An Early Subway Series

Baseball in 1922

Baseball was fairly different in 1922 than in 2022. There only 16 teams, 8 in each league. There was no Designated Hitter (DH)–all teams played by what would later be termed as the “National League Rules.” There were no playoffs. Whichever team won each league competed in the World Series (frequently styled then as the “World’s Series”). 1922 was the first year of the seven game format of the World Series. Before then, it was a nine game format. Additionally, 1922 marked the second year in a row the New York Giants and the New York Yankees squared off in the World Series. The Giants’ and Yankees’ domination of the National and American leagues would continue into 1923 when they competed in the World Series for the third straight year. It is important to note that baseball in 1922 was segregated. Black players were not allowed to play on any teams in Major League Baseball. Instead, they played in a seperate, segregated major league. The segregation of baseball would continue until Jackie Robinson joined the Brooklyn Dodgers in 1947.

The World and Its Cartoonists

Without television and the internet, newspapers were one way of following baseball. The New York Evening World was one of many newspapers available to readers in New York City. Published in the evening, it complemented the morning New York World. Owned and managed by the Pulitzer family after the death of Joseph Pulitzer, the Evening World ran into the early 1930s. The Evening World contained at least two pages of sports content in each edition, giving readers a healthy dose of sports news every evening, except Sunday.

However, newspapers were not the only way to follow baseball. Radio was another way. Throughout the 1920s, it grabbed a greater foothold. However, neither were primarily visual mediums. Cartoons were a way for fans to engage with baseball visually without attending a game. They also provided cartoonists with plentiful opportunities to mock the game and its players. Thus, cartoons served both a documentary and entertainment purpose. Below are list of the cartoonists whose work you will see:

Thornton Fisher: Most of the sports cartoons published in the New York Evening World were Fisher’s. Fisher was a sports journalist and cartoonist who worked for numerous papers throughout the 1910s and 1920s. He became a sports broadcaster in 1923 on New York radio stations WEAF and WNYC. He was hired by NBC in the 1930s.

Bud Counihan: Counihan drew numerous cartoons for multiple newspapers and had a sizeable and prolific career from the 1910s to the 1930s. Counihan was perhaps best known for drawing the Betty Boop comic strip in the 1930s based on the popular cartoon.

Jim Nasium: A cartoonist and sports journalist who was best known for his work in various Pittsburgh and Philadelphia newspapers from the 1900s to the 1920s.