Alva Bradley, Baseball’s Last Purist

In 1927, at the height of the booming 1920s, Cleveland was a bustling metropolis, a manufacturing dynamo and transportation hub on the Great Lakes. As the fifty-two-story Terminal Tower—ground was broken the year before, and construction would be completed in 1930—began to rise over Public Square, the city had a new monument and focus to look forward to, a prestigious office address and the grand terminus of railroad lines coming into Cleveland from all parts of the country, particularly between New York and Chicago.

The major-league baseball team, the Cleveland Indians, had won the World Series in 1920 and finished a close second to the Yankees for the American League pennant in 1926. By the beginning of the 1927 season, the stellar player-manager Tris Speaker had resigned under a cloud of accusations (never substantiated) that he threw a baseball game in 1919. Joe Sewell and Charlie Jamieson were the only starters left from the championship team of seven years ago. The new manager, Jack McCallister, led a team that proved mediocre, finishing 66-87, good for no better than sixth place. Attendance at League Park had dropped from 627,426 in 1926 to 373,138 in 1927. When James Dunn, owner of the Indians since 1916, died in 1922, ownership devolved to his estate, and his widow took over. In the fall of 1927 she sold the Indians and League Park to a group of local real-estate magnates and businessmen for approximately one million dollars.

The new owners considered it important that the ownership of the ballclub be local. The most passionate baseball fan among them was Alva Bradley, who, though not the principal investor, was designated their president and spokesman. Bradley, then in his early forties, was a Cornell graduate, president of the Cleveland Chamber of Commerce, and chairman of the Cleveland Builders Supply Company. His involvements in the real-estate and shipping industries were numerous. Sportswriter Whitey Lewis described him as “suave, even-tempered and inclined to adopt a conciliatory view of disputes.”

Every spring, Bradley would express optimism that the Indians would win the pennant. After every game at League Park, whether the team had won or lost, he went to the clubhouse and talked with the players, never criticizing any of them for their performance.

Congratulations would follow a win, and, if they lost, Bradley would begin the conversation with “Well, we can’t win ’em all.”

Bradley once said of Ernest S. Barnard, who served as spokesman for the Dunn family and had arranged the sale of the Indians, that he was “unquestionably the smartest man I ever met in baseball. … He sold our crowd the team for a million dollars, and they weren’t worth a darned cent.” The 1928 team had a fair batting average, .285, but they didn’t score many runs. Moreover, their pitching was bad and their defense the worst in the league-all this despite Bradley’s resolve from the outset to introduce new blood into the organization.

Recognizing the gaps in his knowledge of the baseball business, Bradley hired American League umpire Billy Evans as general manager and vice president for an estimated salary of $30,000 to $40,000 a year. When the contract of shortstop Roger Peckinpaugh, a native of Wooster, Ohio, was purchased from the Chicago White Sox, he hung up his cleats to become the Indians’ new field manager. Looking back, Bradley once described his new manager as “sound ” and scrupulously honest in all his dealings. “I never had to fear that he might get the club into trouble.”

Bradley immediately went to work to strengthen the Indians’ roster. With Evans’s advice and the new owners’ money, he endeavored to acquire some of the game’s best players. His letter to Ed Barrow of the Yankees indicated that his “sole effort ” was “to build up an organization that will put Cleveland back on the baseball map.” Generous offers made to the Yankees for Lou Gehrig and to the Boston Braves for Rogers Hornsby were rebuffed. But Billy Evans went to the Pacific Coast League and for $50,000 did acquire Earl Averill, the powerful center fielder who would be the team’s best offensive player for the next decade.

Anticipating championship teams, Bradley, in a letter to city manager William R. Hopkins, wrote on May 23, 1928: “We must have the necessary facilities to take care of the crowds. I hope that some definite action will be taken on the Stadium.” Many powerful business interests, including Bradley’s and those of the Van Sweringen brothers, developers of the Terminal Tower, stood to benefit from the new Municipal Stadium, slated to be built on the lakefront at West Sixth Street. Bradley worked diligently for the bond referendum, on the ballot in November, to raise $2,640,000 for the Stadium’s construction.

The referendum passed. Bradley boasted, “We’ll fill that place often, every Sunday.” Its seating capacity was 78,129, and in the 1930s the Indians would fill it only once. Bradley didn’t believe in hiring a public-relations firm for the team, reasoning that a team’s winning record would sell itself and that, if the record were a losing one, “I do not care what you do; you cannot interest them in seeing a lot of poor players.” Unfortunately, Bradley’s nineteen years as president of the Indians included a decade of the Great Depression and four years of World War II. The plans Bradley and his fellow owners had for the improvement of the organization were “crushed in the merciless grinder of the depression.” Gone were the days when general manager Billy Evans had the funds to acquire players of Averill’s caliber.

During the Depression years and following, Bradley would never negotiate with the players about their salaries. After discussing a given player with Billy Evans and Roger Peckinpaugh, the front office determined the figure the club would pay. The first figure was the final one.

The Indians played their first home game at the new stadium on July 31, 1932—a pitcher’s duel between Mel Harder and Lefty Grove of the Athletics, the A’s finally winning 1-0. Thereafter, the Indians made Municipal Stadium their permanent home field through the end of the 1933 season, but during that period their average attendance there per game was only 5,817, about a thousand less than what they could have expected to draw at League Park.

The Stadium, Babe Ruth declared, was a cow pasture, and Connie Mack informed Bradley that the greatest place in the world to play baseball was none other than League Park. Like a lot of fans, Bradley enjoyed high-scoring games, and he pointed to another one-run win by the Athletics over the Indians in July 1932—this one an 18-17 game at League Park only three weeks before their inauguration of Municipal Stadium, as one of the best games he had ever seen. By 1934, the Indians had returned to League Park, at least for their weekday and Saturday games.

It was in 1933 that the Depression hit baseball the hardest. After President Roosevelt closed the banks in March, Bradley had some difficulty finding enough cash to pay spring-training expenses. In an effort to boost gate receipts, he discontinued radio broadcasts of regular-season games. The organization had been in the red ever since it was acquired by the new ownership team in 1928. Bradley had never received any salary from his position as club president, and now everyone in the front office, from Evans on down, took a pay cut. After every game Evans would report the club’s financial details to Bradley. The player payroll was trimmed by $70,000.

The Indians teams of the early Depression years were hard-hitting ones, but the fielding was poor and the pitching only fair, although a few bright spots in that department stand out. Wes Ferrell won 91 games for the Indians from 1929 through 1932 (but then faltered in 1933 and was pitching for the Red Sox the next year). And Mel Harder, who broke in with the Indians in 1928, won twenty or more games for the Indians twice in the 1930s and established himself as a rock of stability in their starting rotation.

A little more than two months into the 1933 season, with the Indians two games out of first place, Evans fired Peckinpaugh, on June 7. In more than five years as manager of the Indians, Peckinpaugh compiled a record of 415-402, a winning percentage of .508. “We only hire the manager, the public fires him,” Bradley told reporters. This incident was the beginning of a series of questionable decisions on the part of the Indians to fire their managers. By the time Oscar Vitt was shown the door in 1940, Cleveland had developed a reputation for being “the graveyard of managers.”

In 1940, Plain Dealer sports columnist Gordon Cobbledick would extol Peckinpaugh’s managerial excellence and argue that his departure was the beginning of Bradley’s woes. “It is said,” Cobbledick wrote, that “once the owner started firing managers, it was an indication of his failure to provide winning players and he was in for trouble.”

Two days after Peckinpaugh’s dismissal, Bradley announced that Walter Johnson, the pitching legend who would be elected to the inaugural class of the Baseball Hall of Fame in 1936, had been hired as the Indians’ new manager. Some reports indicate that Evans was opposed to the hiring of Johnson but that the ownership group included a personal friend of the “Big Train.”

In 1934, his first full season as manager, Walter Johnson led his team to a third-place finish. The assessment of sportswriter Herman Goldstein was that he was a great ballplayer and “far from a great manager but a nice guy, a very nice guy.” Johnson had little patience for ailing players. He boasted that “I’ve never had a sore arm.” The Big Train traded fiery Wes Ferrell to the Red Sox and suspended Oral Hildebrand after the pitcher asked for a day off to recover from an injured leg. By the fall of 1934 the anti-Johnson faction among the Indians players included almost the entire team. Bradley knew of the players’ feelings, but on July 20 the team re-signed Johnson to manage the 1935 season. “Johnson wasn’t built for the job,” wrote sportswriter Stuart Bell. “Reticent, inarticulate, and hard-headed, he can’t meet his players on a common ground.”

The owners were satisfied with the team’s performance in 1934. It posted a winning record, and the books showed a profit, finally-of $100,000. In a cost-cutting measure, Johnson had managed without a coach. Some veteran players, notably third baseman Willie Kamm, filled in the gaps by coaching younger players informally. On May 23, 1935, Johnson dismissed Kamm and backup catcher Glenn Myatt from the team, saying that he had reason to think they were fomenting opposition to him among the ranks. Myatt soon signed with the New York Giants, but the future of Kamm’s career in Cleveland was now on the desks of Bradley and Evans. At least initially and in public, Bradley did not waver. “In any business we run,” he told reporters, “we have only one manager.”

Bradley offered to pay Kamm his salary for the rest of the season to work as a scout, but he refused to make any decision against Johnson. Kamm asked Bradley if he could take his case to Commissioner Landis. Bradley assented. “I believe,” he said,

that when a manager is involved on the one side, a manager who has the whole hearted back of his employers, and a star player like Kamm, who is an idol with the fan flock on the other, the highest court in baseball should decide who is in the right.

When asked what action he would take if Landis backed Kamm, Bradley replied that there would be “only one thing I could do” and that would be to fire Johnson. Ed Bang of the Cleveland News concluded, “Bradley welcomed the chance to support his lonely position with the opinion of the commissioner.”

In a two-hour meeting with Johnson and Kamm, Landis affirmed that it was a manager’s right to dismiss a player. He also supported Kamm against any slur on his “character or repute.” Some observers concluded that Landis simply sent the whole matter back into Bradley’s hands. Kamm accepted Bradley’s offer to scout for the Indians. Trying to gather support for Johnson with Cleveland fans, Bradley took out an ad in the local papers: “We, the members of the Cleveland Baseball Club, want the fans to know that we are not a team split wide open by dissension, arrayed against our manager.” Twenty-one players signed the petition, in which Johnson was neither praised nor blamed.

Despite this measure, for weeks afterward the fans booed the manager. They even threw lemons on the field. Extra police were assigned to League Park, and concession stand beverages were dispensed in soft cups rather than bottles. Attendance was dropping. Only 5,000 showed up for a Sunday game with league-leading Detroit. Bradley fired Johnson, and on August 5 coach Steve O’Neill was hired in his stead. “The fans are mad at Johnson,” Bradley concluded, “and so we are going to put O’Neill in charge and see if he can pull us up a little.” Johnson never managed again, and Willie Kamm’s major-league career was over. Kamm managed in the Pacific Coast League for the Mission Reds in 1936-37, their last two years in the league. Billy Evans’s salary had been cut for the second time after the 1935 season, and he decided to move on. He served as president of the Southern Association in 1942-46 and as general manager of the Detroit Tigers in 1947-51.

Cy Slapnicka, superscout, assumed some of Evans’s responsibilities for the Indians. His work in the 1930s included his signing of future stars Hal Trosky, Ken Keltner, and Lou Boudreau. At a meeting of the board of directors in 1936, he reported on “the greatest young pitcher I ever saw.” The youngster was Bob Feller, a high-school junior from Van Meter, Iowa. Feller was signed for one dollar, and Slapnicka moved him around to keep him off the radar of rival major-league clubs. Judge Landis learned of the Indians’ dealings with Feller and was prepared to make the teenager a free agent. After meeting with Feller and Feller’s father, Bill, Landis relented, as the Feller’s explained Bob’s wish to stay with the Cleveland club and their intention to sue baseball if Landis attempted to alter their current arrangement with the organization.

The affable Steve O’Neill was Feller’s first manager in Cleveland when he came up in 1936. In 1936 and 1937, his two full seasons as the Indians’ manager, the team had winning records, although the pitching depth was not great and the defense not sharp. The roster included several eccentric players who were difficult to discipline; Johnny Allen, Rollie Hemsley, Frankie Pytlak, Roy Weatherly, and Jeff Heath earned reputations for rowdiness.

After the 1937 season, when O’Neill’s record stood at an impressive 199-168, Bradley demoted him to the position of scout, arguing that the former catcher had tolerated insubordination and failed to curb the volatile personalities of some of his players.

Enter Oscar Vitt, manager of the Yankees’ farm team in Newark. His new contract with the Indians took him through 1939. To the Cleveland reporters, Bradley described him as the premier manager in the minor leagues. Vitt promised a “hustling” club: “Above all, I insist my players hustle all the time or out they go. There will be no exceptions.” The Indians won 88 games in 1938, 87 in 1939, and finished third both years.

His players despised him. Gordon Cobbledick observed that Vitt “ridiculed players in conversation with writers, fans and opposing players and managers.” From his postgame visits to the clubhouse, Bradley was well aware that many of the players reciprocated their manager’s contempt. Even so, in August 1939, Bradley rehired him for the 1940 season. “They’ve got to know who their boss is,” he said, “and they may as well know now that Vitt will be giving the orders again next season. Naturally, I will back him up in whatever action he may see fit to take to maintain discipline.”

In 1940, the four-time defending world champion New York Yankees had an off year, and Cleveland showed some promise of capturing the pennant. Ed Bang at the Cleveland News suggested that, to win the players’ respect, Vitt had “to be more patient with their shortcomings.” But the outspoken manager ignored the advice, and his negative comments to players and to reporters alike continued apace.

On June 13, 1940, a committee of players approached Bradley. Feller related that, “if Bradley wanted the team to win the pennant, he had to fire Vitt, and the sooner the better.” Bradley heard them out. He reminded them that the season was not yet half over, and his final word to them was that Vitt would stay. One of the players conveyed some details of the meeting to Cobbledick, who the next day made it public knowledge through his column in the Plain Dealer. Whitey Lewis of the Cleveland Press urged Vitt to resign because “he had outlived his usefulness as manager of the present Cleveland Club.”

As in 1935, the manager had lost the respect of many of his players. Back then Bradley’s decision was to fire the manager, Walter Johnson. Now, though, five years later, the team was a winning one, and Vitt, while opposed by his players, at least had the support of the fans, who greeted him with cheers whenever he left the dugout to walk out on the field. At home as well as on the road, the Indians players had come to be called “the crybabies.”

Perhaps at Bradley’s suggestion, they signed an open letter to the Cleveland fans that was published in the local newspapers on June 18: “We, the undersigned, publicly declare to withdraw all statements referring to the resignation of Oscar Vitt. We feel this action is for the betterment of the Cleveland Baseball Club.” But this statement was in no sense a result of the players having changed their minds. On the contrary, insiders on the team called the present situation an “armed truce” likely to continue for the rest of the season.

But the players had now gotten their troubles off their chests, and that had a helpful effect. Feller recalled that the players worked with coach Johnny Bassler on their own set of signals during the games and ignored Vitt as much as they could. For his part, Vitt did discard the offensive dugout behavior and attitude that the players had objected to. “If mistakes are made,” Vitt told the press, “they’ll be criticized by me. But I’ll be as nice as I can.” The Indians lost the pennant to the Detroit Tigers the last weekend of the season. “Our players literally kicked it away,” Bradley told The Sporting News years later, in 1944. “The players were literally booed out of the championship.”

Whitey Lewis pointed fingers instead at the front office. “I think the officials of the baseball club should get together and hide in shame for allowing such a putrid situation to develop right under their noses,” he wrote in his column of June 14, 1940.

If they didn’t know of this approaching revolution, right under their noses, they are not capable of operating a baseball team in the major leagues. If they did know of the inevitable and allowed such a condition to develop, words fail me at this point in the narrative.

Bradley would remain the club president until 1946, but after the 1940 season he would never bring to that role the same optimism and enthusiasm that had characterized his attitude in earlier years.

Vitt’ s contract was not renewed. Roger Peckinpaugh was brought back to replace him. The team slipped to fourth place (75-79) in 1941, and attendance dropped from 902,576 to 745,948. Bradley believed that no major league team should play more than seven-night games a season. His former advisor Cy Slapnicka, however, argued that lights at the Stadium would give people who worked during the day more opportunities to attend games. At President Roosevelt’s request, the Indians finally did add more night games to their schedule, doubling them to fourteen a season. (On the subject of televised games, Bradley maintained that television, if “unbridled,” would ruin all professional sports.)

Wartime baseball in Cleveland featured the appointment of twenty-four-year-old shortstop Lou Boudreau as player-manager in 1942. (A basketball injury resulted in arthritis in Bourdreau’s ankles, rendering him ineligible for military service.) Bradley opposed the move, arguing that “he was the greatest shortstop in the world. I’m not going to ruin his career by burdening him with the problems” that confront a manager. Peckinpaugh, who had moved to the front office to become general manager, finally persuaded Bradley to name Boudreau the manager, but Bradley insisted that the younger man be carefully advised by his elders, by Burt Shotton and other coaches.

Bradley thought wartime baseball should be discontinued if the caliber of available players declined beyond a certain threshold. “If we ever reach the point where we’d have to put catchers in the outfield, I’d be in favor of suspending.” Bradley felt strongly that the war effort should be subordinated to all other business. He delegated contract negotiations to Peckinpaugh and worked hard on arrangements for the exhibition game, between an all-service team and an American League all-star team, played at Municipal Stadium on July 7, 1942, before 62,094 paying fans. (The American League won, 5-0.) The event was a personal triumph for Bradley, as he hosted business leaders, writers, and broadcasters to raise money for the armed forces. It was around this time, in the early 1940s, after his brother had died of heart disease, that Bradley added to his philanthropic profile the chairmanship of a committee to raise funds for research into the causes of high blood pressure and hardening of the arteries.

Still dreaming of a Cleveland Indians world championship, Bradley corresponded regularly with Bob Feller, who was fighting the war in the Pacific. Bradley was looking forward to the day when Feller and his team-mates would come home and the city would be on top of the baseball world again. Other members of the ownership team, the wind taken out of their sails by some of the club’s struggles and embarrassments in recent years, worried that Bradley would stubbornly refuse to sell the team until they won the World Series, a goal that had eluded them all along. The group negotiated secretly with Bill Veeck and his investors to buy the Indians, and on June 21, 1946, the Cleveland Indians were sold to Veeck for $1.6 million. When Bradley learned of the news, he resolved to make a bid for the team himself, but it was too late.

Much of the marketing philosophy that Veeck would make famous during his tenure as owner of the Cleveland Indians would soon be adopted by baseball executives nationwide, but his immediate predecessor was not impressed. “I’ve always been a conservative man,” Bradley told Howard Preston in an interview (August 1, 1946) in the Cleveland News. “Fireworks and free nylon stockings at a ballgame are novel. But our old organization couldn’t have done it. Different people have different selling ideas.”

After being forced out of his role in the Indians organization, Bradley never attended another baseball game in Cleveland until 1948, when the Indians finally won their second world championship. He could take satisfaction that the championship team had at its core Boudreau, Feller, Keltner, and Hegan, ballplayers acquired during his time in the front office.

Ever the traditionalist, Bradley to the end continued to express his disapproval of the introduction of lights and whistles, as he might have called them, into the institution that was major-league baseball. “Today’s big question,” he told Ed McAuley of the Cleveland News in 1951, “is how many people are in the park? Get them in somehow. Play all your games at night. Give them souvenirs; give them all kinds of sideshows. Get them in the park.”

Bradley’s career as a baseball executive was marked by his conflicts with his managers, who in tum were in many cases hamstrung by their own conflicts with their players. “Ballplayers,” as the saying goes, “are ordinary people with special skills.” At the office, the supervisor can fire a temperamental accountant and the next day hire another who will do the same work just as well or better, but the talented ballplayer is a rare commodity. In baseball, the manager manages personalities as well as in-game strategy, and Bradley’s reluctance to fire his managers when they were failing miserably in that former capacity may have been a function of his never having worn a major-league uniform himself.

On Bradley’s death in 1953, The Sporting News wrote that “he brought to the National Pastime a calmness, dignity and honesty of purpose which helped see it through some of its most dangerous times, the long years of the depression and of World War II.”

That baseball’s last purist had held “firmly to the proposition that baseball is a sport rather than a business” was a sentiment that, besides being appropriate to the occasion, pointed to, if not the whole and complex truth about Alva Bradley, an important element of that truth and one worth remembering.

Enjoy the game on a sunny summer afternoon! 

 

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Russell Schneider informed me about Ed McAuley’s series about Bradley in the Cleveland News in January-February 1951 and gave me the title for this article.

Steve Johnson copied the Alva Bradley file at the National Baseball Hall of Fame for me. A great friend in baseball and SABR.

My wife Doris has calmed me and edited and typed my papers for more than fifty years. My father took me to the first night baseball game played at Brookside Park in Cleveland, on May 22, 1938, before an estimated crowd of as many as 100,000 people.

 

SOURCES

Akron Beacon Journal, 1934-35.

Cleveland News, 1934-53.

Cleveland Press, 1934-53.

Cleveland Plain Dealer, 1927-53.

The Sporting News, 1927-46, 1953.

Dolgan, Bob. Heroes, Scamps, and Good Guys: 100 Colorful Characters from Cleveland Sports History. Cleveland: Gray, 1971-2003.

Eckhouse, Morris. Legends of the Tribe: An Illustrated History of the Cleveland Indians. Dallas: Taylor, 2000.

Feller, Bob, with Bill Gilbert. Now Pitching, Bob Feller: A Baseball Memoir. New York: Harper Perennial, 1990.

Kavanagh, Jack. Walter Johnson: A Life. South Bend, Ind.: Diamond Communications, 1995.

Lewis, Franklin. The Cleveland Indians. New York: Putnam, 1949.

McAuley, Ed. Cleveland News, 29 January-24 February 1951. Series of 24 articles about Alva Bradley’s year as president of the Cleveland Indians.

Odenkirk, James E. Plain Dealing: A Biography of Gordon Cobbledick. Tempe, Ariz.: Spider-Naps, 1990.

Schneider, Russell. The Cleveland Indians Encyclopedia. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1996.

Thomas, Henry W. Walter Johnson: Baseball’s Big Train. Washington, D.C: Phenom Press, 1995.