most prominent publisher of baseball scorecards and game programs, though his predecessor in scorecards, Charles Ebbets, took back the food concessions from Stevens at Ebbets Field in 1923. Two years later, when the One Great Scorer came to mark against his name, Ebbets died a wealthy man in his room at the Waldorf-Astoria, testimony to the fact that few men went broke selling concessions to baseball fans.

  Hot dogs grilling outside Ebbets Field before World Series Game 2, October 6, 1920. (Library of Congress)

  Though certainly the most famous, given his proximity to the press in New York, Stevens was not alone in expanding the palate of the baseball fan. The St. Louis Cardinals and Browns hired Blake Harper, who transformed the concessions operation at Sportsman’s Park, which brought in $100,000 a year to that ballpark at the dawn of the Depression. A reporter in 1930 was dizzied by the menu: “Ice cream, éclairs and bricklets in three flavors; peanuts, near beer, draught and bottled and served at an old-time bar with a brass foot rail; hot fish sandwiches on Fridays; boiled egg sandwiches; cheese sandwiches; ham sandwiches; chicken salad sandwiches; tongue sandwiches; candy; chewing gum; cigars; cigarets; potato chips; pretzels; popcorn; soda, all flavors, and Coca-Cola; coffee; frozen all-day suckers for the knothole gang; shoe shines; artificial roses and autographed souvenir baseball bats.” Vendors were provided with lockers and showers, and every one of the hawkers—50 to 125 were employed per game—had to “bathe, don a clean jacket and cap and pass inspection before going into the stands to sell.”

  These vendors were exclusively men. An 1862 law in New York City prohibited women from “waiting on, attending in any manner or furnishing refreshments to the audience or spectators at any place of public amusement.” (New York legislators didn’t move to repeal the law until 1977, by which time a few female vendors had already infiltrated Shea Stadium.)

  No, the vendors were all men, and those men sold hot dogs. The actor Humphrey Bogar
t said, “A hot dog at the ballpark is better than a steak at the Ritz,” though Harry M. Stevens didn’t have to choose, having practically parlayed a ballpark hot dog into a steak at the Ritz. He lived in a succession of luxury hotels—never the Ritz, but the Savoy, the Waldorf, and the Belmont. He died at the Murray Hill Hotel in 1934, at age seventy-eight, having made an empire of food and scorecards. And though his letterhead listed him as “Caterer and Publisher,” and his company continued to grow—it would be bought by the food-service giant Aramark in 1994—there was no mistaking his greatest legacy. “He realized the importance of the frankfurter,” the New York Times announced in the fourth paragraph of his obituary. “Eminent sports writers joined in crowning him as the ‘Hot-Dog King.’ ”

  Yankee Stadium vendor selling soda in glass bottles. (National Baseball Hall of Fame Library, Cooperstown, NY)

  If the Hot-Dog King had an heir, it was Thomas G. Arthur, patriarch of another family of concessionaires, Arthur Food Services of Los Angeles. When the Dodgers moved west from his and their native Brooklyn, Arthur held the food concession at the LA Coliseum, where they would play for four years. To celebrate the team’s move into Dodger Stadium in 1962, Arthur introduced a foot-long hot dog of the kind he enjoyed in his Coney Island youth. When people impertinently suggested that the new dog was nothing close to a foot long, Arthur renamed it, for the sake of veracity, a “Dodger Dog.” It became the most famous and for many seasons the best-selling sausage in all of baseball, if not the world.