A CHAMPIONSHIP FOR INDIANAPOLIS Baseball commissioner Kenesaw Mountain whole mess is that we could have beat over, Federal League Park is long gone. Landis saw the game as a guide for life for them no matter what the circumstances!” The Hoosiers’ intracity rivals, the Indi­ American boys. “Destroy his faith in its square­ Remembering his handling of the ans, are still in Indianapolis, playing in ness and honesty," said Landis, “and you have Federal League suit, organized baseball the Triple-A International League. Most destroyed something more; you have planted hired Landis as its first commissioner in Indians fans who take Kentucky Avenue suspicion of all things in his ear.” the wake of the Black Sox Scandal. And toward Victory Field are unaware they 1916 the Giants shipped him to the Cin­ so the Federal League gave rise to Landis, are passing the site of the city’s last major cinnati Reds. Taking over center field for Wrigley Field, and Roush. “If the Federal league baseball park. There is no plaque the Reds and swinging a thick-handled, League didn’t do anything else,” wrote Jim to mark where it stood. Neither is there forty-eight-ounce bat (the heaviest in Cruisinberry, in a 1952 article for Baseball anything to commemorate the Hoosiers’ big-league history), Roush won batting Magazine, “it brought out Edd Roush as championship season in 1914— the last titles in 1917 (.341) and 1919 (.321). He one of the great players of the game.” title by an Indianapolis big-league team hit .333 in 1918, when Brooklyn’s Zach Roush finished his eighteen-year career in any sport until 1970, when the Indiana Wheat led the league at .335. in 1931 with a lifetime .323 average. He Pacers claimed the American Basketball Cincinnati won its first pennant in was inducted into the Hall of Fame in Association crown. Like the ballpark they 1919 and went on to beat the Chicago 1962. Roush continued to live in Oakland once played in and the league they were White Sox, Roush’s first big-league team, City, shuttling to Florida when the cold part of, the Indianapolis Hoosiers exist in the World Series. A year later the Black weather set in. He remained trim, active, now only in dusty record books and yel­ Sox Scandal broke with the stunning news and spry. Toward the end of winter in lowed newspaper clippings. that several Chicago players had conspired 1988, the ninety-four-year-old Roush was Sports historian Pete Cava is a frequent with gamblers to fix the outcome. “I don’t the oldest living Hall of Famer and also contributor to Traces. His article on the know whether the whole truth of what the last surviving player from the Federal 1887 Indianapolis Hoosiers baseball team went on there will ever come out,” Roush League and the infamous 1919 World appeared in the fall 2006 issue of Traces. • told Lawrence Ritter in the classic baseball Series. He suffered a heart attack prior to book The Glory o f Their Times. “Whatever a March 21 exhibition game and died in it was, though, it was a dirty rotten shame. Bradenton, Florida. One thing that’s always overlooked in the Just like the old cemetery it was built FOR FURTER READING ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------— --------------------------------------------- Okkonen, Marc. The Federal League of 1914-1915: Baseball’s Third Major League. Garrett Park, MD: Society for American Baseball Research, 1989. | Pietrusza, David. Judge and Jury: The Life and Times of Judge Kenesaw Mountain Landis. South Bend, IN: Diamond Communications, 1998. | _____ . Major Leagues: The Formation, Sometimes Absorption, and Mostly Inevitable Demise o f 18 Professional Baseball Organizations, 1871 to Present. Jefferson, NC: McFarland and Company, 1991. | Ritter, Lawrence S. The Glory of Their Times: The Story of the Early Days of Baseball Told by the Men Who Played It. New York: W. Morrow, 1984. TRACES | Summer 2010 | 15.