1914.
One hundred years ago.
A time for heroes to be born.
Joe DiMaggio, Joe Louis, and Clayton Moore came into the world that year.
DiMaggio was the best all around baseball player of his era while Louis became one of the best in the boxing world and a hero to African Americans in the decade before Jackie Robinson broke baseball’s color barrier. Moore would go on to be a circus performer, Hollywood stunt man, and actor (he would play the iconic role of The Lone Ranger on television 35 years after his birth).
If one followed baseball in 1914, one would have been reading about Roger Peckinpaugh, the 23-year-old shortstop of the Yankees who became manager, inspiring the future trivia question: Who was baseball’s youngest manager?
Flamboyant pitcher Rube Waddell, who was made for today’s media with his show-off personality, died at 36 from tuberculosis. Connie Mack, his manager on the Philadelphia Athletics, said of his four-time 20-game winner, “Rube had a million-dollar arm and a two-cent head.”
When Babe Ruth was baseball’s most popular character in the late 1920s, The Sporting News editorialized: “No player [who] ever lived, not even Babe Ruth, has so captured the affections of the fans of his day as did Rube Waddell.”
Also passing into baseball history in 1914 was Harry Steinfeldt, at the young age of 37. He’s the answer to this trivia question: Who was the third baseman of the Chicago Cubs at the time of the team’s famous double-play combination of Tinker to Evers to Chance?
And in 1914 a young man who would go on to rewrite baseball’s batting records made his major league debut as a pitcher. The aforementioned George Herman “Babe” Ruth, only 19, pitched in four games for the Boston Red Sox and won two of his three decisions.
Jewish fans that year were following the exploits of Erskine Mayer.
The Atlanta native dropped out of Georgia Tech in 1910 when he was offered a minor league contract. The Philadelphia Phillies were impressed with his pitching prowess and brought him to the major leagues in 1912. In his first full season Mayer won nine and lost nine but impressed savvy baseball men who saw beyond the mediocre won-lost record.
In 1914 Mayer became the first Jewish pitcher to win 20 games in a big league season, posting a 21-9 record with a superb earned run average of 2.58.
His background was an interesting one.
Erskine’s father’s side came from Germany. Musical talent ran in the family. Erskine’s father, Isaac, was a pianist and music teacher with a fondness for baseball and often played ball with his two sons.
Erskine’s mother traced her ancestry back to the Mayflower. Her mother’s brother, James Allen, was a riverboat captain operating from Hannibal, Missouri, to New Orleans. From marking twain on the boat, Samuel Clemens picked up his nom de plum of “Mark Twain.”
Erskine’s maternal grandmother was a convert to Judaism, and her daughter was born into the religion. They heard stories about and from Jews who came to America from Europe in the years before Erskine was born.
Just to cite one group as an example, harsh conditions imposed on Romanian Jews accounted for more than 75,000 of them coming to the United States between 1881 and 1914. Many left Romania on foot and trekked across Europe to Hamburg, Germany, where they boarded ships to Great Britain, Canada, and the United States.
Some eventually came all the way to Detroit. In 1914 the Ford Motor Company was offering five dollars for an eight-hour shift, slicing an hour off the workday for almost double the money paid elsewhere. The combination of jobs and money made Detroit a magnet. Fourteen thousand applied by mail, and many left homes and farms in all parts of the country and Europe.