The Cubs and Mets have it easy. All they are doing is flying into Japan for baseball’s first-ever international opening day, playing two games and then coming home with nothing worse than a little jet lag.
By contrast, there was the 1913-1914 world tour by the Chicago White Sox and New York Giants. Now that was a road trip.
It spanned nearly five months over five continents and 38,000 miles, with seasickness, the threat of disease, and dromedary halitosis all part of the package. Not that the tour lacked for highlights. A khedive and a king came out to watch the American pastime; Sir Thomas Lipton shared his wealth, in a way; and the Sphinx provided shelter from the elements.
The Hall of Fame has several items from the tour, but nothing presently on display. No matter. Chuck Comiskey still has the baseballs that Lipton and King George V autographed for his grandfather, Charles A. Comiskey. And Joseph Benz still remembers a story often told by his father, Sox pitcher Joe Benz, who went on the tour as a kind of last act of bachelorhood before getting married immediately on his return.
As the younger Benz, today an 82-year old retiree, tells it, “Supposedly, when they were standing in line to meet King George, one of the other players dared him to say, `Hello, George, how in the hell are you?’ “
Let the record show that Benz declined to be anything but diplomatic.
White Sox pitcher and future Hall of Famer Urban “Red” Faber told his son Urban a different story about the trip. “Dad said his favorite place was Australia. They could speak English there.”
The tour was the brainchild of Charles A. Comiskey. If the founder of the White Sox was a tightwad who drove his players to participate in what would become the Black Sox scandal of 1919, he was also something of a visionary. According to biographer G.W. Axelson, Comiskey had thought of taking his team on tour since their 1906 World Series win over the Cubs.
Comiskey wanted to copy baseball pioneer Albert G. Spalding, who barnstormed internationally with his National League White Stockings in 1888-1889. But Comiskey wanted to do it even better.
A chance encounter with Giants’ manager John McGraw at a Chicago saloon in December of 1912 set the idea in motion. The necessary money was raised, much of it from Comiskey himself, and plans were drawn up to tour Asia, Australia, Africa and Europe following the end of the 1913 season.
Ted Spencer, vice president and chief curator at the Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, is not surprised at either foray by a Chicago baseball team into Japan, the current one or the long ago one. Visiting in 1994, Spencer saw Japanese school yearbooks from 1900 “and you could see (even then) the importance of the game.”
Explains Spencer, “There’s always been this fascination with American culture in Japan, and it shows with baseball.” The game was introduced by American missionaries in the 1870s.
Cooperstown will be adding items from the Cubs-Mets series, Spencer says.
And, just as now, not all players were eager to go on the 1913 trip. Some apparently disliked the notion of travel by any means other than train or streetcar. The need to fill holes at various positions forced the teams to look beyond their own rosters. When Sox manager Jimmy Callahan extended an invitation to Nap Lajoie, the Cleveland second baseman accepted — only to change his mind on learning a world tour entailed going over water. “Too damp a prospect,” Lajoie said.
The White Sox ended up with an all-star cast that included Hall of Fame outfielders Tris Speaker of Boston and Sam Crawford of Detroit, who, playing in Tokyo under dazzling conditions, complained, “I’m sore because I came 7,000 miles to play the sunfield.”
Ironically, Red Faber went as a rookie pitcher on loan to the Giants. This, though it has been reported McGraw didn’t think much of Faber. Three years later, Faber would win three games against McGraw’s team in the 1917 World Series. “I can’t think of a better revenge,” his son says.
The tour began in mid-October, with the teams barnstorming across the United States, playing games in places like Ottumwa, Muskogee and Los Angeles — then much smaller but already showing its love of automobiles. It is said that more than $1 million worth of cars stood parked outside the playing field.
A group of 67 players, officials and wives left for Japan on Nov. 19, 1913, embarking from Victoria, British Columbia, aboard the Empress of China, a small ocean liner. Three days later, a wireless message reached Chicago: “All well except the passengers.” By one account, 80 percent of the group was seasick within 12 hours of leaving port. Bad seas delayed the ship’s arrival at Yokohama by four days.
When the Empress finally drew close to Japan, passengers were told they couldn’t enter the country without vaccinations. The reaction was less than enthusiastic, with Giants pitcher Bunny Hearn arguing he didn’t need to be stuck with anything since he had already been bitten by a rattlesnake in North Carolina. For his part, Joe Benz asked to have his shot above the ankle so his pitching arm wouldn’t hurt. In the end, everyone got their shots the old-fashioned way, in the arm.
Once in Japan, the teams began a routine that repeated itself over the next three months –the Americans would play before large and appreciative, if somewhat bewildered, crowds and then take in the sights. Along the way, there was more than a little culture shock for guests and hosts alike.
It was probably the first time anyone in Hong Kong had ever seen Major League ballplayers dance the tango and fox trot, as they did at a banquet in their honor, or travel through the streets of the business district in sedan chairs. At the same time, the tourists seemed surprised at how different the outside world was. They didn’t expect the cramped sleeping quarters on Japanese trains or the widespread poverty of a city like Shanghai.
When the Empress of China sailed into Shanghai harbor, beggars went out to the liner in small boats; they placed baskets on long poles to attract donations from passengers.
John McGraw eventually grew so upset with the situation that he fell into the stereotype of the ugly American. “Chinese boatmen and peddlers have not been generous or honest in their dealings with the boys,” McGraw charged in one of the columns he filed periodically with the New York Times. McGraw also wrote how Giants’ first baseman Fred Merkle bought a Japanese suit, “and he looks like a laundryman in these clothes.”
But the tour unfolded mostly as great adventure. The players sailed from China to Manila to Australia and from there to Ceylon (Sri Lanka), where they were feted by tea magnate Lipton, himself a sportsman and renowned yachtist. Each guest received a gift of 10 pounds of boxed tea.
Then came Egypt.
Baseball mixed with sightseeing in the Land of the Pharaohs, and it encouraged at least one publicity stunt, when catcher Ivy Wingo tossed a ball over the Sphinx to outfielder Steve Evans. But the gods may not have been amused. The tourists soon found themselves using the Sphinx for protection from a sand-and-rain storm that kicked up.
The tour doubled as a honeymoon for Chuck Comiskey’s parents, who were newlyweds at the time, and Egypt left at least one distinct impression. Chuck Comiskey recalls, “Mother said that a camel’s breath was the worst smell you could encounter.”
The khedive, or ruler, of Egypt may not have particularly cared for baseball, but he very much wanted to meet one of the travelers. The most popular player in Egypt and other stops proved to be a New York outfielder by the name of Jim Thorpe.
One year removed from winning gold medals in the decathlon and pentathlon at the Stockholm Olympics (and responding to praise from the king of Sweden with a simple “Thanks, King”), Thorpe attracted attention throughout the tour. He had a way about him, Chuck Comiskey believes.
“One of the stories my mother Grace always talked about involved Jim Thorpe. She and another lady would be strolling on the deck after they enjoyed their breakfast or lunch.
“`Thorpe would come along,’ she said, `and he would put his arm around my waist and my companion’s and pick us off the ground and run us around the whole side of the ship.'”
On the voyage to Ceylon, Thorpe impressed English passengers with his ability to play cricket. When the tour reached Nice, France, Thorpe gave a demonstration with the discus. About the only thing Thorpe didn’t do was create another stir in the presence of another king, the British sovereign.
The tour ended with a game played before 30,000 fans, including George V, at the Chelsea Football Grounds in London. The 11-inning game — won by the White Sox, 5-4– caused the king to ask some polite questions about baseball. But the British press was less than impressed. Baseball was dismissed as a game of “glorified rounders,” and, despite the spirited level of play, “it was all Greek to the crowd,” one Fleet Streeter wrote.
But the tour couldn’t escape the shadows of wars both distant and near. When the teams finally arrived back in New York on March 6, it was aboard the Lusitania. Fourteen months later, the liner would fall victim to a U- boat. There would be no more world tours for Charles Comiskey (although the two teams did make a European swing in 1924).
“If we can carry out our missionary program,” Comiskey hoped, “in 10 or 20 years we may have a real World’s Series in which all the nations of the world can enter teams. The game has the backbone to make it live and be popular wherever introduced.”
Sammy Sosa or, for that matter Hideo Nomo, couldn’t have said it any better.
