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Yesterday's whirlwind demonstration at the Polo Grounds against Judge Kenesaw Mountain Landis was typical of the American mob in its most blind and unreasoning mood. Under authority vested in them by the rules of big league baseball, the umpires have the power to call a game on account of darkness, and acting under this authority the umpires called the second game in the World's Series, when the score stood three all at the end of the tenth inning. Darkness was falling fast, and in the opinion of the umpires a continuance of play for another inning was impossible. Not so said the crowds in the bleachers, whose emotions were already keyed to a high pitch by reason of the closeness of the score. The game was called, they reasoned, in order to permit the baseball "magnates" to pocket the proceeds of the game, whose total considerably exceeded $100,000. The crowd had to find something tangible upon which to pour the vials of its wrath, and it readily found a visible symbol in the person of Judge Landis, high commissioner of baseball. Upon his head an angry and tumultuous crowd of between 5000 and 8000 poured invective after invective, and if Judge Landis escaped without bodily harm, it was due to no excess of charity on the part of the crowd that surrounded him.
The handiwork of the American mob spirit is the same in New York as it is in Boston, Chicago, or San Francisco. What happened yesterday at the Polo Grounds has had its parallel in occasional demonstrations in the Harvard Stadium against the home team. If manners make the man, our crowds have still much to learn. In the last analysis the level of sportsmanship depends as much upon the temper and ideals of the sporting public as it does upon the standards of the players themselves, whether professionals or amateurs. What wonder that the pages of professional baseball are sometimes marred by scandals, when the crowds that throng the grandstands are so ill-mannered and when there are among the spectators so many poor sportsmen? --Boston Transcript.
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