22.
The 1930s If the Golden Age of Sports occurred in the 1920s with Babe Ruth, Jack Dempsey, Bobby Jones, Red Grange, and Big Bill Tilden dominating the landscape, then the Golden Age of Baseball came in the 1930s. No period in the history of the game had a greater galaxy of stars — men who helped distract attention from the struggles of the Great Depression and, for a few hours each day, focused it instead on the Great American Pastime. Ruth, of course, was still around, placing his personal punctuation mark on America’s favorite pastime with his “called shot” home run in the 1932 World Series and his decisive two-run homer in the first All-Star Game a year later. But he had plenty of company in an era jammed with larger-than-life characters. American League sluggers like Jimmie Foxx and Hank Greenberg made runs at Ruth’s record of 60 home runs in a single season, each finishing with 58. Bill Terry became the National League’s last .400 hitter in 1930, the same year pint-sized Hack Wilson hit 56 home runs and drove in 190. Lefty Grove had a 30-win season on the road to 300 victories. Dizzy Dean became the National League’s last 30-game winner. Carl Hubbell struck out five Hall of Famers in succession in another All-Star Game, and Rogers Hornsby finished off a 23-year career in which he batted .358. Right in the middle of the convention of great players, a cartoonist with a whimsical sense of humor arrived in New York. Willard Mullin had two stints in Los Angeles and two others in Texas before settling in a city that would provide him with material for the next four decades. Mullin’s New York included three baseball teams: the lordly Yankees of Ruth and Lou Gehrig, the storied Giants of Terry and Hubbell, and the daffy Dodgers of Van Lingle Mungo and Frenchy Bordagaray. The Yankees were about to launch a dynasty. The Giants had history on their side. The Dodgers occasionally encountered basepath buffoonery that once led to three of them converging at third base at the same moment. It was a palette overflowing with material for an aspiring sports cartoonist. At the Los Angeles Herald, Mullin had stepped in on short notice to produce four political cartoons. He scrambled to complete the job on time, and when he was paid a paltry $30 for the hurry-up effort, he decided his future lay elsewhere. He learned that the World-Telegram in New York was shopping for a cartoonist. Mullin shipped some samples, got invited to Florida to interview with columnist Joe Williams, and was hired. This was a major step for Mullin, moving clear across the country to a new job in the nation’s largest city. He was warming up for the assignment, working with Williams in Florida when word came from New York that the managing editor of the World-Telegram, a barrel-chested, imposing bear of a man named Lee B. Wood, was unhappy with some of the cartoons and wanted to see his new employee in person. Meanwhile, despite landmark moments like his “called shot” home run in the 1932 World Series and the decisive home run in the first All-Star Game a year later, Ruth had become increasingly disenchanted with his situation. There had been a nasty holdout at the start of the decade and when the team laughed off his bid to become manager of the Yankees, the Babe was on his way out the door.
opposite: Leo Durocher credited Mullin with dubbing the 1934 Cardinals “The Gashouse Gang.” This is one of the earliest representations of that Cardinal team.