From the 1951 movie Angels in the Outfield

ALAN writes:

For your readers who enjoy movies from pre-Revolutionary times (i.e., before the 1960s), I would like to recommend one made by MGM in 1951. Angels in the Outfield is a black-and-white movie about the manager of a baseball team and an orphan. It is not primarily about baseball but about good and evil, self-control and its absence. It is not a great movie. It does not pretend to be. But it is charming and thoroughly satisfying to anyone who remembers American culture and baseball in the 1950s.

The story involves the influence of the orphan and a newspaper reporter on the manager and his bad habits.  It features excellent performances by Paul Douglas as the manager, Janet Leigh as the reporter, Donna Corcoran as the eight-year-old orphan, and Keenan Wynn as an obnoxious sports announcer.  Bing Crosby, Joe DiMaggio, Ty Cobb, and songwriter Harry Ruby appear as themselves in brief scenes.

The movie is a time capsule from 1951. There is no “diversity” or “multiculturalism.” There are no “messages.” There is a degree of orderliness in the behavior of the people in this movie that was common in 1951 and for some years after but would be astonishing to see in any public place today.  Shakespeare is quoted on a baseball field.  We get to see streetcars and scenes on the streets of Pittsburgh, where parts of the movie were filmed.  Baseball teams traveled by train, and one scene takes place in a dining car.

Inside a Catholic orphanage we see immaculate rooms, hallways, wooden staircases, and the quiet dignity that Catholic nuns enforced.  All those scenes are true to life:  That moral code and orderliness were always there in the red-brick parochial school building I attended in the 1950s and in other such places.

The manager’s bad habit of losing his temper and swearing at umpires is portrayed humorously and effectively without a single off-color word spoken or implied by anyone.  That is because this movie was made in 1951 when even people in the motion picture industry understood what is not acceptable in speech and conduct.  But this was not an instance of “censorship”.  There was no censorship, because it was unnecessary.  This was self-policing by producers who understood and respected a moral code that most Americans in 1951 endeavored to follow and expected the entertainment industry not to violate.

By contrast, if this movie were made today, it would include all the explicit profanities, for which its producers would applaud themselves and adolescent-witted audiences would flock to the theaters.  That is because motion picture producers today are incapable of understanding how to make a decent movie and audiences are incapable of understanding why and how to appreciate one.  Neither group is capable of understanding the moral and entertainment value in a movie like “Angels in the Outfield,” which all Americans understood in 1951.

Many of the baseball scenes were filmed in Forbes Field, a classic ballpark that was home to the Pittsburgh Pirates for sixty years.  In 1959, “Forbes Field” was one of those romantic-sounding magical places that loomed in the imagination of a ten-year-old boy as he listened in the darkness of summer nights to St. Louis Cardinals’ radio announcer Harry Caray describe the play-by-play of games in that ballpark between the Cardinals and the Pirates.

In this movie we see Forbes Field and American baseball fans as they were in 1951.  We see panoramic views of the grandstands, the scoreboard, the press boxes, action on the field, and the people in the seats.

It shows that the point of going to a baseball game was to enjoy a baseball game.  For Americans in 1951, that was enough.  Professional baseball had not yet descended into the spectacle of noise, gimmicks, and self-congratulation that it became in later years and is today.

There are no TV screens, no rock “music,” no electronic scoreboards festooned with flashing lights, no “total entertainment,” no cartoon characters prancing about, no advertisements on the outfield walls, and no bombastic displays of self-importance by the players or the fans. People in the stands are not there to show off.  They cheer, boo, and applaud alternately.  They are never out of control.  They are very much in control — of themselves.  (Note:  All are white.)

There are moments of quiet during the game, with only the low murmur of the crowd, thus permitting spectators to talk, to think, to assess the game.  This is not cinematic fantasy.  It is an exact reflection of such moments in Forbes Field and other ballparks in the years before they were drowned out by the insufferable noise called “music”.  There is an orderliness about these people and the setting that would become glaringly obvious if contrasted with what professional baseball is today.  (And what is baseball today?  It is “a symptom and casualty of cultural deterioration” said Lawrence Auster in a discussion in 2008, and he was right.)

This movie shows baseball fans who know how to act and dress. The men are well-groomed. There are no men with long hair or earrings. Many men wear white shirt and tie. The women wear dresses, hats, and pearls, not blue jeans, trousers, or tattoos.  No one watching the game wears baseball shirts or caps, let alone the quintessential mark of stupidity in baseball caps worn backward.  Only the ballplayers wear baseball apparel and caps.  There is a whole unspoken code of moral standards and expectations undergirding all those scenes.  That is because they were grown-ups, not perpetual adolescents.  Today’s baseball fans know no such code because they are adolescents, not grown-ups.

If my father found himself in a baseball setting like that shown in this movie, he would be thoroughly comfortable. But if he found himself in a professional baseball setting today, he would feel repelled and insulted.

Little touches add to the movie’s charm:  Joe the parrot; the ramps in a classic old ballpark; a veal dinner seasoned with neatsfoot oil mistaken for olive oil; and the little girl asking “What about grace?” at the dinner table, to which the manager replies “Grace who?”  The conversation between the orphan and the manager in Mother Superior’s office in the orphanage is one of the best scenes, played superbly by Donna Corcoran and Paul Douglas.

Despite his temper, the manager of the team is shown to be a decent man who—because of the orphan’s prayers for his losing team—is induced to abandon his bad habits. In doing so, the net gain for him and the audience is: A family. That is what Americans in 1951 found satisfying in the closing scene of a movie: A family. That was the priceless treasure whose value Americans understood in 1951 but today are too stupid to understand.

This movie shows elements of a lost civilization not only in Forbes Field, which was demolished twenty years later, but also in a baseball team of well-mannered, clean-shaven men, a ballpark and city run by white men, a Catholic orphanage, Catholic nuns in their traditional distinctive habits, the cleanliness and orderliness in public places, and a moral code of dignified behavior, dress, and demeanor even at sporting events involving thousands of people.  Like Forbes Field, Americans demolished or surrendered those things, too.

Younger viewers will know nothing of such things.  But older viewers like me know that such things existed in the 1950s not only in motion pictures but also in American culture, because we were there.

— Comments —

Dan R. writes:

Being roughly the same age as Alan and growing up a baseball fan in a big city, I will attest to the veracity of his essay.  It definitely moistens the eyes, with the contrast between then and now just painful.  No doubt, however, many would applaud the state of baseball (and many other such things) today, the thought of which makes me shudder.

One major difference I’ve detected in baseball then and now is that baseball is now no longer for children, but for adults.  The economics of the game have changed to a point where tickets are too high-priced for families to attend on a regular basis, and my impression is that many of the fans are successful professional people indulging in an exercise of nostalgia.  Worst of all may be the sports-talk shows, which I find myself watching when stopping for dinner when en route home from a long trip on the road.  Being alone, I’ll sit at the bar (I don’t drink, but the main reason for sitting there is that there’s usually no wait), and for the few minutes I’m there the ubiquitous televisions with their closed-captioning of the sports-talk are bearable and even amusing, but what strikes me most is that the topics of conversation are rarely anything kids would be interested in.  In a word, it’s all “moneyball.”  Where this will leave baseball a decade or two down the road, when professionals will have had far less exposure to it, is anyone’s guess.

Laura writes:

One major difference I’ve detected in baseball then and now is that baseball is now no longer for children, but for adults. 

This is not true for Minor League baseball, which has grown in popularity. The Minor League experience also tends to be more wholesome.

A reader writes:

They put more effort into dressing for a baseball game than many people do today for church.

Laura writes:

Sad, but true. : – )

By the way, here is a photo of women celebrating Pittsburgh’s 1960 World Series victory. Not a single woman is wearing pants.

Oppressed. Terribly oppressed.

Buck writes:

Great stuff, Alan!

Playing baseball fell somewhere between involuntary action, similar to breathing, and reflex action, such as blinking. It was that natural and automatic. We would just go to the field and wait. It was a magnet for boys in our neighborhood. Our field was a vacant lot that I could throw a baseball on to from my front yard. The elevated RF&P rail line defined the outfield. It was our own natural stadium. It even had a concrete warning track. That empty lot (and the rail line) was a gift. Like so many of the temporary gifts of the 1950s, they were disappearing forever by the early 1960s.

My neighbor’s grandfather was in charge of facilities at the storied Griffith Stadium, home to the Washington Senators and the Washington Redskins, until demolished in 1961.  I got to run out on the field once circa 1954 (age six), while the place was empty. I think that my dad took me to a game when I was even younger, but I don’t remember. Baseball was one of the rare connections that I had with my dad. That diminished as my fastball developed. If I could go back in time, I would back it off, just to keep him playing catch in the back alley.

I think that it is now obvious that a whole lot of World War Two veterans, just like my father, were clueless about a great many things that they simply took for granted; never imagining that American life would not continue as is. Most of the men in the ball park photos from the 1950s never saw it coming, and if some did, they had no clue how to fight the enemy within, especially one that so many of their brothers had just died to defend.

Ironically, it was another war, our own Civil War, that spread the great game of baseball so rapidly around America, turning it into America’s game, and making it the new American pastime.

Paul writes:

I can vouch for Alan’s eloquent description of what it was like. It is vital that his testimony and the testimony of his peers appear on the Net.  They are historical documents.

Alan’s testimony rebuts those who concentrate on real and perceived victims that existed in the 50s.  Forever one will find victims if one only looks.

In the fifth or sixth grade, I vividly recall walking the few blocks home from my Catholic grammar school and passing the two post boxes, one a regular and the other, a strange olive green that I since learned is a kind of way station for postmen.  I had my Magnavox transistor radio Christmas present with me and was dejected because the Dodgers were beating my Yankees in the World Series.  In those days, MLB heroes were all-Americans, Mickey Mantle, Roger Maris, etc.

You are right: minor league ball is different.  It is primarily about family, and it is played by Americans, who are almost always white, having come from colleges.  Black players are fondly cheered too, even in evil Mississippi.  I recently attended a Mississippi Braves game in the heart of Mississippi.  The fans were 95 percent white.  In front of me was a charming black family of three.  About the fourth inning, I noticed the Mommy politely put her hands to her ears to indicate that my whistling was too loud.  It is really loud.  My father would use it to call us in at dusk from blocks away.  I immediately apologized and stopped.  They turned and smiled.  We were entertained (when the Braves scored two runs to win by one) by a cannon beyond center field and manned by men dressed in evil Confederate uniforms.  I was shocked when my friend’s wife wanted to go take their picture, she being offended by the Confederate statue in the city.  I have no such prejudice and went with her.  They were proud and charming and explained how old the cannon was.  They were not intent on harming anyone.

Alan writes:

Thanks to Laura Wood for the pictures and to Dan R., Buck, and Paul for their comments on baseball as it once was.

Here are a few more notes on how it was in St. Louis:

In the 1930s, Muny League teams played amateur baseball in city parks. They played for the love of the game.  Teams were sponsored by local stores, banks, churches, taverns, and businesses.  One of my uncles played on a team with Terry Moore, who would become an outstanding centerfielder for the St. Louis Cardinals in the 1940s.

In her reminiscence of life there in the 1930s, Betty Pavlige recalled how she and her girlfriend sat on the curb and watched boys play baseball on a vacant corner lot at Second and Victor Streets in the Kosciusko neighborhood in south St. Louis, a working-class neighborhood with many factories and industries.                 [ Growing Up in Soulard, 1980, pp. 72-77 ]

“Sand Lot Baseball” was the great summer activity in that neighborhood, wrote a friend of my father who lived there in the 1930s and whose grandfather owned a corner grocery store.  The “playing field” was often a corner lot with no grass.  Since there was not a lot of auto traffic, some variations of baseball were played in street intersections in early evening.  “….On the field at Second Street and Lami Street, a railroad track ran through the outfield, which was an impediment but was taken in stride….”   [ Arthur Roesler, Growing Up on Third Street, privately printed, 2004 ]

With her parochial school classmates in the 1930s, my mother played softball at Fox Playground in south St. Louis.  One day she and some of her friends walked three miles to see a Cardinals game at Sportsman’s Park.   How many of today’s baseball trendies would walk three miles?

When the Cardinals played the St. Louis Browns in the 1944 all-St. Louis World Series, my mother and one of my uncles made a wager.  She was a Cardinals fan, but he was a Browns fan.  If the Browns won the Series, she would buy a case of beer for my uncle.  But if they lost, he would buy a case of soda for her.  It was all in a lighthearted spirit of good fun.  Of course the Browns lost, and my uncle kept his promise.

Dwight Eisenhower was in the White House when my classmates and I discovered baseball cards in 1958.  My father spent countless hours on Saturday afternoons and weeknights playing baseball with me at the neighborhood park.  We played catch, Wiffle Ball, Indian Ball, and regular games whenever enough boys were there to form teams on the spur of the moment.  I remember how satisfying it was to quench our thirst at the drinking fountain after playing baseball for several hours in the heat of a Saturday afternoon.

At age 9-10, I didn’t realize it, but those were some of the happiest times my father and I would ever share.  Many years later, the day came when I realized that he and I would never again toss a baseball back and forth, as we did so many times in those golden summers from 1958-’64.

The time also came when fewer white children came to that park, the drinking fountains stopped working, the playground was dismantled, thugs vandalized the park building, and people began to be robbed, shot, and killed on the streets around the park.

A color slide taken by my mother in 1958 shows one of my aunts (at age 53) playing catch baseball with me, a scene that strikes me today as highly improbable.  But she agreed to do so, I imagine because she loved me dearly and had no children of her own.

“There used to be a ballpark right here” is what Frank Sinatra could have sung about the block in north St. Louis where Sportsman’s Park stood until it was demolished in 1966.

One night in June 1959 my mother took me to that classic ballpark and we sat in the upper deck to see a game between the Cardinals and the Phillies.  But the special attraction that night was a 25^th reunion of players from the 1934 World Series-winning Cardinals’ “Gas House Gang” team, including Dizzy Dean, Frankie Frisch, and Joe Medwick.  Dizzy Dean sang “The Wabash Cannonball”.  I was too young then to realize how much it must have meant to her to see, right there on the field below us, the same Cardinal players whose exploits she had followed at age 12 in 1934.

On a sunny Saturday afternoon in July 1960, my father took me to Sportsman’s Park for a game between the Cardinals and the Cubs.  It was also “Camera Day”, meaning that children could walk on to the playing field and meet and take snapshots of their favorite Cardinal players.  How impressive it was to that 10-year-old boy to see the huge expanse of that playing field and the brilliant white uniforms worn by the Cardinals and trimmed with just the right amounts of red, blue, and gold, with no feature overdone.  I managed to take seven snapshots of Cardinal players whose names I had learned from baseball cards and who were boyhood heroes to my classmates and me, including pitcher Larry Jackson, second baseman Julian Javier, and third baseman Ken Boyer.  Stan Musial stood right there in front of me.

I remember how startling it was to a little boy when he couldn’t see a thing because everyone seated around him suddenly stood up in response to a timely play.  I remember walking up and down the ramps inside the park to reach our seats.  My father bought a Cardinals’ yearbook for me for the princely sum of fifty cents.  It was a modest affair with black and white pictures of Cardinal players with their wives and children.  A yearbook today costs thirty times that amount.  It is a gaudy affair with slick advertising and pictures of players who look and behave like buffoons.

Without realizing it, I was living through the tail end of a golden age in American baseball.  It was golden not only because of talented players in only sixteen major league teams, but also partly because things like restraint, balance, form, proportion, and perspective were still understood by most ballplayers and most other Americans.

Many players were well aware of their responsibility to set a good example for the boys and girls who idolized them–players like Ted Williams, Ken Boyer, Lindy McDaniel, and Stan Musial.  A substantial degree of loyalty existed between players, fans, and cities.  Fair play and good sportsmanship could still be seen.  Savvy baseball fans applauded outstanding plays by the opposing team.

The splendor in those years consisted partly in the baseball cards we traded with friends and classmates, and partly in being able to go to a grand old ballpark like Sportsman’s Park every now and then.  It was there also in the wonderful scenes that were painted in our imagination all summer long by radio announcers Harry Caray and Jack Buck describing games in exotic-sounding places like Wrigley Field, Crosley Field, Forbes Field, and Connie Mack Stadium.  Baseball on radio was always better than baseball on TV.  Radio engaged the imagination; television deadened it.  Dogs can watch baseball on TV, but I doubt they can understand it on radio.

Former Boston Red Sox player Dom DiMaggio wrote:  “….you could walk down your neighborhood street and hear the home team’s game being broadcast over the radio, with the crowd noise and the announcer’s play-by-play description coming through the screen doors and open windows….”  [ Real Grass, Real Heroes, 1990, p. 7 ]

That was absolutely right, and the voice we heard on streets in St. Louis in the 1950s-‘60s was that of Harry Caray.

The splendor of professional baseball faded gradually as more and more novelties and gimmicks were adopted, teams multiplied, talent was diluted, players agreed to wear uniforms that look like jammies, baseball cards became big business, and games were made into spectacles of bombast, advertising, loutishness, and the blaring noise absurdly called “music”.

Baseball historian Lawrence Ritter wrote that yesterday’s classic ballparks “had magic that will live for years in the memories of those who were lucky enough to have passed through their turnstiles”.  [ Lost Ballparks, 1992, p. 7 ]  Indeed they did, and Sportsman’s Park was one of them.  It was rich in baseball history.  It was small enough that fans enjoyed a feeling of intimacy in seats that were close to the playing field.  It was too small to contain a ball that Babe Ruth hit and that sailed out of the park and broke a window in a building across the street.

Seldom today do I feel the absence of my parents and aunts and uncles more intently than on a pleasant summer Sunday afternoon like so many of those in the 1950s-‘80s when baseball on radio was an enjoyable part of their lives and mine that I made the mistake of just taking for granted.

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