The 1948 Project will be a winter long project Karen and Kevin Flynn will be running in conjunction with a bigger project the folks over at DidTheTribeWinLastNight.com are running this winter.
Did The Tribe Win Last Night is a wonderful website that covers everything about the Cleveland Indians baseball club. Starting September 22, 2013 they are going to start winter project where they are retelling of the Cleveland Indians 1948 World Series Season.
A couple months ago Mike Brandyberry from DidTheTribeWinLastNight.com reached out to me and asked if we could share some stories about the 1948 Washington Senators as it relates to the ‘48 Cleveland Indians.
Karen and Kevin Flynn of D.C. Baseball History.com were eager to take on the project. So in few weeks we will start what we are calling the 1948 Project. We will run our first article that deals with a summary of the 1948 Nats. After the first story the Flynn’s will be running a series of articles on Washington players along the brief summary of the game.
We hope you enjoy this unique look back to the 1948 season. Below is more about the entire project.
Did The Tribe Win Last Night Presents: The Modernized Retelling of the Cleveland Indians 1948 World Series Season Through Blogs and Social Media
Cleveland sports fans are unique in many ways, loyal to their teams when most fans would have abandoned ship a long time ago. The town has not had a playoff team in any sport since 2010 and hosts a generation of heartache for most fans that dates back to the early 1980s. It seems ESPN and other sports networks have Cleveland’s pain saved in their reels and ready to press play as soon as it becomes applicable again.
But there was a time when Cleveland was on top of the sports world. The major markets weren’t quite good enough to take down Cleveland in hockey, football or baseball, and the city held championships in each sport.
The year was 1948.
The Cleveland Indians had a new, energetic owner dedicated to winning, the biggest and newest stadium in baseball, a strong pitching staff — complete with a surprising rookie performance — and an offense full of power, ready to set new home run records. However, they also had their problems, including a young manager who might not be able to lead the team to the championship, a star veteran pitcher showing his first signs of mortality and two more pitchers battling serious illnesses during the season. None of that includes the team becoming the first American League team to integrate and deal with racial issues.
Since Did The Tribe Win Last Night was born more than two years ago, we’ve learned that every day has a new storyline or topic surrounding the Indians. We’ve covered trades, free agent signings, and a manager on the hot seat, lineup shakeups and a pennant race. Every day of a season matters and impacts the greater whole of leading to a potential playoff spot.
These storylines were just as frequent and compelling in 1948. Now that 65 seasons are nearly in the record books since the Indians’ last championship season, many of those day-to-day stories have been lost through generations. About five months ago, some of us at DTTWLN started to research and dig through the 1948 season, and the news and information we found was compelling.
We began to wonder how Bill Veeck, Lou Boudreau, Bob Feller and the rest of the 1948 Indians would have fit into a modern, social media-driven world filled with blogs and Twitter. In a matter of weeks, we began re-writing and preparing Did The Tribe Win Last Night 1948, a modernized retelling of the Cleveland Indians’ last World Series championship season.
Beginning Sept. 22, The Tribe Win Last Night 1948 will become a day-by-day recounting of the 1948 Cleveland Indians season, written by our staff as breaking news, based off published reports of the day from the Cleveland Press, Plain Dealer and other references. We will report 1948 news on this site as if it is happening live, including through our Twitter handles (@didtribewin1948, @Lou_Boudreau, @Bob_Feller19, @Bob_Lemon21, @Ken_Keltner6 and @RChristopher48) that will provide in-game updates, player profiles and interaction with the intent to bring the day-to-day stories of the 1948 season back to life.
Photo credit: Cleveland Memory Project
All information and news reported on Did The Tribe Win Last Night 1948 is believed to be accurate and correct from our research. However, we have made a couple of revisions in an attempt to modernize and be politically correct in our current society. In 1948, the Indians were often referred to as “Redskins,” in newspaper accounts. We’ve elected to refer to them as the Indians, or as we do in the modern day, the Tribe. The same modernization is true for descriptions of Larry Doby and Satchel Paige. Newspapers often referred to them as Negros; however, we have elected to use African-American when mention or discussion of race is necessary.
We hope you enjoy reading — or re-reading — about the 1948 season as much as we enjoyed re-writing it. I think most Indians fans can choose to follow the events daily, or occasionally. Beginning Sept. 22, we will have daily posts through March 20 covering every game, plus storylines on and off the field, including player interviews and profiles. We’ve written over 300 posts for Did The Tribe Win Last Night 1948. Like most seasons, Indians fans can miss a day or two and jump right back into the season. Our posts and updates are categorized and marked chronologically so that readers can be brought back up to speed in the season very quickly.
