Ringel: The 1915 World Series and the rise of the modern American sports fan
From SABR member Paul Ringel at We’re History on November 3, 2015:
One hundred years ago, the Boston Red Sox beat the Philadelphia Phillies in the 1915 World Series. The victory occurred in the midst of a dominant run for Boston’s baseball teams, which won five championships between 1912 and 1918. This success even brought national recognition to the city’s most vociferous baseball fans, a group that called themselves the Royal Rooters. Both these teams and the Rooters have been the subject of numerous books, documentaries, and even songs, but their involvement in the 1915 World Series in particular has generated little interest from sportswriters or historians.
The lack of attention paid to the 1915 Series may be due to the dominant pitching and limited offense that was typical of baseball’s “dead-ball” era. Yet if events on the field represented their time, what happened off the field was new. Record crowds and celebrity guests indicated professional baseball’s increasingly respectable status in the nation’s northern cities, and a public battle over accommodations for the Rooters revealed that their cheering had become more than just a leisure activity. For these mostly prosperous and ambitious men, it had become a means of gaining political and economic influence.
Read the full article here: http://werehistory.org/1915-world-series/
Originally published: November 5, 2015. Last Updated: November 5, 2015.