Much was made in the baseball press of the number of "college men" coming into the big leagues. That usually referred to players who hadn't actually graduated from college but had attended for a year or two, played college baseball, and then signed a professional contract and abandoned pursuit of a degree. Moreover, figures on college men in the majors varied not only from time to time but from source to source.

As early as 1929, according to Baseball Magazine, forty-six players with at least some college background (about 12 percent) were on big-league rosters. Five years later, the Sporting News put the number of ex-collegians in the National League alone at forty-four, led by the Phillies with nine and the Giants with eight. About one-third of the forty-four had earned degrees. In 1935 Bill Bryson in Baseball Magazine wrote that of 226 "star players," forty-four had attended "some college or other"; the next year, Bryson identified seventy former collegians on the total roll (368) of major leaguers. Forty-five of the seventy were in the American League, with the White Sox and Detroit listing eight each. At that point, according to Bryson's information, only Cincinnati had no college men at all. [Ralph W. Brewer, “Look at Them College Boys,” Baseball Magazine, February 1930, p. 394; Sporting News, March 29, 1934, p. 5; Bill Bryson, “The Majors Go Collegiate,” Baseball Magazine, July 1935, pp. 369–370; Bill Bryson, “Majoring for the Majors,” Baseball Magazine, June 1936, pp. 319–320.]

Front-rank big leaguers who'd attended college but hadn't graduated included Lou Gehrig, who dropped out of Columbia University in his junior year; Mickey Cochrane, who did the same at Boston University; and Hank Greenberg, who left New York University after only one semester. Bump Hadley attended Brown University; Mace Brown, the University of Iowa; Tommy Bridges, the University of Tennessee; Larry French, the University of California (Berkeley); Tex Carleton, Texas Christian University; Bill Lee, Louisiana State University; and Zeke Bonura, Loyola University of New Orleans.

But by the mid- and late 1930s, more big leaguers than ever had become legitimate college and university degree holders. From an academic standpoint, the most impressive were Burgess Whitehead (B.A., University of North Carolina), the first big leaguer to wear a Phi Beta Kappa key, and Monte Weaver, who had earned an M.S. in mathematics from the University of Virginia by doing his thesis on the vectorial angle of the curve ball. Other notable diploma-holding big leaguers included Bill Werber from Duke University; Buddy Myer from Mississippi State Agricultural College; George Earnshaw, a Swarthmore College graduate; Eldon Auker, who finished at Kansas State; Claude Passeau, who held a degree from Millsaps College, in Jackson, Mississippi; Marvin Owen, a graduate of Santa Clara College; Luke Appling, a product of Oglethorpe College, in Atlanta; and Hal Schumacher, who had the company of most of his Giants teammates at St. Lawrence University's 1933 commencement.

Red Rolfe, who'd attended exclusive Exeter Academy before going on to play baseball and earn his B.A. at Dartmouth College, went up to the Yankees to stay in 1934. Several more college graduates subsequently joined the Yankees. Joe Gordon finished his degree at the University of Oregon after his second big-league season; Charlie Keller had graduated from the University of Maryland when he went up from Newark in 1939; and Marvin Breuer held a degree in civil engineering from the Missouri School of Mines when he joined the New York pitching staff the same year.

In August 1939, Cleveland promoted from Buffalo the hotshot middle-infield combination of Lou Boudreau and Ray Mack. Shortstop Boudreau had starred in both basketball and baseball at the University of Illinois, and had finished his degree despite being declared ineligible for his senior year when it became known that the Indians were paying his widowed mother $100 per month to ensure his services. Second baseman Mack (né Mlcknovsky) was a native Clevelander who gained a B.S. from that city's Case Institute of Technology.

The presence of so many college men occasionally prompted comments about how much ballplayers had changed, and some people weren't sure that was a good thing. In 1935 the Seattle sportswriter Royal Brougham sarcastically observed that "the grimy, unshaven, rough-and-ready of the old days is on his way out, and baseball is wearing a white collar, slacks and a daisy in its lapel." A few years later, Bill Terry expressed a longing for "the old-fashioned, insatiable player who would walk half the day to play a ball game." George Levy, former megaphone announcer at Yankee Stadium, thought that players were "more efficient, colder now....[They] give you the impression they have a job to do, and they go in there and do it and get away as quickly as possible." Whether one liked it or not, Joe McCarthy believed that contemporary players had to be treated differently. While he'd blown off plenty of steam managing in the minors, McCarthy said in 1938, "The time when a manager used to talk to his players as though he were driving a bunch of mules is pretty well past." [Sporting News, March 21, 1935, p. 5; Bill Terry, “Fly by Night,” Collier’s, April 20, 1940, p. 97; Sporting News, December 25, 1941, p. 11; Sporting News, November 24, 1938, p. 3.]

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