Hero Crafting in Sporting Life, an Early Baseball Journal

Abstract

By the turn of the twentieth century, organized baseball had emerged as America's national pastime with larger-than-life heroes enshrined in mythic lore. Early sports writers engaged in a symbiotic relationship with professional baseball, promoting the sport, its leaders, and players, yet all the while profiting from the game's success. This article examines how Sporting Life, one of the earliest sports journals, played a role in manufacturing heroes out of early American baseball players. This study identifies mechanisms that Sporting Life used to craft heroes in the decade preceding the 1920s, which scholars have long identified as the Golden Age of sports writing. Many scholars have examined legendary Jazz-Age sports writers such as Grantland Rice and Paul Gallico, who mythologized sports stars in the 1920s, but this study reveals that only a decade prior to the Golden Age, Sporting Life writers were crafting heroes of the Dead Ball Era. One question served to guide the narrative: what techniques did Sporting Life writers employ to mythologize prominent professional baseball stars and leaders from 1912 to 1917? After a broad reading of Sporting Life issues throughout the 1910s, twenty-five issues were systematically selected and more than 205 articles were analyzed utilizing an in-depth textual analysis.