Good evening. This is Dead Legends. The baseball newsletter that loves the game as much as Jim Leyland loved smoking heaters in the dugout.

Let’s dive in.

Today’s story is about two bombings at big league ballparks.

In the fall of 1920, the league’s owners hired Judge Kenesaw Mountain Landis to be the first commissioner of baseball.

He did some great things for the sport after the fallout from the Black Sox Scandal, and with the help of superstars like Babe Ruth, he restored America’s faith in the purity of the game.

But it was a bit of a rocky start.

Initially, Landis was still working as a Federal Judge when he became the commissioner - so he was playing both roles.

In 1921, just a few weeks after he’d permanently banned eight White Sox players, he issued a controversial judgement dubbed “The Landis Award” relating to the construction industry.

Looking back on it, people say it actually revitalized the industry and brought about a lot of development.

But it allowed companies to cut their worker’s wages by up to 12.5%.

As you can imagine, a lot of people had beef with that.

The ruling divided the construction industry into two sides: union shops, and non-union shops.

And it was literally like two rival street gangs.

Construction sites and factories were often plagued by arson, bombings, beatings, and other random acts of violence in protest of the Landis Award.

This kind of shit was going on all throughout 1922 and into the Spring of the following year.

As the 1923 season approached, White Sox owner Charles Comiskey hired non-union painters to repaint the stadium's exterior for the home opener.

Cubs owner William Wrigley also hired non-union workers to install 5,000 new seats in his North Side ballpark.

These decisions saved the clubs a lot of money, but it also painted a target on their backs.

Union workers boycotted both teams, but attendance numbers were unaffected.

On April 22nd, a bomb went off at Comiskey Park.

No injuries were reported - just an obliterated hot dog stand and some shattered office windows.

Then on October 14th, another bomb went off at Wrigley.

That one caused a little more damage, about $5,000 worth - almost $90,000 in today’s money.

Four ticket booths got leveled, and the bombs almost took out a few supporting columns near the grandstands.

It was never proven, but the circumstantial evidence suggests that the bombings were probably carried out by union workers as retaliation against Landis and the Chicago team owners.

Ultimately, nobody was arrested for the incidents, and the ballpark bombings are almost never mentioned today in Chicago baseball history books.

A NEW SOCIAL NETWORK FOR BALLPLAYERS

Baseball season is upon us, and our friends at 22Fresh just dropped this new app called StatRat.

It’s the best way to track your stats regardless of what league you play in, and you can also follow other people on the app to keep up with their season.

It’s 100% free, and takes less than 60 seconds to set up.

RIDICULOUS STATS

BASEBALL TRIVIA

STRANGE NAMES

If you're just joining us, we play this game every day where we try to find the weirdest names throughout baseball history.

Why? Don't ask us, it's just something we like to do.

If you've been rocking with us for awhile now, you know what time it is.

Today's winner is:

Ducky was a rising star that had his career interrupted by World War II.

The year before he joined the military, Detweiler had a 40-game hit streak in the Three-I-League.

After the war, he played with the Boston Braves, but went hitless in his lone plate appearance.

He continued to play and manage in the minors until 1952.

THE DEAD LEGENDS ARCHIVE

If you like this story, check out some of our past favorites:

• The Ice Game: Baseball on skates??

• The Spy: Half James Bond, half Babe Ruth

• The Seagull: Dave Winfield goes to jail in Toronto

• The Signs: How a deaf ballplayer helped invent baseball’s secret language

• The Greatest Pitcher Who Never Existed: Sidd Finch takes the baseball world by storm