As ballplayers' ethnicity changed, so did their geographic origins. Those who wrote about players' backgrounds often confused their birthplaces with where they grew up -- as with Dick Bartell and Wally Berger, both Chicago-born Californians, and Schoolboy Rowe, Texas-born but Arkansas-reared. But whereas earlier in the century players had come predominantly from the northeastern and older midwestern states, by the 1930s a substantial shift toward the South and West had taken place.

One survey published early in 1934 put the number of Texans among all those listed on major-league rosters at thirty-six, Californians at thirty-five, and Illinois natives at thirty-four. Three years later, a survey of 225 players from thirty-five states identified nineteen Californians, eighteen Texans, fifteen each from Illinois and New York, fourteen each from North Carolina and Pennsylvania, twelve Ohioans, ten each from Oklahoma and Missouri, nine Louisianians, and eight each from New Jersey and Tennessee. Aside from a couple of Canadians, the remaining seventy-three in the survey were scattered among thirty-seven states. At that time, Al Lopez was the only native Floridian in the majors.

According to a study by Bill Bryson published the next year, only 13.8 percent of established big leaguers had grown up as residents of major-league cities; another 11.3 percent came from cities of more than 250,000. Small towns and rural communities -- locales of less than 2,500 population -- had produced an imposing 37 percent. Curiously, fifty-three of eighty-four pitchers in Bryson's study came from small towns and villages.

From the 1930s on, California's mild climate and burgeoning population would produce more major leaguers than any other state. Lefty O'Doul, Joe Cronin, Babe Herman, and Dick Bartell were already in the big time before 1930; subsequently, such notables as Lefty Gomez, Larry French, Frank Demaree, Wally Berger, Monte Pearson, Babe Dahlgren, Bobby Doerr, and Ted Williams came out of the Golden State. The biggest single concentration of big leaguers was in the San Francisco Bay area, which spawned O'Doul, Cronin, Bartell, Pearson, Dahlgren, and a steady flow of Italian-American players, including by 1940 Joe, Vince, and Dominic DiMaggio, Ernie Lombardi, Frank Crosetti, Tony Lazzeri, Dolph Camilli, Cookie Lavagetto, Dario Lodigiani, and Joe Orengo. (But "sons of Caesar" came from all parts of the country. Gus Mancuso and Johnny Rizzo, for example, grew up in Houston; Zeke Bonura was from New Orleans; Lou Chiozza was born in Tallulah, Louisiana, and lived in Memphis.)

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