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 Judge Kenesaw Mountain Landis Photo Gallery
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KENESAW MOUNTAIN LANDIS – COMMISSIONER OR CZAR

“We want a man as chairman who will rule with an iron hand. Baseball has lacked a hand like that for years. It needs it now worse than ever. Therefore, it is our object to appoint a big man to lead the new commission.” – National League President John Heydler on the search for the first baseball commissioner.

He was major league baseball’s first commissioner. Unlike his successors, he wasn’t an employee of the owners. He demanded and received full autonomy before taking the job. As a federal judge he was used to being the boss, giving the orders. He would accept no less from the men looking to hire someone to clean up the national pastime following the high-profile Black Sox scandal of 1919. Kenesaw Mountain Landis certainly made his mark on baseball. But was he a hero or villain? Did he benefit baseball or harm it, or was he somewhere in between? Let’s take a look at his Hall of Fame legacy.

Landis was both a strange and dynamic character. He was thin to the point of almost being frail, with a shock of often unkempt white hair. When he was named commissioner in November of 1920, he looked older than his 54 years. He had a reputation for theatrics in his courtroom after being named a judge of the U.S. District Court of Northern Illinois by President Theodore Roosevelt in 1905.

Born on November 20, 1866, in Millville, Ohio, his military surgeon father decided to name him after the Civil War Battle of Kennesaw Mountain. The name didn’t please his family and Abraham Landis left an “n” out of Kennesaw, but it was certainly a name people would remember. By 1920, Judge Landis had a reputation as a moralist and prohibitionist, someone who railed against the evils of drinking and gambling. Yet friends said he could swear like a sailor when the mood struck him.

The lords of major league baseball took a fancy to the judge in 1915 when the rival Federal League brought the major leagues to court in an antitrust action. Landis stonewalled his decision for some 11 months until league officials, tired of waiting, began selling off the teams and the league disbanded. For his non-decision, Judge Landis was front and center when the Black Sox scandal broke. His name was the first mentioned when the idea of naming a Commissioner of Baseball was discussed. After all, he was a man known for his integrity, as well as being a fan of the game who loved the Chicago Cubs.

Kenesaw Mountain Landis was formally offered the job on November 12, 1920, a year after word of the fix in the 1919 World Series became baseball’s hottest topic. He took the job only after the owners granted him the absolute power over the game that he demanded. Many felt at the time that the Black Sox scandal brought the problem of gambling and gamblers infiltrating the game to the fore. Shenanigans involving gambling were fairly common up to that time. The owners often let it slide due to fear of hurting the game.

An example had to be made, and after the eight named players on the White Sox were acquitted in a jury trial, Landis made his first statement as commissioner, one he knew had to be strong and decisive. He said:

“Regardless of the verdict of juries, no player that sits in a conference with a bunch of crooked players and gamblers where the ways and means of throwing games are discussed, and does not promptly tell his club about it, will ever again play professional baseball.”

So the eight, including the great Shoeless Joe Jackson and Buck Weaver, both of whom had excelled in the 1919 World Series, were gone with Landis adamant they’d never be reinstated. “There is absolutely no chance for any of them to creep back into organized baseball,” he said. “They will be and remain outlaws.” During the rest of his tenure, Landis opposed any efforts to reinstate the banned players. They weren’t alone. In his first decade as commissioner he would banish 11 players for gambling-related offenses. His actions certainly cut down on player involvement with gamblers.

Was the Black Sox scandal the highlight of Judge Landis’ tenure as commissioner? Let’s take a look at some of his other decisions or non-decisions. There was a rule in place, perhaps an outdated one, that prohibited players from barnstorming after the season. The player who openly defied it was nonother than Babe Ruth, the game’s greatest attraction. When told that Landis prohibited him from barnstorming, the defiant Babe suggested the commissioner “go jump in a lake.” The result was that both the Babe and teammate Bob Meusel were suspended for the first 40 games of the 1922 season.

When two of the game’s greatest stars, Ty Cobb and Tris Speaker, were accused by retired pitcher Dutch Leonard of conspiring with him (Cobb’s Detroit teammate) and Smoky Joe Wood (Speaker’s teammate with Cleveland), to throw a game between the teams back in 1919, Landis took no action. Leonard supposedly had letters to back up his claims, but Landis ruled that Leonard was driven by a personal grudge. Wood was retired, but Cobb and Speaker were allowed to finish out their careers.

In 1930, Landis noted that the growth of farm systems were allowing owners to stockpile players, often keeping major league worthy players in the minors. He made a test case of outfielder Fred Bennett, who was in the St. Louis Browns system, and declared him a free agent. Browns’ owner Phil Ball took the commissioner to federal court and lost. It’s said that by the end of the 1930s Landis had freed nearly 200 minor league players. The owners, obviously, weren’t happy.

In 1943, Landis again showed his aversion to gambling by banishing Phillies’ owner William Cox for life for betting on games. But that was part of a chain of events that ultimately put a shameful mark on Judge Landis tenure. A year earlier, Bill Veeck, Jr. wanted to buy the Phillies from then-owner Gary Nugent. He made it no secret that he wanted to fill his wartime roster with players in the Negro Leagues and apparently told Judge Landis of his plan. A day later the National League took control of the team, and, with Landis’ approval, sold it to William Cox. Landis had often said that baseball had no written rule to prevent African-Americans from playing, but here and in other instances he made no effort to eliminate the unwritten rule. No African-American played in the big leagues while he was commissioner.

But everything wasn’t rosy. By 1944, many of the owners wanted Landis out. Many referred to him as a czar, while the press and public continued to support him. That fall, with his health failing, the owners gave Landis a new seven-year contract. But they did it with the knowledge that he might not last much longer, and they were right. Eight days after getting his new contract, Kenesaw Mountain Landis died at the age of 78.

New York sportswriter Tom Meany hit the nail on the head when he wrote, shortly before Landis’ death, that if the commissioner were ousted the man who replaced him would “merely be an employee. And who ever heard of any employee finding against his bosses.” That’s exactly what happened and continues that way today.

You can take the good with the bad, but one thing is certain. There will never be a baseball commissioner quite like Kenesaw Mountain Landis. He was one of a kind.

Bill Gutman

Photo Credits: All from Google search

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