Baseball, Melodrama, and Public Perception: An Interview with Travis Stern

Travis Stern, Ballplayers on Stage: Baseball, Melodrama, and Theatrical Celebrity in the Deadball Era (May 23, 2024). University of Tennessee Press, cover art. 

Travis Stern’s book Ballplayers on Stage: Baseball, Melodrama, and Theatrical Celebrity in the Deadball Era ties two seemingly disparate topics together—baseball and the theater. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, however, these topics were not so disparate, as major baseball players including Cap Anson, Ty Cobb, and Babe Ruth took to the stage during their off-seasons to shape their public image and make some extra cash.

The theatrical performances of these ballplayers, Stern argues, tell us a lot about how fans interacted with and understood their baseball careers. In this interview with the author, Stern talks about how he came to this unique marriage of topics, how our concept of heroes has changed over time, and what the modern equivalent of taking the stage is for ballplayers today. 

TB: Baseball and theater—that's a pretty surprising crossover. How did you come to this topic?

TS: In my PhD program, I was in a class where we talked about the cities where vaudeville performers would get their mail. These were places like Cincinnati, St. Louis, Boston, New York, Philadelphia, and Pittsburgh, and my mind just went, “Oh, those are all the original National League teams,” and it started to make sense. The vaudevillians were riding the rails at the same time as the ballplayers were. I started getting into those overlaps, thinking it would be an interesting little rabbit hole to dive down, and it quickly became more than that.

TB: Around what time did ballplayers begin to step into vaudeville?

TS: We know that some ballplayers were stepping onto vaudeville stages periodically in the late 19th century. For as long as professional baseball has been around, there have been ballplayers who have appeared on stage. Anytime you've got any celebrity, somebody is going to use that celebrity to make a little money.

TB: When ballplayers appeared in the theater, what were the plays and performances like?

TS: The ballplayers were usually the gimmick attraction to a production, but they were not usually the star meant to carry the entire show as a performer. Mike Kelly played smaller bit parts in his full-length plays, which would have been the most common for any ballplayer being cast into a scripted, full-length production. Rube Waddell fitted this mold as well. Cap Anson and Ty Cobb had much larger roles in their productions. But none of the ballplayers were expected to be “good” at acting. 

Everyone involved in the production, from the other actors to the audience members, would know that the ballplayer was not trained as actors were. While a quick-witted partner in a vaudeville act could help save a performance if the ballplayer froze, forgot a line, or even just got nervous on stage, in a scripted, full-length play, the other actors were somewhat restricted in how they could help out an anxious ballplayer. 

TB: In your book, you write a lot about how ballplayers’ presence in the theater changed public perception of the sport. Can you talk a bit about how this shift came about? 

TS: Early baseball was noted for its rough atmosphere—mostly working-class male fans, drinking, gambling, etc. all of the things that were generally frowned upon by “polite” society. The middle class, hoping to become part of the “polite” upper-class society rather than be associated with the working class, was generally hesitant to engage with the culture of the ballpark. 

Blue laws and “Ladies’ Days” at the ballpark were somewhat successful in breaking down that barrier, but seeing ballplayers associated with middle-class sensibilities in the popular theater moved it even further. Melodrama, whether explicitly or implicitly, promoted the kind of morality that the middle class idealized—ballplayers were removed from the coarse elements of the ballpark and put into the framework of a more acceptable world, which allowed audiences to say: It's not the game of baseball or the players’ fault that the atmosphere is less-than-ideal for the middle class. The game grew. 

Babe Ruth covered in Duluth News Tribune, November 7, 1926. Courtesy of Duluth Public Library.

TB: I think most baseball fans would be surprised to hear that players like Ty Cobb, Cap Anson, and Babe Ruth took to the vaudeville stage. How do you think this information adds to our understanding of these players?

TS: I think it shows how active they were in crafting their persona. Ruth, especially, because he had the sports agent Christy Walsh, who was very active in promoting the idea that: “This is Babe Ruth, and what you see on the field is not necessarily what he’s like off the field.” Cobb is another interesting case because he created such a villainous persona for himself on the field that people could not see him differently off the field. Now, he certainly had a bunch of other issues that made him villainous off the field, but when he tried to portray a hero, people didn't buy it. 

TB: Not to flatten this too much, but if we're considering vaudeville as the way that players were branding themselves, is social media vaudeville now?

TS: Yes, to a certain extent. Now, keep in mind that my book is more about full-length plays, but vaudeville is certainly tied to those plays here. A player would team up with another experienced vaudevillian, and they would craft a story or a message for that particular player. Players now hire people to run their social media to create a presence for audiences to understand them. 

I think we have gotten to the point where we understand that we are oftentimes consuming a crafted experience of a player; when we get the uncrafted experience, like a Joey Votto, who just announced retirement, we get the sense that that’s him—it's not him being managed. A lot of audiences, throughout time, want to see or at least have the perception of their player as someone who is as authentic as possible.

Photo of sports agent Christy Walsh in 1935. Christy Walsh represented former baseball players like Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig through a press syndicate he ran. Image retrieved from Wikimedia Commons. Courtesy of Los Angeles Daily News Photographic Collection at the UCLA Library.

TB: That's really interesting, especially because you write about this performed “authentic” image, but also about ballplayers as icons of morality and respectability. In my mind, those concepts are at odds. 

TS: After World War II, starting in the '50s, with players like Mantle, we have started to understand that our heroes are not perfect. Our heroes have feet of clay. Before then, the primary means of storytelling—melodramatic and performative—really does give us the idea that heroes are heroes, and villains are villains. We can fully believe in a Christy Mathewson. We can fully believe in a Babe Ruth. We can fully believe in some of these players, because they hold up an image of morality or an image of what we expect about ourselves as Americans or something. 

My book takes a look at a unique time in history, because, at the time, film hadn’t become quite as widespread as it would. If you wanted to see a player and the player wasn’t at the ballpark, the place to go was the stage. You would see a version of that player, but it was a version of that player that talked, sang, and danced—a version that did not do what’s expected from the overall image of a baseball player.

In some ways, that made them more human, because they were set up to fail at being a live performer. In the late '80s and early '90s, SNL would have sports figures on the show. Because it’s a live performance, it's not mediatized. You can't edit it. They bring on Charles Barkley, Michael Jordan, or Wayne Gretzky. These are people at the very top of their field. They are terrible in the show. We want that. We want to see them as a fish out of water.

We are laughing at them and with them because we know they are in on the joke. Jordan knows he is not a great actor. Even if you take 27 takes and put him into one scene in Space Jam, he's not that great of an actor. You get to see that: “Hey, this guy is human.” He may be superhuman on the court, but he is a human. He makes mistakes, and he's not good at some stuff. We like that.

Artwork made after Mike "King" Kelley's studio portrait. Courtesy of Marty Appel.

TB: You wrote about this briefly in your Mike Kelly chapter, but can you talk about how melodrama reached immigrants and non-English speakers?

TS: Melodrama is the most commercially successful form of theater in history. Part of the reason for that is you don't really need to have pre-existing knowledge in order to understand a melodramatic story. You don't even need to know how to speak the language because all of it is engineered. The costuming, the acting style, the lights, the spectacle—everything is engineered to make you feel a certain way. 

You don't need to know who the good guy is, because the good guy will make himself apparent to you. He usually wears white and acts nobly. You know who the bad guy is, because he is wearing black and is twirling the mustache. He's got the evil laugh. Even if you don't understand the language, you can understand the evil laugh.

A certain mode of interaction is expected with melodrama. Even if you don't quite understand the codes yet, as the audience boos the villain or cheers the hero, you learn those codes. You learn what is acceptable in this society, which is part of why melodrama was so useful in people acclimating to the culture. It was useful for institutions to try to bring people in to help them understand what America was about in the late 1800s. It gave a sense of, “Even if I don't speak the language, if I boo at the right time, if I cheer at the right time, if my heart swells at the ending as the couple gets together or the farm is saved, then I have this moment of community with all of these people around me.” It created a sense of belonging. Now, you can certainly debate whether what you're belonging to is good or not.

TB: That’s interesting because I feel like what you just said echoes what people say about going to baseball games and rooting for a team.

TS: Absolutely. As theater starts to move away from melodrama and into realistic drama and social issues, baseball takes up that mantle because it doesn't matter if you know the language at all; the good guys wear the home whites. 

You can go in and cheer for your team. If you don't know anything about them, there's something visible on the field about scoring a run, about making a great catch, and about striking out someone that causes a cheer or a boo, and that creates that community.

This interview was edited for clarity and length.