IT is commonly said that there is no sportsmanship in professional baseball; that the teams are out for the money and the rooters are out to see their city get the championship. Yet at St. Louis in the World Series the local fans, notorious for fierceness and vociferousness, “booed” their own pitcher when he “walked” Babe Ruth. As Heywood Broun tells the story, “But yesterday they cheered a stranger [Babe Ruth]. They stood up for him and waved their hats. And when, in the eighth inning, a Cardinal pitcher passed him on purpose, although there was no one on, St. Louis turned against its own and shouted, ‘Let him hit it!’” And in the critical moment in the decisive game at New York we had the queer spectacle of the mighty Alexander in colloquy with his captain as to whether he should yield to the demands of the crowd to “give the Babe a chance;” in fact, he compromised and gave Ruth two conceivably hittable balls before he deliberately pitched wide; so for that day Ruth had to be satisfied with one home run and four passes and with having beaten the World Series record for home runs. Now the rule about called balls is perfectly sound -no one can devise a better way of keeping a fair balance between pitcher and batter. It is both fair and honorable to “walk” a batter. Yet somehow there was a human hunger even in St. Louis to see the favorite get a good chance-not sensible, perhaps, but with a tang of good sportsmanship. That may be acknowledged even if it was plain that what the crowd chiefly wanted was thrills.

Dramatic moments were not wanting in this series, won by the St. Louis Cardinals by four games out of seven. Most picturesque of all was the triumph of “Alexander the Great,” supposed to have, in baseball parlance, an “aged soup-bone,” yet splendidly pitching his team to victory twice and then when called in suddenly at the crisis in the seventh inning of the seventh game, when the Yankees had three men on bases and a hit would have meant at least a tie, mastering the situation as coolly as if it were in a practice game. The facts that he is a “veteran” (thirty-nine years old, we believe) and that he is supposed to be of doubtful value lecause of his notorious objection to discipline, added a certain zest to his triumph.

It was a great World Series. It netted over a million dollars in gate receipts; the winning individual players got $5,584.57 each, the losing players $3,417.75 each; the total attendance was over 325,000; no one can estimate how many millions heard the exciting accounts over the radio. St. Louis is World’s Champion for the first time. Best of all, there has been no intimation of corruption or trickery. This year’s Series was baseball at its best. Exit baseball; enter football.

Source: The Outlook, Oct 20, 1926