The Tour to End All Tours: The Story of Major League Baseball's 1913-1914 World Tour.(Book Review)

The Tour to End All Tours: The Story of Major League Baseball's 1913-1914 World Tour. James E. Elfers. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2003.

James E. Elfers contributes significantly to popular culture with this readable, entertaining analysis of baseball at its early twentieth-century entrepreneurial best. Tightly focused, The Tour to End All Tours leaves no fact, detail, or personality unexamined. Its author, a library analyst at the University of Delaware, unfolds the distinctive story of how "the two most powerful men in baseball" (2), Charles A. Comiskey of the Chicago White Sox and John J. McGraw of the New York Giants, shepherded their respective big league teams around the world. This three-month world tour, an "odyssey of thirty thousand miles through thirteen nations" (xi), was conceived in a Chicago bar in 1912, launched in Cincinnati ten months later, and ended in London in February the next year. The novel trek took America's national pastime to places and people eager to pay handsomely for a peek at colorful diamond performers as diverse in personality as they were in ability.

Two of the first five inductees into the Cooperstown Baseball Hall of Fame, "Wahoo" Sam Crawford and "Tris" Speaker, headed the cast of intrepid travelers willing to brave Pacific waters so "nightmarish" that they "turned the sea into a hellish cauldron" (105); Manila muds so "slick" that they resembled "quicksand" and "iced sidewalk" (144); and "a storm-tossed Europe" (197). The team included such nondescript performers as the trio of catchers the White Sox paraded before the world: Tommy Daly, who had caught only one game with Chicago in 1913; Jack Bliss, who had caught none; and Andy Slight, who never appeared, at any time, in a Major League contest. Yet the unevenness of talent was designed to mislead no one. The tour had, as its publicized objective, not all-star performances by All-Star players, but "transplant{ing} America's game in athletic and sports-loving countries ... who desire to adopt some game that has both the athletic and mental attributes conducive to the physical development of the youth of their country" (10). On the surface, Comiskey and McGraw were altruistic Americans committed to showcasing a sport well known but little played outside the United States. The pair, it appeared, had only the welfare of humankind in their baseball-dominated minds.

Elfers, however, leaves little doubt that there was room in those minds for less laudatory, more practical thinking. "The Tour," he reveals, "made a good ...