Ballplayers on Stage: Baseball, Melodrama, and Theatrical Celebrity in the Deadball Era

Professional athletes have been known to try acting from time to time. Peyton Manning hosted Saturday Night Live, for example, and LeBron James starred in the newest Space Jam (2021) movie (after, of course, Michael Jordan appeared in the original). As Travis Stern shows in his slim volume Ballplayers on Stage, this is a well-worn American tradition. Analyzing the so-called deadball era of baseball—named for the low-scoring games and the extreme rarity of home runs—of approximately 1900 to 1920, Stern tells the stories of five popular baseball players who also dabbled in theater productions. As Stern notes, this was a mutually beneficial arrangement for players and theater owners. Players were not expected to develop professional acting skills because their mere presence brought patrons to the theater, and as a result they earned significant income in the offseason for comparatively easy work. In turn, players’ fame coaxed patrons to the theater who may not otherwise have bothered to attend. The players’ acting was generally poor, which for audiences was part of the fun. Making use of periodicals, typescripts of plays, and biographies of these players, Stern argues that the players’ participation in melodramas—stage plays marked by the presence of clear heroes and villains and designed to evoke intense emotion in the audience—helped baseball shed its image as a sport of the working class and instead brought it into the realm of middle-class respectability.Stern's five subjects are Cap Anson, Mike “King” Kelly, Christy Mathewson, Ty Cobb, and Rube Waddell. Each created a slightly different persona on stage, which was virtually always linked to the player's baseball reputation. Anson, for example, cultivated an image as a heated and passionate participant on the field and the paragon of gentility off it, which he brought to his role in the play A Runaway Colt. Mathewson, who served as a writer rather than an actor, was known as a selfless, caring member of the New York Giants. He helped author The Girl and the Pennant, including in the play a hero character whose unassailable goodness was based upon his own sterling reputation. By contrast, Detroit Tigers star Ty Cobb was known as a hothead who was quick to anger and even throw punches when things did not go his way, and he reveled in being jeered by fans of the opposing team. Although he tried to play a melodramatic hero in The College Widow, those who came to see him perform usually did so because they were intrigued by his bad reputation, blunting the impact of his character's positive qualities. Stern concludes the book with a brief analysis of the vaudeville career of Babe Ruth, the legendary player whose penchant for big hits and home runs helped inaugurate the more active “live ball” era.Stern does an excellent job delving into the specific details of these five players’ stage careers, but he could have spent more time placing their stage participation into a broader context. Owing to scholars’ interest in blackface performances during this period, there is a significant body of literature on the cultural meaning of theater in the United States in the early twentieth century. Without a firmer grounding in the scholarly literature, the reader is left to guess at the significance of some of these events. Indeed, historian John F. Kasson's analysis of “high” and “low” culture would have helped ground Stern's assertion that baseball players’ participation in stage plays helped make the sport more respectable—a claim that is more stated than demonstrated. Nonetheless, for readers interested in the intersection of sport and other forms of mass culture, Stern's book is a useful and intriguing resource. It is perhaps best used in graduate seminars on sport or theater, although selected chapters might be helpful in educating undergraduate students on the complex history of celebrity culture in the United States.