Baseball
In 1902, Sunday baseball games were legalized in Chicago, St. Louis, and Cincinnati.
In 1907, New York City Democrats introduced two bills in Albany, New York that attempted to legalize Sunday baseball. State Assemblyman Al Smith spoke out against the ban of Sunday Baseball arguing that it was better for young men to be playing baseball than to “be driven to places where they play Waltz Me Around Again, Willie." However, both bills were unsuccessful.
In 1911, Philadelphia Athletics manager Connie Mack expressed a desire for the Athletics to play on Sunday. The main driving force behind his interest in playing on Sunday was to earn money. The Athletics were not a wealthy baseball club, and Athletics vice-president John Shibe estimated that the team would make $20,000 for each Sunday game that they played in Philadelphia. Mack thought that, for the team, it was financially necessary to play on Sundays, explaining that "we cannot meet our payrolls playing on seventy-seven weekdays at home". Many Pennsylvania politicians and religious groups opposed Shibe and Mack's effort for Sunday baseball, claiming that playing on that day was a "breach of peace" and that the games would be "a disturbance to persons in that neighborhood desirous of preserving the peace and quiet of Sunday so that they may in such peace and quiet pursue their religious worship and meditation". Unfortunately for the Athletics, Philadelphia's other baseball team, the Phillies, took no public position on the subject, undermining the Athletics' case.
In 1917, the New York Giants and Cincinnati Reds played the first Sunday game ever at the Polo Grounds, New York's home field. However, after the game both managers, John McGraw and Christy Mathewson, were arrested for violating the blue laws.
The following year, Sunday baseball was legalized in Cleveland, Washington, D.C., and Detroit. One year after that, New York legalized baseball games on Sunday, and baseball teams that played in New York (the New York Giants, the New York Yankees, and the Brooklyn Dodgers) were allowed to have home games on Sunday.
Read more about this topic: Sunday Baseball Games
Famous quotes containing the word baseball:
“It is a mass language only in the same sense that its baseball slang is born of baseball players. That is, it is a language which is being molded by writers to do delicate things and yet be within the grasp of superficially educated people. It is not a natural growth, much as its proletarian writers would like to think so. But compared with it at its best, English has reached the Alexandrian stage of formalism and decay.”
—Raymond Chandler (1888–1959)
“One of the baseball-team owners approached me and said: “If you become baseball commissioner, you’re going to have to deal with 28 big egos,” and I said, “For me, that’s a 72% reduction.””
—George Mitchell (b. 1933)
“Baseball is the religion that worships the obvious and gives thanks that things are exactly as they seem. Instead of celebrating mysteries, baseball rejoices in the absence of mysteries and trusts that, if we watch what is laid before our eyes, down to the last detail, we will cultivate the gift of seeing things as they really are.”
—Thomas Boswell, U.S. sports journalist. “The Church of Baseball,” Baseball: An Illustrated History, ed. Geoffrey C. Ward, Knopf (1994)