Waite Hoyt might point out the drawbacks of a career in professional baseball, but for Foxx and others with the ability and good fortune to make it to the major leagues, a way of life awaited them that few people -- and hardly anybody of modest education and family background -- could possibly aspire to. In a 1937 American Mercury piece. Gerald Holland didn't exaggerate a great deal when he described a big-league ballplayer's life as "a never-never land of lower berths and club cars, beauty-rest mattresses, awe-stricken barbers and adoring women, Florida sunbaths, thick steaks and pie ŕ la mode, alert medics and zealous trainers -- topped each fortnight by a pay check for more money than exists in the workaday world of bookkeepers, soda-fountain attendants, and streetcar conductors." [Gerald Holland, “Baseball and Ballyhoo,” American Mercury, May 1937, p. 81.] Holland might have added that the daily $3.50 to $4.00 meal allowance on road trips was a day's pay for half the country's working people.

Yet decades later, ballplayers also remembered what it was like in the era of an inviolate reserve clause, no pension benefits, and, perhaps most vividly, no air-conditioning. Players especially hated to go to St. Louis in July and August and have to deal with the suffocating heat. Billy Herman remembered that the Cubs might take a night train from Chicago, arrive in St. Louis early the next morning, and check in at their hotel, which hadn't cooled off much during the night. They would eat breakfast in a hot dining room and try to get a few hours' sleep before going out to Sportsman's Park, where they played on a field made rock hard and nearly denuded from being used by both Browns and Cardinals.

The game over, "you take your shower, but there's no way you can dry off; the sweat just keeps running off of you." Back to a steamy hotel room. "But the dining room isn't much better, so you order room service and stay right there and eat." Later, unable to sleep in the heat, "you get up and pull the sheet off the bed and soak it with cold water and go back and roll up in a wet sheet; but it dries out after an hour or two, and you have to get up and soak it again." After four days in St. Louis, on to Cincinnati, "and it's the same thing. For eight days you haven't had a decent night's sleep." [Donald Honig, Baseball When the Grass Was Real: Baseball from the Twenties to the Forties Told by the Men Who Played It (New York: Coward, McCann, 1975), p. 148.]

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