Baseball
World Series
- 5–12 October — Cleveland Indians (AL) defeats Brooklyn Dodgers (NL) to win the 1920 World Series by 5 games to 2
Major League Baseball
- The sale of Babe Ruth. Boston Red Sox transfers Babe Ruth to New York Yankees for $125,000 and a $350,000 loan. Ruth hits 54 home runs for the Yankees in 1920, nearly double the record of 29 he hit in the 1919 season.
- 16 August — Ray Chapman of Cleveland Indians is hit on the head by a fastball from Carl Mays of New York Yankees. He dies early next day, the second fatality of major league play.
- Chicago White Sox stars Eddie Cicotte and Shoeless Joe Jackson confess their roles in the Black Sox scandal
Negro League Baseball
- 13 February — the Negro National League is formed
- 2 May — the first game of the new league is played at Indianapolis with the Indianapolis ABCs defeating the Chicago Giants (not to be confused with the Chicago American Giants)
- Chicago American Giants wins the inaugural Negro National League pennant
Read more about this topic: 1920 In Sports
Famous quotes containing the word baseball:
“I don’t like comparisons with football. Baseball is an entirely different game. You can watch a tight, well-played football game, but it isn’t exciting if half the stadium is empty. The violence on the field must bounce off a lot of people. But you can go to a ball park on a quiet Tuesday afternoon with only a few thousand people in the place and thoroughly enjoy a one-sided game. Baseball has an aesthetic, intellectual appeal found in no other team sport.”
—Bowie Kuhn (b. 1926)
“How, in one short century, has this ersatz sport so strangled the consciousness of the country in the grip of its flabby tentacles that the mention of women’s baseball gets no reaction other than blank amazement?”
—Darlene Mehrer, As quoted in Women in Baseball. Ch. 6, by Gai Ingham Berlage (1994)
“Compared to football, baseball is almost an Oriental game, minimizing individual stardom, requiring a wide range of aggressive and defensive skills, and filled with long periods of inaction and irresolution. It has no time limitations. Football, on the other hand, has immediate goals, resolution on every single play, and a lot of violence—itself a highlight. It has clearly distinguishable hierarchies: heroes and drones.”
—Jerry Mander, U.S. advertising executive, author. Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television, ch. 15, Morrow (1978)