SPINK, J(ohn) G(eorge) Taylor 1888-1962

PERSONAL: Born November 6, 1888, in St. Louis, MO; died following a heart attack December 7, 1962; son of Charles Claude (a publisher) and Marie (Taylor) Spink; married Blanche Keene, April 15, 1914; children: two.

CAREER: Publisher. Worked variously as a stock boy for the Rawlings Sporting Goods Company, as a copy boy in the sports department of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, and as correspondent for the New York Morning Telegraph; Sporting News, 1903-62, publisher, 1914-62.

AWARDS, HONORS: Bill Slocum Memorial Award, Baseball Writers Association of America, 1962, for "long and meritorious service to baseball"; J. G. Taylor Spink Award for outstanding baseball writing was created in his honor by Baseball Writers Association of America; Spink was its first recipient in 1962.

WRITINGS:

Judge Landis and Twenty-five Years of Baseball, Crowell (New York, NY), 1947.

(Compiler with Paul A. Rickart and Ray J. Naymer) Daguerreotypes: Hall of Fame Members and Other Immortals, C. C. Spink (St. Louis, MO), 1961.

Author of Sporting News Record Book. Columns included "Three and One—Looking Them over with J. G. Taylor Spink" and "Looping the Loops."

SIDELIGHTS: For nearly fifty years, J. G. Taylor Spink was publisher of the Sporting News, often referred to as the "Bible of Baseball," a main source of news, features, statistics, and opinion for fans, umpires, owners, and the sports media. Spink's paternal grandfather, William Spink, had been a legislator in Canada, and his grandmother, Frances Woodbury Spink, came to the United States during the Civil War and raised their eight children, including Charles, Spink's father, and his uncles, Billy and Al. Al launched the Sporting News two years before Spink was born, and Charles, who had been homesteading in South Dakota, came to St. Louis to manage the startup. After he married Marie Taylor, her father, a businessman, invested in the new publication. Charles was assisted by statistician Ernest J. Lanigan in making the paper a success. They started by publishing minor league statistics, the first step in their entrenchment in the world of baseball.

Spink became involved in the family business while still in grammar school when his father gave him the task of selling four copies of the paper each week. He doubled his quota and sold copies of the Saturday Evening Post as well. He had little interest in school, and when he was in the tenth grade, his parents allowed him to drop out, whereupon he worked for the Rawlings Sporting Goods Company as a stock boy and for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch as a copy boy. His father let him experience the working world for one year before bringing him into the family business, over which Charles now had control. Al, who had become financially depleted in his attempt to promote a theatrical production, was forced to sell his stock to his brother. In 1899 Charles added the Sporting Goods Dealer to their publications list, a trade magazine that was very profitable. Two toy-focused publications were established then sold to another publisher.

Spink was expected to work seven days a week and wrote for both the Sporting News and the Sporting Goods Dealer. In 1909 he began to publish the Sporting News Record Book. He also worked part-time as the St. Louis correspondent for the New York Morning Telegraph, a theatrical paper edited by former lawman Bat Masterson, for which he covered stage productions when they came to town. What he longed for was to be the official scorer for the World Series, but he was unqualified and not yet old enough. His persistence in continually making this request of American League president Byron "Ban" Johnson paid off, particularly in view of the support the League had received from Charles when it was newly formed. Spink held the position for ten years.

Immediately after Spink's wedding to Blanche Keene, Charles died, and at the age of twenty-five, Spink found himself head of the family business. At the time, the paper employed only two correspondents hired by Charles: W. H. Rankin, who wrote from New York, and H. G. Merrill, who covered the minor leagues from Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania. Spink hired enough new correspondents to cover each of the major league teams. He also reversed the paper's position of covering the rogue Federal League which later collapsed in 1915. The Sporting Life, the country's only other national baseball weekly, ceased publication in 1917.

Times were difficult for the Sporting News. World War I siphoned off players and readers, and circulation dropped. When Spink heard that U.S. soldiers stationed in Europe were passing around copies of the paper, he convinced American League president Johnson to buy and distribute 150,000 copies to the troops overseas. Club owners added 25,000 copies, and Spink increased the number by another 5,000 with the 1917 Christmas issue. The price of the paper had to be raised twice due to wartime shortages, but the Sporting News survived.

Spink was involved in the scandal that surrounded the defeat of the Chicago White Sox by the Cincinnati Reds in the 1919 World Series. He cooperated fully with Johnson in investigating allegations that the win was the result of a fix—that White Sox ballplayers had been paid by professional gamblers to lose the series. The eight accused men, dubbed the "Black Sox," were eventually acquitted, but they still were banned from baseball by the newly appointed first baseball commissioner Kenesaw Mountain Landis. When the dust settled baseball emerged cleansed, and the popularity of the Sporting News became stronger than ever. But Landis never quite forgave Spink for his alliance with Johnson during the troubles with the Sox. In 1921 he removed Spink from his position as scorer for the World Series. Spink remained friendly to Landis in print until the 1923 World Series, when an editorial in the Sporting News questioned his giving the proceeds of a tie game to charity. Landis responded publicly to the paper's outrage, and the paper retorted. It also continued to be financially successful, due in part to the increased interest in baseball because of players like Babe Ruth.

The popularity of the Sporting News widened even more when Spink hired baseball writers from all over the country to contribute their regional coverage. Many of these articles were little more than reprints of pieces that had run in their local papers, but because the Sporting News was national nearly all of the writing was fresh to its readers.

In 1931 Edgar G. Brands became editor of the paper and thereafter wrote all editorial opinion for the Sporting News. One of his first positions was that major league teams would never play at night. However, when the Cincinnati Reds played the first night game in 1935, the paper gave the new practice the editorial stamp of approval. "Spink and Brands were no crusaders, especially if circulation was at stake," wrote Steven P. Gietschier in Dictionary of Literary Biography. "Instead, they often used their editorial space to pick at frivolous matters, such as asking fans to return home-run balls hit into the stands because 'baseballs cost money' or suggesting that scorecard printers should put the name of the home team at the bottom of the scorecard instead of at the top."

Landis and the paper continued to exchange barbs, but in 1941, when A. G. Spalding and Brothers Company made the decision to stop publication of their annual baseball guide, Landis agreed to give Spink the contract. When World War II broke out, Spink and the leagues and club owners collaborated in sending out a special overseas tabloid edition of the Sporting News to the men and women serving in Europe and the Pacific. Circulation of this issue reached nearly one million during the World Series. Spink printed letters of appreciation in the paper and added coverage of army and navy baseball. In order to make the paper more desirable to fans of sports other than baseball, Spink began covering college and professional football in the fall of 1942. Before the year had ended, he added hockey and basketball. The tabloid format had been so popular in the overseas edition that he used it for the stateside edition.

With the end of World War II, attendance at games surged, and baseball got a huge boost, as did the circulation of the Sporting News when veterans who had received it while on duty returned as loyal readers. Spink continued to support the owners of the major league clubs when Jorge Pasqual and his brother tried to convince players to join a third major league in Mexico and when Boston labor organizer Robert Murphy tried to unionize players as the American Baseball Guild. However, the paper's editorials did reflect problems that needed to be addressed.

From 1942 the Sporting News had taken a stand against integrating the major leagues. The position was that it would be difficult for black players and would also compromise Negro League ball. When Jackie Robinson was signed to play with the Montreal Royals, the farm club of the Brooklyn Dodgers, in 1945, the paper editorialized that he was being unfairly placed in competition with younger players, would be expected to demonstrate skills beyond his ability, and would be "confronted with the . . . social rebuffs and the competitive heartaches which are inevitable for a Negro trail-blazer." Further the Sporting News criticized white players who reacted negatively to the signing, calling these responses "unsportsmanlike, and, above all else, un-American." The Sporting News followed Robinson through his second spring training and declared that he was ready for the big leagues, even though Dodgers manager Branch Rickey held back with his intentions. When Robinson was transferred to Brooklyn, the newspaper covered the event with a full article reflecting its approval. Later that year the Sporting News awarded Robinson the Rookie of the Year Award.

By the 1950s Spink had earned such a reputation that other sportswriters wrote about him in other publications. "Spink's personality and work habits fairly begged for such treatment," noted Gietschier. "He was regarded as a character, the living embodiment of the stereotypical publisher: gruff, demanding, competitive, impatient, and dedicated to getting the story. Most of those who exalted Spink had weathered his personal and professional demeanor firsthand when they had been asked to write for the Sporting News. Taking an assignment from Spink and then completing it to his specifications and on his deadline was often an exasperating, exhausting, and frustrating ordeal. Writers did not shy away, though, perhaps because Spink, for all his bluster, demanded of them their best work." "He insisted always that his publications be as perfect as mind, ingenuity, and hard work could make them," wrote Spink's assistant Carl T. Felker in Taylor Spink: The Legend and the Man. His work ethic resulted in many scoops for the paper, and his inside information sometimes prevented events from occurring, as when Spink told Stan Musial in 1958 that the St. Louis Cardinals were planning to trade him. Musial threatened to retire, and his trade was canceled.

By 1961 Spink's health was failing. He suffered from emphysema, but he continued to put in long hours at his office and brought his work home with him. Although many in the business felt that he was deserving of being named to the Baseball Hall of Fame, journalists were not eligible for this honor. Since the Hall of Fame would not change its rules, the Baseball Writers Association of America (BBWAA) did the next best thing by giving Spink the Bill Slocum Memorial Award for his service to baseball in January 1962. After the World Series that same year, the BBWAA established the J. G. Taylor Spink Award for outstanding baseball writing, which is presented annually at the Hall of Fame ceremony. Spink was the first recipient.

Spink, who was spending the winter in Arizona, was too ill to accept the Slocum Award. He sent his son, Charles Claude Johnson Spink, to New York for the presentation. His son also took over as president, treasurer, and publisher of his father's company, while Spink assumed the title of chairman of the board. On December 7, Spink called in to check on the progress of the issue coming to deadline. A few hours later, he died of a heart attack. Felker wrote his full obituary in the next issue, and said, in part, that "by any standard of measurement, Taylor Spink was a great personality. In whatever field of action he had been placed, he would have been a leader by the sheer force of his character, his ability, and his extraordinary energy. Circumstances made him a publisher, with baseball as his chief arena. And in that field, he was unique, without a peer."

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

BOOKS

Dictionary of Literary Biography, Volume 241: American Sportswriters and Writers on Sport, Gale (Detroit, MI), 2001, pp. 274-282.

Felker, Carl T., Taylor Spink: The Legend and the Man, Sporting News (St. Louis, MO), 1973.

Reidenbaugh, Lowell, The Sporting News First Hundred Years, 1886-1986, Sporting News (St. Louis, MO), 1985.

PERIODICALS

Saturday Evening Post, June 20, 1942, Stanley Frank, "Bible of Baseball."

Sporting News, May 21, 1936, Ernst J. Lanigan, "The Sporting News Spans Half a Century with Baseball," pp. 1A, 6A; March, 1966, Frederick G. Lieb, "80 Candles Dot the Sporting News Cake," pp. 21-24.

Sports Illustrated, February, 1961, Gerald Holland, "Taylor Spink Is First-Class," pp. 58-66.

University of Missouri Bulletin, May 3, 1951, J. G. Taylor Spink, "Sports Writing and Editing: An Address, 43rd Annual Journalism Week, School of Journalism, University of Missouri."

Sporting News, December 22, 1962, Carl T. Felker, "J. G. Taylor Spink, 1882-1962," pp. 13-16, 20.*