Turning the page on another chapter

Sporting News, The, Dec 1, 1997 by Steve Gietschier

In the beginning--how else would a story about the publication long nicknamed "The Bible of Baseball" commence?--THE SPORTING NEWS was an eight-page broadsheet. A single copy cost 5 cents and a year's subscription $2. When Alfred H. Spink, a Canadian American who came to St. Louis to work in the newspaper business, published our first issue on March 17, 1886, he set out not only to make a profit, but also to please his friends. These guys were the city's "barroom fraternity," frequenters of the Cheers of their day. They knew St. Louis' saloons and boardinghouses, its politicians and policemen. They were interested in politics, crime, the theater and sports, especially baseball. THE SPORTING NEWS was written for them.

There was baseball in the? first issue, of course. Front-page stories, written in the form of letters to the editor, covered "The Game in Gotham," "The White Stockings" and "The Northwestern League." But the longest piece on page 1 was about harness racing, and there were other sports here, too: cycling, boxing and hunting, plus the first installment of Caught on the Fly. In all, two pages of ads and six of news.

Spink's enterprise proved such a success that he soon asked his younger brother Charles to join him as business manager for $50 a week. Charles arrived in St. Louis with $10 in his pocket. Al borrowed the money and bought his brother dinner with it. Within four years, the younger Spink had pushed the older aside. Al turned to his other passion, the theater. He wrote and produced a play, "The Derby Winner," that required a cast of 42 persons and six horses. The Spink name helped make it a success in St. Louis, but when Al took his creation on the road, it flopped monumentally. Al was wiped out, even using his SPORTING NEWS stock as collateral for loans he could not repay.

By 1910, a copy of THE SPORTING NEWS still cost 5 cents, and each issue was full of nothing but baseball. Charles Spink had tied the future of his business to the future of the national pastime. Moreover, he and his editor, Joe Flanner, became activist journalists, not content merely to report the news but campaigning--in the name of fans and readers--to make it. They railed against liquor peddling in the stands, gambling and assaults upon umpires.

When Western League president Ban Johnson wanted to make his minor league a major league and rename it the American League, Spink supported him. Flanner, an attorney by training, drafted the 1903 National Agreement that brought an end to the feud between the two major leagues and paved the way for the modern World Series.

In 1910, Spink hired a young Chicago newspaperman, Ring Lardner, as editor. His tenure lasted but a few weeks--he accused Spink of dishonesty--but he did use his time to write "Pullman Pastimes," a series of columns about ballplayers on the road that presaged Lardner's development into one of America's best humorists.

Charles Spink died in 1914 after attending the opening game of the Federal League's St. Louis Terriers. He was succeeded by his son, J.G. Taylor Spink, a journalistic dynamo who never was very far from a telephone despite his great penchant for travel. It was on one of his trips, in fact, that THE SPORTING NEWS got its unofficial nickname.

"There goes the man who writes the Bible," said a passenger on an ocean liner to the shin's captain when a dapper, young Spink and his wife were boarding the vessel. "Who is he," joshed the captain, "Matthew, Mark, Luke or John?" "That is Taylor Spink," replied the voyager, "and he writes the Bible of Baseball." The nickname stuck. Two decades later, when Bill Veeck's Cleveland Indians buried their pennant hopes in a mock ceremony before late-season game, business manager Rudie Schaffer read the last rites from "The Bible of Baseball."

This third Spink ran THE SPORTING NEWS until 1962 and saw it through what we now call the "Golden Age of American Sport." The paper, in fact, became a must-read, week after week, year-round, for anyone in any sector of baseball--players, coaches, managers, announcers, executives, owners and especially fans, who got their say every week in the Voice of the Fan. Baseball and THE SPORTING NEWS were bound inextricably.

The September 17,1942, issue changed all that forever. There, in a small ad at the bottom of page 5, came the announcement, "Football Next Week." It was almost as if the sport had just been invented. Coverage was minimal at first: schedules, results and one feature story per week. At season's end, we named an All-American team and a player of the year, Frank Sinkwich of Georgia.

Football was followed that winter by basketball and hockey. But remarkably, in this year and for years to come, these sports disappeared from TSN's pages in February, just as baseball was making its way to spring training.

The following summer, THE SPORTING NEWS switched from a full-sized newspaper to a tabloid. Spink had tried out the, tabloid format in special military editions, and when the federal government urged the conservation of paper as part of the war effort, the new format became Spink's response.