[byrone]

Reading sportswriter Fred Lieb’s book “Baseball as I Have Known It”, Lieb describes this scene:

“After the last game of the 1924 Washington-New York World Series, I was alone with (Judge) Landis on a little balcony outside his room in the Raleigh Hotel in Washington. Below us in Pennsylvania Avenue snake-danced a joy-maddened crowd. Washington’s beloved Senators had just won the deciding seventh game, and Saint Walter Johnson had been the winning pitcher in the twelve-inning cliff-hanger. It was not only Washington’s first World Series victory but also its first major league pennant. Congressmen, department heads, barbers, bootblacks, janitors, office secretaries all joined in on the frivolity. They blew trumpets and beat drums. Some beat wash basins with large spoons. Anything that could make noise was being used in this joyous paean to victory.

Landis put his hand on my shoulder and looked directly in my eyes as he said ‘Freddy, what are we looking at now- could this be the highest point of what we call our national sport? Greece had its sports and its Olympics; they must have reached a zenith and then waned. The same for the sport of ancient Rome, there must have been a year at which they were at their peak. I repeat Freddy, are we at the zenith of baseball’.’”

So in 1924 a century ago Landis was questioning if baseball was at its peak.

Looking back, what is the zenith of baseball?