Halloween 1924 Was Baseball Barnstorming At Its Best
By Joe Guzzardi
On Halloween night, parents now must decide between the traditional activity—taking the youngsters trick-or-treating—or a newer option: watching the World Series, the fall classic that once ended in mid-September. World Series viewing is only practical for West Coast kids; the Los Angeles Dodgers’ Tyler Glasnow threw Game Three’s first pitch at 8:42 PM EDT. Fans know that if MLB Commissioner Rob Manfred could have his way, the league would play regular season games on Christmas Eve in Auckland, New Zealand. Picture Manfred’s fantasy: robots calling the plays at all four corners and players’ uniforms adorned from collar to cleat with advertisements—walking billboards.
Until Manfred realizes his dream, he’ll content himself with adding new teams to the existing leagues. With expansion and the diluted talent pool anticipated before the end of the decade, there could be a major reshuffling of existing leagues to address concerns over brutal travel schedules. Candidates for new franchises include Nashville, Salt Lake City, a possible return to Montreal, or the long shot: Mexico City. Manfred will need to mandate domed stadiums before awarding new franchises. Post-season weather delays are inevitable as games are played later and later in autumn.
Disgruntled fans yearning for true baseball should turn back the pages to relive the greatest Halloween baseball ever played. On October 31, 1924, three Hall of Famers—Babe Ruth, Walter Johnson, and Sam “Wahoo” Crawford—played an exhibition game for the ages. Ruth won his only batting crown that year, hitting .378. He led the league with 46 home runs and drove in 121 runs. Highlighted by the Bambino’s cloud-busting 550-foot home run, with a second four-bagger added for good measure, Ruth, his otherworldly homer, and the game live on in legend in tiny Brea, California.
Johnson, the “Big Train,” was a local hero. His family moved from Humboldt, Kansas—Johnson’s birthplace—to Olinda, California, just east of Brea, a small oil boomtown. As a frolicking teenager, Johnson rode his black mare “Tar,” worked the rough-and-tumble oil fields, and began pitching for the Union Oil Wells, a company team where he forged his future as a MLB 417-game winner.
Just a few weeks after Johnson’s Senators won the 1924 World Series against the New York Giants, the 36-year-old “Big Train” faced off against Ruth, who toed the slab and pitched a complete-game 12-1 victory. The game, part of the Johnson-Ruth barnstorming tour, was played in brilliant Southern California sunshine. In honor of the big day, schools were closed, shops shuttered, Boy Scouts directed traffic, and fans from nearby towns rushed to see baseball played by the best. Though the evidence is lost to time, rumors persist that the Hall of Fame duo led the town’s first-ever Halloween parade. The Brea Bowl erected two thousand seats to accommodate the town’s 1,500 residents, but 15,000 showed up. Those without seats settled for gathering around primitive radio crystal sets. An Anaheim Bulletin headline—”All roads lead to Brea for Monster Athletic Contest”—summed up the pregame excitement. The Los Angeles Times dubbed it “the greatest deluxe sandlot game Southern California has ever seen.” After all, the Dodgers’ move from Brooklyn to Los Angeles and the Giants’ shift from New York to San Francisco were more than three decades away.
But Johnson, just days after his triumphant seventh-game World Series win, disappointed his hometown rooters with his substandard pitching performance. With only a day’s rest from an exhibition in Oakland and hampered by semi-pro catcher “Bus” Callan’s limited experience, Johnson was shelled—eight runs on eight hits, including four home runs. Later in his life, Callan revealed a secret about Ruth and his homers. Early in the game, Johnson told his catcher that the fans wanted to see Ruth do what he does best—hit the ball out of sight. During Ruth’s first two at-bats, Johnson grooved fat pitches that, to the fans’ glee, the Sultan of Swat blasted.
After the game, Johnson and Ruth visited Hollywood, with Douglas Fairbanks giving the two a set tour of his latest movie, “The Thief of Bagdad.” The Brea exhibition was the last game of the barnstorming season, beating the November 1 deadline set by baseball commissioner Kenesaw Mountain Landis.
Ruth operated at full throttle on his swing west, playing to an estimated 125,000 fans in 15 cities. “He made 22 scheduled speeches, headed four parades, judged a boxing match, drove a golf ball 353 yards, visited eighteen hospitals and orphan asylums,” Marshall Smelser wrote in his 1975 biography, “The Life That Ruth Built.”
Postscript: When the Orange Freeway and the Brea Mall opened in the 1970s, the town turned into a magnet for shoppers and home buyers. Single-story houses now stand where the Brea Bowl once hosted Ruth and Johnson.
Compared to Ruth, Johnson is underappreciated. Consider this partial list of his records: nine consecutive 300+ innings pitched, 110 shutouts won, 35 1-0 shutouts, 65 shutouts lost, 12 seasons leading the league in shutouts, and highest batting average for a pitcher, .433.
Ruth and Johnson died too young. Johnson passed at age 59 from a brain tumor in 1946, and Ruth, aged 53, succumbed to cancer in 1948. Watch Johnson pitch to Ruth here.
Joe Guzzardi is a Society for American Baseball Research scholar. Contact him at guzzjoe@yahoo.com
