The Maniacs

Kolohe says:

What’s striking to me is that in the first 20 some odd years of the 20th century, when the structure and even the rules of Major League baseball were still very fluid, the intense cross town rivalries in Chicago and New York did not motivate anyone enough to have actual head to head games. The lack of any inter-league play (except for the World Series), these two teams would not play each other until June of 1997. This appears to me to be in sharp contrast to say, how English Association football developed, where matchups of cross town rivalries were their bread and butter.

It seems to me that they were leaving money on the table. Now, granted, the history of sport in dynamic urban centers also often leads to violence, both disorganized and organized, and has spillover political effects. But I don’t think it was the ‘city fathers’ that were precluding this in the name of ‘public order’ . (Chicago also had little to nothing in the way of ‘old patrician money’ the way that say, New York City had, acting as a countervailing socially conservative political force. It was a ‘cowtown’ not much more than thirty years earlier)Report