The first time in Time

The March 30, 1925 issue of Time magazine featured the first occasion in which baseball was treated as a cover feature. The article regarded the rookie season of future Hall of Famer George Sisler.

It’s always interesting to see how language — especially written — was treated in past generations. Before television, and even before radio was a fairly common appliance in the American household, writers — “wordsmiths” — were the only way baseball fans got their information. It was also a time when each major metropolitan area had several newspapers from which to choose. Some families were Democrats, some were Republicans. Likewise some were morning and evening readers, scoping the Herald for their sports coverage, while others were partial to the Post.

From the pages of Time:

“A lean figure walked into a Southern hotel, in the latter part of February, confronted the clerk, who surveyed him dubiously. His suit, shabby and worn as thin as paper, had obviously been made by an inferior tailor; his shirt was old and very dirty; and, in spite of the fact that his face had not been shaved for several days, the clerk could tell at a glance that it was not the countenance of an aristocrat. Before addressing the hotel employe, he respectfully removed from his head a felt hat, and requested a room. He volunteered the information that he had left his wife and children, even fishing from his pocket a photograph of them (spotted with marks that were certainly not tear-stains), which he insisted that the clerk examine. He was, he said, a baseball player. His services had been hired by a famed big league team. He had come for spring practice.”

Read the rest of the piece from the Time magazine archives here.