“National League of Professional Clubs”: Henry Chadwick declares it “a startling coup d’état.”

HENRY CHADWICK had been invited to attend the meeting of the Western clubs on December 17, 1875 but declined. He learned of the formation of a new league, on February 2, 1876, from the press, and was aggrieved. Here is his response, from The New York Clipper of February 12. [Paragraphing added — jt.]

FOR THE PAST YEAR OR TWO we have been calling the attention of professional club-managers to the importance of doing something to put a stop to the growing abuses connected with their class of the baseball fraternity, the most prominent of which is the evil of fraudulent play in the form of “hippodroming,” or the “selling” or “throwing” of games for betting purposes, practiced by knavish members of the club-teams, and countenanced by still worse club officials. While all have acknowledged the existence of the evil in question, and lamented the fact, none have hitherto taken any direct steps towards reform — at least, not prior to the close of the season of 1875.

Last December, however, a meeting of club managers of Western organizations was held in Louisville, the object of which was to take the initiatory steps in a movement calculated to remove the existing odium from the professionals, and a reform was looked forward to by the best friends of the national game which could not but greatly add to the success, pecuniary and otherwise, of the professional clubs about to enter upon the promising campaign of the centennial year. In this business of reform it was evident that those who undertook it would have serious work to do; but it was expected that the issue would be met boldly and openly. The evil in question had begun to sap at the very foundations of the national game. It was necessary that the removal of the cancer from the system should be thorough and complete, and it was requisite, therefore, that the operation should be placed in experienced hands.

Judging from what took place in the metropolis this past week, it would seem that this important work was not entrusted to men of experience; for, in our opinion, a sad blunder has been committed by the delegates to this club primary-meeting — it cannot be called a convention — which, on Wednesday night, Feb. 2, terminated in the organization of the “National League of Professional Clubs.”

What was the work of reform the clubs in question had to do? It was to put a stop to fraudulent play among professional players, and to punish the clubs and their officials who countenanced it; and with this primary object there was the secondary one of revising the National Association laws so that knavish players could not be engaged after having become “marked” or suspected men.

Then, too, by way of supplement, there remained the business of confining the contests of the championship arena to those stock-company organizations who are capable of carrying out the season’s programme of tours and club engagements to a satisfactory issue. The business of revising the playing rules of the game was a matter outside of the “reform movement,” and therefore was something of secondary importance.

Now, what was there to prevent this work from being entered upon boldly, manfully, consistently and openly, at the general convention of the National Association? The object in view was one naturally commanding professional baseball-playing. The opposition to be expected to such a commendable movement was unimportant, and entirely inadequate to any successful resistance to the carrying-out of the needed reformation. Why, therefore this secret meeting, with closed doors and a star-chamber method of attaining the ostensible objects in view? The honest clubs of the professional class are in a large majority, and possess the power to carry out the needed reformation.

There is nothing in the laws of the National Association of professional players to prevent them from controlling the convention in the cause of honest play. If the circumstances of the relative positions of the two classes of the professionals — the honest men and the knaves — were such as to render it questionable whether the opposition of the latter could be successfully withstood, or had the existing laws of the National Association been such as to have given the opposition a power of controlling the convention and preventing the reformers from carrying their point, there would then have been some excuse for the secrecy observed, and for the anti-American method of doing their business of reform; but nothing of the kind existed. Why, therefore, was the singular course adopted of holding a meeting prior to the regular convention, and of organizing a new association outside of the regular gathering of delegates, except that there was some secret object in view which it was not considered desirable to have made public?

Again, we ask, what was the work to be done? What was it in detail? Let us answer this question plainly. It is notorious among professional players and club officials that a great deal of what is called “crooked play” was indulged in during the season of 1875, especially in Philadelphia and Brooklyn — not exclusively in those cities, however. In view of this understood fact, what was there for those advocating reform to do? Neither more nor less than to put it out of the power of the clubs in which this “crooked” business had been engaged in and negatively sanctioned, as it were, by the re-engagement of “suspected” or “marked” men, to re-enter the arena in 1876. Has this been done by the newly-organized “National League”? Certainly not. Again, a part of the work of reform was to prevent the re-engagement of suspected players, and the adoption of rules rendering such players ineligible. Has this object been accomplished by the League? We think not.

The fact is, there was but one fair, manly way of entering upon this business of reform, and that was to have publicly issued a circular, addressed to all professional clubs, expressing in plain language the existence of the abuses to be remedied, pointing out the necessity for reform, and inviting the co-operation of all clubs favoring the movement. If, at a convention held under regular auspices, it was found, that under the rules of the National Association, and at its convention, the reform desired could not be attained, it would then be time to have done what was done at the Grand Central Hotel. We are in hearty accord with the objects put forth in the Western Club Committee’s circular. Indeed, it is but carrying out the programme time and again suggested in the columns of THE CLIPPER — that is, the necessity for a reformation.

But we do decidedly object to the secret and sudden coup d’état of the Western club-managers, and the glaring inconsistency of their action of throwing out one club, while retaining another club equally amenable to censure for the doubtful character of the play of its team. Inconsistent action, too, is apparent in the throwing-out of the Philadelphia Club for its “irregularities” — that is the mild term, we believe — while another club in the League is countenanced in the engagement of players guilty of the very “irregularities” for which the former is punished. Instead of boldly confronting the club thus charged, the League “whip the devil round the stump,” and exclude the offenders under a rule prohibiting two League clubs from being established in the same city. Then, too, they leave out the New Haven Club — an organization which, in the high character of its officials, the strength of its team, and its reputation for carrying out its obligations, stands as high as the clubs in the League — under the rule of limiting League clubs to cities having not less than 75,000 inhabitants, while they allow the Hartford Club in their League, though that city has not so many inhabitants by 13,000 as New Haven.

By a glance at the code of rules — not the playing code — governing the intercourse of the League clubs, one with the other, which are to be attempted to be enforced this season, a series of laws will be found to have been enacted which, before half the season is over, will necessarily be dead-letters. As we said before, the action of the meeting of Feb. 2, which resulted in the organization of the National League, will be found to be of as little advantage to true reform or to the pecuniary interests of the League clubs as could well have been taken. It is to be hoped that we will be found to have been mistaken in our conclusions in this respect, but we are afraid it is an “ower true tale.”

What effect this secret movement will have on the coming convention of the National Association we cannot say at present. It may render the convention unnecessary; but then, again, it may not. There are plenty of the semi-professional class of clubs which would be glad of a chance of getting into the Association in question; and if one club of the organization now on the roll of the National Association concludes to hold the convention, that alone will give it a support which may cause the semi-professionals to rally to the call. In conclusion, we have to say that we regard the action of the clubs in question as hasty, inconsiderate and inconsistent with their alleged efforts at reform; and though we hope to see the movement in favor of reform successful, we are afraid that the right method to insure success has not been adopted by the League.

The Hartford Times, in commenting on the action of the Leaguers, says that “the players engaged by the Philadelphia and New Haven Clubs will be thrown out by the operation of the League laws.” In other words, these twenty odd players, of whom the greater number are as honest as any in the League, are to be branded as “crooked” players unworthy of employment. Such gross injustice presents a striking illustration of the absurdity of some of the laws adopted by the League.

We have to say that the players of the clubs in question are to be held to service, and the clubs to their responsibilities, until the National Association laws which govern them cease to be operative. The players named are as follows: Seward, Nichols, Cassidy, Sommerville, Spence, S. Wright, Pabor, Waitt, Heifert, Knowdel, Meyerle, Crawley, Craver, Schaffer, Weaver, Malone, Zettlein, Treacy, Nelson, and McMullin. The action of the Philadelphia Club under this hasty and crude legislation at the hands of the League organization will be looked for with curiosity.

COMMENTS ON THE LEAGUE.

The St. Louis Globe-Democrat of Feb. 4, in commenting on “theprogramme to be carried out by the Western club Committee,” says:

It is, however, understood that the Philadelphia and New Haven clubs were to have been debarred from representation at it, the former that its managers are given to gambling, and the latter because it did not prove itself a bona-fide organization by making a Western trip last season. The Athletics, Bostons, Hartfords, and Mutuals were to have been represented, and the understanding with the majority of the clubs was that any organization which did not concur with their views could withdraw, and in the event of affairs being evenly divided, an independent National Association should be formed by the Western people.

Action of this kind would be highly commendable but for one reason. The Philadelphias are to be debarred from a moral standpoint, and because the city in which they reside is represented by another organization. The Mutuals are, however, admitted, because gate-receipts in New York can come from that source alone. This club has been accused of more crooked playing than any other in the arena, which is the reason why discrimination in their case is severely commented on by all true lovers of the national game. Higham, Hicks, and Hatfield are to play in the Mutual nine, and their record for dark tricks has been amply demonstrated on numerous occasions.

The New Haven Register says:

The reasons assigned for throwing New Haven out of the “League” are two in number, and neither has any foundation in fact. The statement that the New Haven is a co-operative nine has already been corrected in these columns. If any baseball club in the country is run by a joint-stock company, certainly the New Havens are. By the 1st of November every player in last year’s nine was paid every dollar due him, the capital stock of the Association increased to ten thousand dollars, and sixteen hundred dollars was raised and paid as advance-money to those who are to make up this year’s club.

Nearly all the stock has been taken, directors, officers, etc., elected. If it not a genuine stock company, there is no such thing. But, on the other hand, one of the nines admitted into the newly-organized League — the Mutuals — is a co-operative nine. Certainly, the first reason assigned is not advanced in good faith.

Part 1 of this series: https://goo.gl/jel10E

Part 2: https://goo.gl/mGIPNp.

Part 3: https://goo.gl/hIa9JQ.

Part 4: https://goo.gl/TLQnW5

Part 5: https://goo.gl/64DP1O

A Startling Coup d’Etat was originally published in Our Game on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

FATHER CHADWICK’s feelings were bruised. How could a thoroughgoing revision of the game take place without him? How could a coal dealer (Hulbert) and a mere ballplayer (Spalding) reconstruct the game he had imagined, then willed into being? Chadwick called the National League approach an “anti-American method of doing business” but it was not long before he accepted Spalding’s apology for the brutal attack below (which Spalding may well have crafted for Lewis Meacham, the baseball reporter at the Chicago Tribune). What sweetened Spalding’s apology was his invitation to Chadwick to edit his annual Spalding Guide, a new rival to the venerable Beadle’s Dime Base-Ball Player and DeWitt Guide (both of which limped into the next decade).

Below, from the Chicago Tribune of April 2, 1876, a scathing attack on the “Father of the Game”:

A Father Without A Child

There is nowhere in the world so sad a spectacle as a cynical carping old man who has outgrown his usefulness, and who being left far behind in the progress of events, vainly attempts to hold back the world to his place, and grumbles because his little say-so is not taken as law. This becomes sadder than ever when the useless old man finds himself placed in a position where he should be an authority, but in which he cannot even maintain the appearance of respectable mediocrity. Such a man is Henry Chadwick, of The Clipper, who though not old in years, has had experience enough to have made himself a man of respect had heaven but given him a head. For some years The Clipper was recognized as an authority in base ball, and at last Chadwick made the fatal error of confounding cause and effect, and so came to believe that he made base ball, instead of contenting himself with the truth, that base ball made him. Full of this mania, he proceeded to call himself the “Father of the Game,” and to assume much on the strength of the title. But he found an unruly child, and one which disinherited its papa with rapidity and ease. During several years up to this present, Chadwick had been in the habit of attending conventions and forcing himself on them by the most barefaced assumption, with the implied threat that, if he was not offered to run things, down would come The Clipper on the organization. By the lowest kind of toadying to Harry Wright (who was the originator of all the meritorious ideas given to the world as his) and to Philadelphia, and by persistent, unjust, and disgraceful abuse on everything Western, — especially Chicagoan, — the man managed to keep the East under his thumb, and so ruled the game. He attempted the same scheme this year, and printed in his paper a mass of verbiage which he was pleased to name the “improved rules,” and which he expected to force down the throats of the professionals.

But, as noted above, the game had grown, the West had grown, and both had outgrown Chadwick and all allied frauds. The necessity for the League had arisen, and it was formed without the knowledge, consent, or presence of “The Father of the Game, and without any recourse to his “amended rules.” Here was a double blow, for both the old man’s vanity and pocket were wounded. As soon as he came to know of the new organization, he rushed around to every member present and demanded the publication of the rules: but the wicked child put his thumb up and bade his self-styled father begone, saying that the rules would be published by the firm who bid for the privilege. Then the man moaned, and begged, and threatened by turns, but the managers, joyously free from his dominion, refused to take him up and carry him further.

Then there was wrath in the breath of “The Veteran,” and he gave himself up to denunciation in the Clipper. Since that time he has turned more ways than one not a reader of the Clipper and World would believe possible. The reason of this is easy to be seen: for some years Chadwick has made a handsome sum yearly by editing a book of rules with one hand and then puffing it into prominence and sale with the other. This pastime is disturbed and the general welcome which the League and its clear and simple rules have met is gall and wormwood to the unprincipled speculator by name Chadwick. From this cause has grown all the wrath, and it is redoubled by the actions of the amateur associations; for, when Chadwick was dumped into the street by the professionals, he took up with the amateur association, and carried into their camp the bundle of rules which he had been building. The Association in question adopted the mass of verbiage, and made the old man’s heart and pocket glad for a moment, only to be saddened again by the refusal of the amateurs to swallow the pill made up for them. The Chicago Amateur Association led off by ignoring Chadwick and adopting the League rules. The New England Association followed suit, and all the Western and Southwestern clubs have done the same thing. This is disheartening, and Chadwick has accordingly gone to work to pick the League rules to pieces with little or no success.

Without spending more words with the man who styles himself “the Father of the Game,” it is enough to say of him that he was always a fraud in the business; that he always depended on other brains than his own for his ideas; that he is miles and leagues behind the age; that he is a played-out and passed-by man who never cared for the National Game further than as he could draw money out of it; and, finally, that members of the League will do themselves an injustice if they allow his efforts to break up the organization to influence them in any way.

History Awakens: A Postscript was originally published in Our Game on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Since August 2010, the “Hall Ball” has crossed the country on a journey to have its picture taken with each member of the Baseball Hall of Fame, both living and deceased.

My friend Ralph Carhart posted this fine story a couple of weeks ago. His story, or rather that of The Hall Ball, was afterwards featured in a segment on CBS Evening News. His trip to Hawaii to depict the ball at Alexander Cartwright’s grave was the culmination of a singular dedication to a project satisfying to him, perplexing to some, and profound to others, myself included. For more, see: http://thehallball.sportspalooza.com/

April 19, 2017– This past Monday, April 17, marked the 197th birthday of Alexander Cartwright, the final Hall of Fame grave that I needed to photograph for the project. I was in Hawaii to take the picture and was asked by the Friends of Alexander Joy Cartwright to talk about the Hall Ball at their annual celebration held at the Oahu Cemetery. The following is the text from that speech.

When I decided 6.5 years ago to take a photograph of a single baseball with every member of the Baseball Hall of Fame, living and deceased, I could not have possibly imagined this moment. Here I am, standing in paradise, with a group of people listening to me tell the story of what brought me to this place, on this day, while those people who love me most stand close by. I just thought it would be a fun thing to collect. I had no idea that this project was going to change my life in such a fundamental way.

I loved baseball as a kid. I played little league. I collected baseball cards. I grew up in upstate New York, so I was a Yankee fan, like my father, until 1984. Then, two things happened. The Mets started to get good and I hit puberty which, to me, meant rebelling against everything my father stood for. I remained a fanatic until 1994, when I graduated from college to pursue a career in theatre and the infamous player’s strike happened. I stopped paying attention to the old game.

Then, in 1998, I was working for Calvin Klein as the manager of their mail room (I was still having trouble getting that theatre career to take off), and the owner of the company gave me tickets to his box at Yankee Stadium. That warm July night, the day after David Cone had pitched a perfect game on Yogi Berra Day, I sat only ten feet from the field. The smell of the grass, a luxury in New York City, was intoxicating. The sheer sense memory thunderbolt of all those hours spent at Shea Stadium, and the fields of the Hudson Valley Little League, was a transformative experience. My love of the game was rekindled.

That very night I started studying the history of baseball. I watched Ken Burns’s epic documentary on constant repeat. I read every book the New York Public Library had to offer. By the summer of 2010, I considered myself to have a pretty solid background in the story of baseball and how it came to be the sport it is today. For example, I knew that it was not invented by Abner Doubleday and that we owed a much greater debt to Alexander Cartwright’s New York Knickerbockers.

But what The Hall Ball has taught me is that the amount of what I knew about baseball at that point in my life was the barest drop of the great depths of its rich history. So much of what we know about baseball is myth and legend. But the true story of how it came to be the game we play today is unknown to most people. This summer the Hall of Fame will induct 5 more members, bringing the current total to 317. Even the most ardent fan would be hard pressed to name 100 of them. And the Hall is just a microcosm. A total of 18,951 men have played major league baseball, plus countless thousands more men and women have played professional ball in the Negro Leagues, the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League, and in Japan, Mexico, Cuba and over twenty nations across the globe.

There is so much out there to know. How does one person begin to even comprehend the vast sum of it all? For me, that answer was The Hall Ball. I didn’t know that in August 2010. But that is what it has become. A crash course in the history of baseball. Since then I have become a member of SABR, the Society for American Baseball Research, and been active in its efforts.

I have become the head of a committee called the 19th Century Baseball Grave Marker Project, dedicated to placing stones at the previously unmarked graves of the game’s pioneers. We placed our first last fall, for James Whyte Davis, who joined the Knickerbockers the year after Alexander Cartwright left to seek his fortunes West. Our next will be for Hall of Famer Pud Galvin, whose Pittsburgh grave features only a cracked, ground-flush stone bearing his name and nothing else.

I have had the honor of holding the game books of the Knickerbockers, one hundred and seventy-year old documents, in my hands. As a contributor to the Protoball Database, a web-based effort to chronicle every instance of the game before it became a professional enterprise in 1870, I have been transposing the Knick Game Books into digital format so that future historians can understand how the game evolved from a loose collection of guidelines to the 172-page document that constitutes the current Major League Baseball Rulebook.

I have discovered that the great Cuban slugger Cristóbal Torriente is not buried in his native country, as the historical record has stated for over fifty years. I learned that he is, in fact, buried in Queens, a short drive from my own home in Brighton Beach.

I have befriended some of the greatest historians in the game, whose stores of knowledge keep the true story of our game’s history alive. They are the keepers of truth and I consider it an honor that I get to learn at their sides. Just as I consider it an honor that I am standing before you today.

And I owe it all to the Hall Ball.

The journey that brought me here today started in Staten Island, just six miles from my home at the time, with a visit to the then-unmarked grave of Sol White, the great Negro League player, manager, executive and historian. Since then I have traveled over 40,000 miles. I have seen 34 states and almost 200 hundred cities and towns. I went to Puerto Rico and Cuba. I am on this very day standing in a place that has always had the unreal quality of nirvana to me.

I have stood by the graves of giants, like Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig, and seen first hand how a stone can tell the story of a man. Ruth’s marker is gigantic, ten feet tall, eight feet wide, a stone carving of Jesus with his arms wrapped around a little boy in a baseball uniform adorning the front. Gehrig’s is in a different cemetery that shares a border with the one where Ruth lies for all eternity. His stone is small, discreet, adorned with only a small copper door within which the ashes of the Iron Horse and his beloved wife Eleanor are placed. The markers, in their stark difference, are perfect symbols of these men.

I have paid homage to some of the lesser known names of the game. Men like Jack Chesbro, whose league leading 41 wins in 1904 remains a record to this day, but whose story is mostly lost to history. His marker is not one of the finely carved geometric works like you see around you today, but instead is a giant boulder that looks as though it just rolled out of the Berkshire Mountains where he is buried. Or men like Arky Vaughan, who was raised a country boy in Arkansas and then moved to the remotest part of northeastern California after his days of being one of the best run scorers of the 1930s and 40s were over. He moved there for the fishing, and that’s where he died, just four years after he played his last game. He fell out of his fishing boat and drowned. Today, his grave is the most isolated of the Hall of Famers, located six hours from San Francisco to the south and six hours from Boise, Idaho to the north.

I have visited the cemetery in Los Angeles where two of the game’s most influential owners both lay. Walter O’ Malley, who became a villain to the people of Brooklyn and a savior to the people of Los Angeles (and Hawaii) when he initiated the great migration west and brought the Dodgers to California. Buried just a few hundred yards away lays Effa Manley, the sole woman in the Hall of Fame. Co-owner of the Newark Eagles, with her husband Abe, it was she that was the real driving force behind the team, proving that women can love the game with just as much passion as a man.

I’ve been to the cemetery in Baltimore which has the distinction of being the burial ground of the most Hall of Famers. Ned Hanlon, who led the National League incarnation of the Baltimore Orioles in the 1890s, and his three protégés, Joe Kelley, Wilbert Robinson, and the legendary John McGraw, are buried in nearby plots of New Cathedral Cemetery. These four men, each raised in the northeast, formed connections amongst each other and the city they came to call home. Now, because of lifetimes each spent pursuing the craft of baseball, they lay there together, forever.

I have stood in places meant to symbolize those who have chosen not to be buried. I went to Springfield, Illinois to find the last remaining physical structure of the Peabody №59 coal mine, a shaft a tenth of the mile off the road in the middle of the woods. It was at that mine that Al Barlick started his career when he umpired his first game for the company team. I have stood on the beach of San Juan, Puerto Rico, where the wreckage of the plane carrying the legendary Roberto Clemente washed ashore after it crashed on New Year’s Eve in 1972. I have gone to the cryonics facility in Scottsdale, Arizona where, contrary to urban legend, the entire body of Ted Williams patiently waits for science to catch up with his son’s dreams. I stood on the mound of Progressive Field in Cleveland where Early Wynn’s ashes were spread and I stood on the third base line of Wrigley Field where Ron Santo had his remains forever interred within the Friendly Confines.

I have looked at enough graves to know that at this point in history, when the stars of the 1940s and fifties are quickly leaving this earth, the inscriptions on their stones are more likely to mention the military career of the player than their baseball exploits. This is especially true if they starred in the Negro Leagues, and likely needed the assistance of the US government to provide a stone after they passed.

I have seen the graves of two men who have come to symbolize the story of the Negro Leagues. Josh Gibson, who died penniless, intoxicated and raving mad, has a simple, small stone which contains his name, the years of his birth and death and the words, “legendary baseball player.” It was placed years after his death by a local church in Pittsburgh. Meanwhile, in Kansas City, there is the mammoth three tiered structure that is the marker for Gibson’s sometimes battery-mate, sometimes opponent, Satchel Paige. Paige would live to 76 years of age and, despite his spendthrift ways, would make enough money from his time as the biggest draw in black baseball to die in comfort. He would pass during a blackout in Kansas City, on June 8, 1982, the day my wife was born.

I have seen the final resting place of two men whom history has labeled the game’s vilest racists, and discovered that there is always more to the story. When I visited Royston, Georgia, I saw a small town with a state of the art medical system funded by a legacy that was left by the business-savvy Ty Cobb. I would learn soon after, when I read Charles Leerhsen’s brilliant book, A Terrible Beauty, that everything I had been taught about Cobb was a lie. The legend of the racist, hateful Cobb has been corrected by historical research. But, before that book, my journey had already shown me a man whose wisdom and generosity still provides college scholarships to the poor youth of his community to this day.

Similarly, I drove down a hidden, overgrown road, whose “no trespassing” sign and closed gate I ignored because my satellite map had shown me that Rogers Hornsby was at the end of it. Hornsby, too, was known for a hateful streak. His body lies in a small cemetery that is on family land in the small town of Hornsby Bend, TX. Adjacent to it is a Mexican cemetery, land donated by the Hornsby family to the local Mexican church to assist its poor, immigrant members with a place to put their loved ones. There is always more than one side to the story.

I’ve seen the cemetery in Chicago that contains two of the individuals whose influence and truly racist natures actually contributed to the prevention of black men playing major league baseball between 1887 and 1947. Cap Anson, one of baseball’s first superstars, refused to allow his teams to play against any team that featured a black player on their roster. And Kenesaw Mountain Landis who, as baseball’s first commissioner, had it within his power to end the “gentlemen’s agreement” that barred blacks from the majors. Instead, he insisted there was no such agreement while simultaneously assuring that it would take his death before Jackie Robinson was allowed to set foot on a major league diamond. In a poignant irony, Oak Woods Cemetery, where they both lay, is currently almost entirely staffed by African Americans.

I have gone through the heavily Amish land of Peoli, OH to find the legendary Cy Young and I have stood 100 yards from where Lincoln delivered the Gettysburg Address to take a picture of the grave of the much lesser known Eddie Plank in Pennsylvania. I have visited the grave of Old Hoss Radborne, in a cemetery in Bloomington, IL where, in a bizarre twist of fate, the father of Abner Doubleday is also buried in an unmarked grave.

I have visited Henry Chadwick in Brooklyn, whose grave resembles a baseball diamond, with stone bases marking the four corners of the plot. I have visited Paul Waner in Bradenton, Florida and Lloyd Waner in Oklahoma City. Harry Wright in Bala Cynwyd, PA and George Wright in Brookline, MA. Three-Finger Brown in Terre Haute, IN, Ray Brown in Dayton, OH and Willard Brown in Houston, TX. Eddie Collins in Weston, MA and Jimmy Collins in Lackawana, NY. Rube Foster in Blue Island, IL and his half brother Bill in Claiborne Co., MS. Walter Johnson in Rockville, MD, Ban Johnson in Spencer, IN and Judy Johnson in Wilmington, DE. King Kelly in Mattapan, MA and George Kelly in Colma, CA.

I’ve met living members, over 65 of them so far. I’ve met Bobby Doerr, who played his first game in 1937, ten years before my own father was born. And I’ve met Greg Maddux, whose rookie card was part of my own collection, with a career that began concurrent with the time when my youthful love of the game ran its hottest. I’ve met tender souls like Ernie Banks and Yogi Berra who have, since I photographed them, gone on to the other side. I’ve met hard men like Bob Gibson and Jim Bunning, whose pictures for the project felt more like work than fun.

I have traveled to Cuba, a country that for my entire life was a forbidden land. There, I found a culture that embraces baseball with a single-minded fervor that America has not experienced since before World War II. I saw games in five provinces of the strong-hitting, weak-pitching Cuban Series Nacional, their version of the major leagues. I visited the Monument to Baseballists in Havana, where over fifty Cuban heroes, including Hall of Famer José Méndez, are buried. It was in this cemetery that the previously mentioned Torriente was thought to lay, but my visit proved something else to be true. I also hired a driver to take me three hours outside of Havana to visit the tiny town of Cruces, where I got to share a Buccanaro Beer with Martín Dihigo Jr, before we drove to his father’s grave and played a game of catch by the body of the only man to be elected into the baseball halls of fame of five different countries.

Which brings me to today. As exotic as Cuba was, it was a mere 1300 miles from my home. Today, I stand in a place that is 5000 miles from where I live. I heard lots of stories about Hawaii as a kid, because my upstate New York, Italian-American Uncle fell in love with a Hawaiian woman. Their wedding was a luau. Everyone wore leis and at one point the groomsmen came out in grass skirts. Hawaii was a mythical place that I always swore I would see someday. Today is that day because of this baseball.

For a theatre guy such as myself, there is tremendous beauty to Alexander Cartwright being the last grave I needed to visit to complete my project. It is the alpha and the omega. Cartwright is the first born member of the Hall of Fame. He remains, to this day, the first person in the Hall of Fame to have ever picked up a bat. Recent research has proven that Cartwright is not responsible for those things with which he is credited on his plaque in the Hall. As a historian, it would be irresponsible of me to ignore that. But, as most of you know, Cartwright was more than that. As a member of the Knickerbockers, he likely umpired the first game they ever played. And though he did not author the modern rules, he was a member of the 1848 rules committee. His civic contributions to the state of Hawaii have made him beloved in his adopted home.

And he has, since his election into the Hall of Fame in 1938, served as the sole reminder to those who view the game through the lens of the Hall, that there was a time before it became America’s Pastime. A time when we were just putting the pieces together to make something different from cricket, and rounders, and “one cat, two cat,” and town ball, and all the other bat and ball games that came before baseball came to be. We owe Cartwright and his family a debt for keeping that door open. For encouraging new research that lets us continue to find the true story behind the creation of baseball.

And thus it is a fitting place that this part of The Hall Ball comes to an end. With the man who represents baseball’s beginning. Because the story of baseball carries on. More men will be elected to the Hall, and I have no idea if the ball will continue to join them. The Hall Ball itself is such a tiny piece of the story of the game. But it’s my piece, and I am honored to be able to share it with you today. Thank you for listening.

The Hall Ball Goes Hawaiian was originally published in Our Game on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

I wrote this story for the Woodstock and Kingston Times, on November 15, 2004, at a juncture in my professional life during which the checkered careers of John Vanderlyn and another Kingston painter of later vintage, Jervis McEntee, held particular resonance. This story represented something of a departure for a man who had written about sports for decades but had long harbored other interests. I had cause to read it again, after some time, because I will attend, later today, a screening of Tobe Carey’s new documentary film, The First Artist in America: The Life and Times of John Vanderlyn, in which I am said to appear.

Someone told me some years ago that after decades of neglect the old Kingston Hotel at 20 Crown Street — in my then hometown of Kingston, New York — had finally been torn down. I knew its story, how in an upstairs room on Thursday evening, September 23, 1852, John Vanderlyn, the man who had once been the most famous painter in America, had died alone without a penny in his pocket. I rushed over to pick among the rubble, like a child imagining that Providence would reveal to me a paintbox, a stickpin, a tangible remnant of the artist and his dream.

The atomized shrine offered nothing, of course, except splintered clapboard and shards of tin ceiling. And I knew full well that Vanderlyn’s legacy was gloriously intact only two streets away, at the Senate House Museum, which saved his death-day possessions. Yet to understand his lifelong course against the grain — and his continuing import for artists today — would indeed take some clearing of rubble. I would have to filter through and beyond received opinion and modern interpretation, returning to contemporary accounts.

John Vanderlyn was born in Kingston on October 15, 1775. His reasonably prosperous family lived on Green Street, between the extant Van Keuren and Tappan houses. They were able to send him to the Kingston Academy when he was eleven, where he soon became fluent in French as well as in Dutch and English.

Young Vanderlyn’s gift for drawing, however, had been a family trait, most evident in his grandfather Pieter, whose portraits are still highly esteemed. At age 16 John sought employment in New York and found it with Thomas Barrow, a print dealer, in whose shop he met Gilbert Stuart, just returned from Paris and already a famous portrait painter. Stuart encouraged Vanderlyn to pursue his studies, which he did at the Robertson brothers’ Columbian Academy of Painting, at 79 Liberty Street, from 1792 through 1794. In 1795 he moved to Philadelphia to apprentice with Stuart, whose portrait of Aaron Burr he copied. The New York senator so admired the oil that he backed the young man’s further education in Paris, where he remained from 1796 to 1801.

At this time there was no nativist tradition of historical painting or landscape. Portraiture was the only form of painting that Americans appreciated and, in the days before photography, for which they would pay. Furthermore, American artists of high promise in the years before the Revolution regarded London as their finishing school. As a Democratic–Republican, Burr drew his inspiration from France, not England, which was the maternal shrine of the Federalists, notably Alexander Hamilton.

Burr’s financial straits in 1798 compelled Vanderlyn to support himself by executing portraits, but his heart was already elsewhere. Studying at the Académie de Peinture at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts with Francois-André Vincent, he improved his draftsmanship, working from life, from old masters, and from antique casts. As James Flexner wrote in The Light of Distant Skies:

This, he was told, was the necessary preparation for painting great historical pictures. When Vincent pulled him away to study landscape he complained — “I do not intend to adopt this branch of my art” and as for the portrait work of his forbears, he considered it “millhouse drudgery.” Vincent agreed that painting likenesses was a waste of time.

That stance rendered all of Vanderlyn’s subsequent years fraught with financial peril, as he continually failed to make foreign seed sprout in native soil. The painter Samuel F.B. Morse was to become similarly afflicted in his years of study in Paris; returning home with a passion to paint grand allegorical subjects, he found a public that admired only his commissioned portraits. Where Morse eventually turned away from painting altogether, devoting his energies to invention (the telegraph, of course, but also the first American photograph), Vanderlyn tried to make his art palatable through entrepreneurial ventures.

“The tide of utility sets against the fine arts,” Thomas Cole once said, and the observation is equally apt today. The European tradition of patronage of the arts — and individual artists — was as yet unmatched in America, where those who had money were dedicated only to acquiring more of it.

This devotion to the almighty dollar earned the scorn of Europeans, who believed that pursuing amusement was the key to enjoying life. All the same, Vanderlyn returned in 1801 to find commissions stacked up in advance, as Aaron Burr, now Vice President of the United States, had been restored to financial health. In the two years before his return to Europe, Vanderlyn painted portraits not only of his patron but also of his daughter Theodosia, a famous beauty in her day and a captivating heroine in Gore Vidal’s historical novel Burr.

Edward and Robert Livingston of the New-York Academy of the Fine Arts, newly formed to import popular casts to sell by subscription, funded Vanderlyn’s European trip in 1803 by assigning him to return with copies of old paintings and sculpture from Paris, Florence, and Rome, in return for which he would receive a salary and a line of credit. However, once again the artist’s financial tether to America was cut without notice. Scrambling for commission work, Vanderlyn managed to create three of the paintings regarded then and now as his masterpieces: The Death of Jane McCrea; Caius Marius Amidst the Ruins of Carthage; and Ariadne Asleep on the Island of Naxos. The first was notable for its bosomy victim and the last for its scandalously undraped nude form. Marius won a medal from Emperor Napoleon in 1808 as the best painting exhibited at the Paris Salon, but Vanderlyn later sold it cheaply and twice pawned the medal.

It was Ariadne and a copy of Correggio’s Antiope that inspired him to visions of filthy lucre. He speculated that while such pictures might prove too naked “for the house of a private individual … on that account it may attract a greater crowd if exhibited publicly.” Ariadne is important as the first formal nude in American art, but is more important in the history of hucksterism, with which the sale and public display of art in America has so often been linked.

When Vanderlyn returned to the States he had his former benefactor Burr in tow, traveling under a pseudonym after four years of ignominious exile in France. Having shot Hamilton dead in the duel at Weehawken in 1804, Burr followed with an adventure in Western expansion that brought a treason charge upon his head. Hounded and broke, Burr returned to New York only because Vanderlyn paid his passage by painting portraits of three fellow passengers.

In 1816, Vanderlyn opened his first American exhibition in New York. In it, he displayed Ariadne, Marius, his Antiope, portraits of James Monroe and James Madison, and copies of paintings by the masters. Separate viewings were arranged for men and women; America was not France after all. The exhibition toured Philadelphia, Charleston, Montreal, Washington, and Boston, but lost money.

Those with money may think about art, fancying themselves to be artists only lacking time, not talent. Artists, however, are always thinking about money.

When Vanderlyn had applied to the New-York Academy of the Fine Arts, the organization that had sent him to Europe in 1803, to display his Ariadne, he was turned down on the grounds that his painting offended public decency. Now he leapt upon an idea he had nurtured since 1814–15, when he had sketched the palace and gardens of Versailles. Not only would Vanderlyn paint a panorama of unprecedented scale and beauty — the form had been invented by the Scottish painter Robert Barker, who exhibited in Edinburgh in 1788 a panoramic view of that city — he would also construct and manage a building for its exhibition. Rather than curry favor with societies and academies he would appeal directly to the public, a public that might otherwise never see the splendor of France.

On March 31, 1817, Vanderlyn announced his plan to erect a rotunda for the exhibition of panoramic as well as conventional art at Chambers and Cross Streets, directly east of the despised Academy of the Fine Arts. He soon solicited $14,000 (a huge sum at a time when average annual salaries ran to $250) from 100 patrons, including John Jacob Astor. He persuaded the Common Council to grant him a ten-year lease of the land in exchange for one peppercorn, as the city’s demonstration of its newfound recognition that New York had been “too long stigmatized as phlegmatic, money making & plodding.” At the conclusion of the lease, however, the building would devolve to the city, and the proprietor’s right to renew was not assured.

Theodore S. Fay, in Views of New-York and Its Environs (1831), wrote of the Rotunda, which was constructed during the summer of 1818: “It is constructed of brick, is fifty-three feet in diameter, and forty feet in height, surmounted with a pantheon-shaped dome and skylight, through which the interior is lighted.” Among the panoramas exhibited were “the palace and gardens of Versailles, painted by Mr. Vanderlyn, and the city of Paris, by Mr. Barker; also, the cities of Mexico and Athens, and the city and lake of Geneva….”

On October 6, 1818, this gem of a building opened not with The Palace and Gardens of Versailles, which Vanderlyn had been busily painting in both New York and Kingston, but instead with Barker’s City of Paris as the panoramic offering. This was followed on January 22, 1819 by the Attack of the Allied Forces on Paris. Vanderlyn’s panorama, complete at 3,000 square feet of canvas, 167 feet long and 12 feet high (early reports pegged its height as 18 feet), debuted on May 26, 1820. To witness the canvas the audience — not the canvas — was rotated “after the manner of a locomotive on a railway turn table,” according to contemporary writer Col. Thomas Picton. The effect was a sensation, and was soon mimicked by a “Cosmorama” at Scudder’s Museum (predecessor of P.T. Barnum’s American Musum, and housed in the same building with the Academy of the Fine Arts). However, Versailles was not a financial success, having cost so much to execute that it could never be exhibited at profit.

Vanderlyn’s hold on the Rotunda was threatened. On December 6, 1824, he petitioned the City for extension of his lease and was denied. Still hoping to win approval, he invited members of the Common Council to attend the debut of a new panorama of the City of Athens on July 18, 1825. Not only were they unmoved, but the vultures were circling above. On May 8, 1826, the newly formed National Academy of Design petitioned the Common Council for a lease of the Rotunda. Vanderlyn had been approached to be one of its founding members but, feeling betrayed, he declined the invitation, the only artist to do so. A month later Dr. Hosack, creator of the city’s botanical garden, and others also petitioned for the lease. Despite entreaties by Vanderlyn’s friends, on March 23, 1829, the Common Council ordered him to vacate.

Financially crushed and embittered, he once again resorted to private commissions for portraits. He took the panorama on tour in the 1830s, frequently stopping at Kingston, where his siblings, nieces, and nephews still resided. A large government grant came his way to paint one of eight panels of the Capitol rotunda with a historical painting of Columbus, for which he traveled to Cuba for research. By the time this latter commission came to him he was in his sixties and was compelled to enlist the assistance of French limners, a concession to age for which he was excoriated in the press.

All the while Vanderlyn was abroad, readying his Landing of Columbus, the panorama of Versailles lay rolled up in storage in Kingston, under the watchful eye of his nephew, John Vanderlyn Jr., himself an artist of some ability. After the painting’s creator died in 1852, the nephew continued to secure it until his death, when it passed to his sister Catharine, a dressmaker who lived at 44 Green Street. Upon her death it descended to the Senate House Association, which had neither the funding nor the venue for its exhibition. In 1952 Senate House made a gift of the panorama to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, where it may be seen today in very nearly its original magnificence, in a specially constructed oval room. (The Rotunda’s architect had been Martin Euclid Thompson, whose most notable work may have been the 1822 Branch Bank at 15–1/2 Wall Street, whose full façade also adorns the American Wing of the Met.)

Vanderlyn’s Rotunda structure improbably survived, first as a naturalization office, then as a marine court of sessions; after the Great Fire of December 1835 that destroyed much of lower Manhattan, it served as the city’s post office. For two years in the 1840s it became once again an art gallery, and then was refitted as city office space in 1848. When it was demolished in 1870, there were few who recalled Vanderlyn’s panorama. A generation later there were few who recalled Vanderlyn; at a May 27, 1892 auction in Kingston, his painting of George Washington, now on display at Senate House, was knocked down at five dollars.

Why does this obstinate artist seem more significant today than he did a century ago? Not because he was a formidable painter, though he was; not because he withered sadly, though he did. Not for the carny-barker wink with which he exhibited Ariadne, nor the optimism and ambition with which he created the Rotunda. I think it is because his struggles and triumphs epitomize the ever swirling waltz of art and money, which he mastered no better than we. I like to imagine that when the money was gone, and life very nearly so, he saw what truly endures.

SIDEBAR: A MODEST PROPOSAL

In 1842 an indifferent engraving of Vanderlyn’s Marius, by Stephen Alonzo Schoff, was a gift to subscribers of the Apollo Association, an entrepreneurial venture on behalf of American artists that, unlike the Rotunda, succeeded wildly. As Russell Lynes wrote in The Tastemakers:

The scheme was this: People were invited to pay $5 for an annual subscription to the Apollo Association. Each subscriber would then receive “a large and costly Original Engraving from an American painting.” He would also receive a ticket with a number on it which would entitle him to a long shot at one of a number of genuine, hand-painted pictures by American artists in an annual lottery to be held by the Association….

In 1844 the Apollo Association changed its name to the American Art-Union, and its membership rose to more than 2,000. In 1848 it distributed more than 450 prize paintings, for which the Art-Union had paid the artists $40,907. When Thomas Cole’s painting Youth was chosen for the gift engraving (it was part of the series called “The Voyage of Life”) and was also one of the grand prizes, the number of subscribers jumped to 18,960. The stimulus to American art and artists was overwhelming … but the courts struck the Art-Union down for violating the anti-lottery laws, and by 1851 it was dead.

Now that anti-lottery laws are themselves dead, with the states themselves as the proprietors and principal beneficiaries, isn’t it time to revive this idea?

Vanderlyn the Artist was originally published in Our Game on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Friend Adam Bernbak wrote to me this morning: “I’m writing today regarding a few questions that continue to come up after my successful exhibit last year in Durham, NC:

The Rise Of The Baseball Card

“Several folks have come up to me seeking clarification on the origins of the term “bullpen” — one they claim to be related to advertisements for Bull Durham tobacco found on the vicinity of warm-up areas, be they down the lines or behind the fences. Ever since I was little I have heard this, as well as myriad of other stories told as the official origin of the term, but have always believed, and continue to believe, that there is no one origin (though I tend to side with the ‘bulls to the slaughter’ idea!) as much as an evolution.

“If you have a moment, can you weigh in with either your thoughts, or a satisfactory answer for these folks?”

I replied:

“This linkage of Bull Durham advertising to the advent of the term bullpen is hoary but wrong.

“I wrote in The Relief Pitcher (1979):”

The bullpen is a development of the early 1900s. (Prior to 1891, as noted, a reliever came in from a position on the field.) The term bull­pen is persistently and mistakenly said to derive from the Bull Durham tobacco signs (“Hit this sign and win $50”) that adorned outfield fences in the days before World War I. Relief pitchers would warm up beneath these signs and behind the section of the outfield roped off for standing-room-only overflow patrons — thus, goes the argument, the name bullpen. If the sign had promoted Camel cigarettes or Murads or Lady Fatimas, would the term bull­pen still have been used?

Yes. As baseball historian Lee Allen pointed out, the Bull Durham sign was not in evidence at major-league parks until 1909, while the term bullpen, signifying the foul areas in back of first and third bases, was in use as early as 1877. On May 4 of that year, the Cincinnati Enquirer frowned on the practice some clubs fol­lowed of admitting latecomers to the park for less than the league’s standard admission of fifty cents — “for ten cents or three for a quar­ter, herding them in like bulls within a rope area in foul territory, adjoining the outfield.”

This simile no doubt has its basis in two earlier usages of the word bullpen — as a prison enclosure, primarily an open-air improvised demarcation; and as a “schoolboys’ ball game, played by two groups, one group outlining the sides of a square enclosure, called the bullpen, within which are the opposing players” (The Oxford English Dictionary). The ball game, popular on the Ohio–Indiana–Kentucky frontier of the 1850s, is first men­tioned in print in Edward Eggleston’s homespun classic The Hoosier Schoolmaster (1871): “He could not throw well enough to make his mark in that famous Western game of bull-pen.” Both senses of the word — the prison enclosure and the ball game — imply enforced occupancy in the bullpen, which reflects the status of the substitute pitcher in the pre-relief era.

The Bullpen and Bull Durham was originally published in Our Game on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

A story from long ago

How did baseball begin? I wrestled with that question for decades, ultimately publishing Baseball in the Garden of Eden in 2011. But along the way I made many tentative forays into this subject, which grips me still. Much of my focus has been on who might have been an (if surely not the) innovator. This story is about the where.

WHEN I FIRST PONDERED what the subject of my keynote speech at the 2006 NINE conference might be, I came up with “Present at the Creation: Baseball’s Pioneering Clubs, 1830–50.” That’s what attendees saw in their programs. I had intended to talk about five clubs that made the game grow along certain lines, along with three individuals whose vast contributions remain largely uncredited: William Rufus Wheaton, Daniel Lucius Adams, and Lewis F. Wadsworth. These five clubs were to have been the Olympics of Philadelphia, whose history and whose game are so little understood; and four clubs from New York — the Gotham, also known as the Washington for their primacy among New York ball clubs; the New York Base Ball Club, whose membership was for some time in the 1830s and ’40s identical with that of the Gotham; the Eagle, which formed as a ball-playing club in 1840 but like the Gotham did not adopt baseball for several years; and of course the Knickerbocker, who have received too much credit for a hundred years now.

Yes, that’s the talk I was going to deliver. In the days prior to the mid-March event, however, I decided on another path.

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,

And sorry I could not travel both

And be one traveler, long I stood

And looked down one as far as I could

To where it bent in the undergrowth.

These roads are named, in current histories, the New York Game and the Massachusetts Game, but that nomenclature simplifies much and explains little.

AN ORGANIZED AMERICAN GAME that we have reason to call baseball starts in several places, more at less at once. This evening I will not talk about Pittsfield, Massachusetts, with which I have come to be associated for my uncovering of its 1791 bylaw, the unique feature of which is its mention of baseball by that name, set in the context of different ball games such as cricket and wicket. I have come to see four other signposts as better guides to telling the tale of how baseball came to be: Baltimore; Philadelphia; New York; and a cluster of towns in central Massachusetts that includes Grafton, Upton, and Medway.

Historians have credited the Knickerbockers with the invention of baseball for these reasons: first, they were organized as a ball club; second, they created a written constitution and rules for play; third, they devised the important innovation of foul territory; and fourth, they eliminated the practice of retiring a runner by plugging him with the ball between bases. As to ninety feet, nine men, and nine innings, the accomplishments engraved on his baseball Hall of Fame plaque, forget about them — it is clear now that Alexander Cartwright’s Knickerbockers of 1845 originated none of these “modern” features. I stripped the brevets from Cartwright’s shoulders in a speech at the Smithsonian in July 2005, when I said:

The Knickerbocker game during Cartwright’s tenure (he departed for the Gold Rush early in 1849) was almost never played with nine men, but instead as few as seven or as many as eleven; the number of innings was unspecified; the length of the baselines was imprecise. Sometimes referred to as an engineer even though he was a bank teller and then a book seller, Cartwright’s “scientific mind” was further credited for laying out the game on a diamond rather than a square….

Cartwright did not play in the “first match game” by Knickerbocker rules, June 19, 1846, which the Knicks lost to the fuzzy aggregation known as the New York Base Ball Club (NYBBC) by a score of 23–1. As early as 1889, a writer for the New York Mercury had observed the irony that baseball’s “first team” had no trouble in finding a rival nine that was experienced enough to give it a thrashing.

To get us started on our whistle-stop journey of four locales without recapitulating all the revisionist notions about baseball’s origin, let me declare what I believe to be the essence of baseball: a bat; a ball that is pitched or thrown to the bat; two sides alternating innings; multiple safe havens, whether bases or stones or stakes; and a round circuit of the havens that scores a run. One might object that my definition embraces not only the New York Game that survives, but also the Massachusetts Game of round ball, which does not; Four Old Cat, very nearly extinct except in some rural parts; and rounders, which David Block, in Baseball Before We Knew It, has shown to be a rather late Western England synonym for a game that had earlier been called baseball.

Henry Chadwick declared in the Beadle Guide of 1860 that baseball began with a game he knew as rounders, which he had played as a boy before coming to these shores from England in 1837. He would stick to this story until his death, irritating America Firsters Albert Spalding and John M. Ward. On the other hand, Father Chadwick also wrote on several occasions that the game might be fairly said to have begun with the Knickerbockers in 1845, though he acknowledged that while they had played baseball at Madison Square and then Murray Hill since about 1842, they were surely not the first baseball club.

Sometimes Chadwick would opine further that baseball did not truly take shape until 1857, when New York area baseball clubs met in conclave to conform the rules of play. And he also declared, on the fiftieth anniversary of the Olympic Ball Club of Philadelphia in 1883, that this body of town-ball players was unquestionably the first base-ball club, a belief he would repeat twenty years later — just prior to the formation of the Mills Commission to separate out all the competing claims to baseball paternity, especially those of America and England.

Over the past century the Mills Commission, comprised of venerable celebrities such as Al Reach and George Wright and chaired by Abraham G. Mills, has been routinely excoriated for having expended little effort and unearthing no real evidence before delivering its surprising verdict on December 30, 1907, that Albert Spalding, with the aid of Abner Graves, was to have his way and anoint Abner Doubleday as the father of baseball. With publication of the Mills Commission conclusions in the 1908 Spalding Guide the battle between Chadwick and Spalding was over. Vanquished, and with precisely one month to live, Chadwick wrote to Mills on March 20.

My Dear Mr Mills

I read your decision in the case of Chadwick Vs Spalding, contained in Spalding’s Guide, just out today, with great interest, and I want to say to you that it is a masterly piece of special pleading, which lets my dear old friend Albert escape a bad defeat.

I notice that the italicised paragraph which closes your dictum in the case, dates your strongest witness’s evidence at 1839, whereas it is well known that the old Philadelphia Town Ball Club played under the “rounders rule” in “Town Ball” in 1831, eight years earlier. How about that? I was so sure of my case that I failed to present more detailed evidence. The fact is, the whole matter was a Joke, between Albert and my self, for the fun of the thing.

As for the Judges Reach and Wright, “They Mean well but they don’t know.”

Some day or other, in the near future, I’ll drop in on you and talk it over.

Chadwick and Mills never had that chat. For this knowledgeable crowd I need not go into the machinations that led to Abner Doubleday’s being elevated to the position of baseball’s Edison. But what has become clear only recently — since 1999, when the Commission’s papers, long thought to have burned up in the American Sports Publishing Company fire of July 5, 1913, miraculously turned up intact — was that Mills and his factotum, James A. Sullivan, had in fact done rather a lot of work. Spreading their net wide, they had drawn forth amazingly clearheaded reminiscences by octogenarian ballplayers and scribes, and Sullivan’s raw, unedited files offer many treasures not present in the summaries which scholars have previously accessed. Indeed, Mills and Sullivan, not at all the lackeys they had been made out to be, digested the Doubleday concoction with so much distaste that they continued their search for better evidence even after the Commission’s mandate ended on December 31, 1907.

LET’S START IN BALTIMORE and work our way north. In September 1905 the Commission learned from John W. Oliver, ninety-year-old editor of the Yonkers Statesman, of baseball play in Baltimore in about 1825. His family had arrived there from England in about 1819. Oliver’s friend and interviewer C.H. McDonald reported:

He remembers very distinctly having played the game of Base Ball when a boy, both before and after becoming an apprentice. He states that his earliest recollection of the playing of the game was when he was about ten years of age, and at that time the game was played in this manner: The batter held the ball in one hand and a flat stick in the other, tossed the ball into the air and hit on the return, and then ran to either one, two, or three bases depending on the number of boys playing the game. If the ball was caught on the fly or the batter hit with the ball while running the bases, he was out. These bases, so called, at that time, were either stones or pieces of sod was removed [sic], or bare places where grass was scraped off. He remembers seeing the game played frequently while an apprentice boy, but always in this manner, never with a pitcher or a catcher, but sometimes with sides…. [Oliver is quoted thus:] “I never saw the game played with stakes or poles used for bases instead of stones or sods. Never heard of a game of Rounders. One Old Cat, Two Old Cat, Three Old Cat have seen played, but never have taken part in it myself.” To my question as to what name this base game that he played was called, he said he remembered distinctly that it was known only as BASE BALL. He further stated that he never saw men play ball until he had been in New York a few years….” [He moved to New York from Baltimore in 1835.]

To recap this rich recollection: what we have here is a game called baseball that might or might not have sides, had no pitcher or thrower, and was played only by children. This is the sort of game that had been played by English boys and girls for well over a century before. Yet upon coming to New York in the late 1830s, Oliver notes that he saw men playing ball. I know who these men might have been, but let’s go next to Philadelphia.

We know from such standard works as Charles A. Peverelly’s Book of American Pastimes (1866) the basic story of that city’s Olympic Ball Club. Although ball of varying sorts had been played in Philadelphia long before the Olympics — the University of Pennsylvania had banned ball play near open windows in 1784 (interesting how the earliest mentions of ball play in America tend to come in the form of prohibitions!). Recently I came upon a provocative mention of ball play in Philadelphia in 1829. In “A Word Fitly Spoken,” published in The American Sunday School Magazine of January 1830, the anonymous writer observes:

There is, in the city of Philadelphia, an asylum for children who are presented to the guardians or overseers of the poor, as objects of public charity. Without stopping to admire and approve the humane and wise provision which keeps them from much evil example and influence, and gives them that instruction which is profitable for all things, even in this world, — our present object is, to state a case of much interest, which recently occurred.

Early on a Sabbath afternoon during the summer [of 1829], the matron of this asylum was pained to find a company of eighteen men, (rope-makers,) at a game of ball, in an enclosure near the building, and in view of the children. Knowing the power of such an example, she went to them — requested them to desist a moment, till they should hear what she had to say…. She then civilly requested them to leave their sport for a while, and go with her to the asylum, assuring them that what they would see, would be new to them, and perhaps interesting After a short consultation, they determined to follow her; and leaving their hats and coats behind, they all followed her to the house.

Chastened to see how faithfully the children observed the Sabbath, the eighteen ball players — “one of them was considerably advanced, (supposed 45 or 55 years old,) and the youngest was about 17” — returned to the field, “took their hats and coats in the most orderly manner, and returned home.”

Actually, my guess is that they left the Orphan Asylum, which still stands at North 18th and Race Streets, went to the Delaware River, and caught the horse ferry to Camden, there to play ball in peace.

At least that is how Philadelphia’s story of organized town ball begins: with some young men taking the ferry across the Delaware to play ball at an open field off Market Street in Camden, New Jersey. The first occasion we know of for certain was the Fourth of July, 1831, as town ball derived its name from the communal ball play attached to holidays and feast days. On that first day, according to Peverelly, “there were but four players, and the game was ‘Cat Ball,’ or what is called in some parts of New England, ‘Two Old Cat.’ The players, who were then over twenty-five years old, told some of their younger friends of the pleasure and advantage they found in resuming their boyish sports, and invited them to join and make up a number large enough for a game of Town Ball.” The precise location of the Olympics’ field may now, like that of the asylum ball grounds, be revealed: 422 Market Street, the site of an Episcopal Church still standing at the location where its cornerstone was laid in 1830. This event pushed the ball players a bit to the north.

These Olympics did not return to play in Philadelphia, perhaps because of its blue laws, until 1857, and did not convert from town ball to base ball until three years after that. But they adopted a constitution in the early 1830s (one survives in printed form from 1838), established bylaws for the conduct of their members and, in an advance from the game that John Oliver played in Baltimore in 1825, they permitted no members younger than twenty-one years of age.

In 1883 the club observed its fiftieth anniversary, and some of the original members attended the banquet. The Police Gazette noted that these men had “played baseball when it was in its extreme infancy, in the good old days when the players had to make their own bats and balls, and the runner was put out by hitting him with the ball. In those days five stakes were driven into the ground, and the batsman had to make a circuit of these stakes before a run could be scored.” In 1904 Chadwick, embroiled in his argument with Spalding, reminded his readers that the Olympics’ “old game of ‘town ball’ was simply an American edition of the English game of rounders … in vogue in the New England states as early as 1830.”

Recapping the confusing claims, Philadelphia’s version of town ball employed four bases plus a striker’s point, resembled the New England Game of round ball, and could be stripped down to cat ball when not enough players were present to play town ball. The Philadelphia Game was regarded as baseball of an infant sort, yet it was “simply … rounders,” which in England was another name for baseball. Dizzying.

Let’s press on to Gotham.

IN 1858 A PHILADELPHIA CORRESPONDENT named “Excelsior” wrote to the Clipper about town ball, calling it “comparatively unknown in New York.” Three old cat — with its three bases plus a striker’s point and its eight players to the side — was the game that New Yorkers of the 1820s termed baseball and played at places evocatively named “retreats” or “gardens.” New York’s version of baseball included the “old-fashioned way” of throwing the ball to the batter and at the runner.

In a letter to William S. Cogswell dated January 10, 1905, Abraham G. Mills, just beginning to accumulate data for his Commission’s report, wrote:

Among the vivid recollections of my early life at Union Hall Academy [in Jamaica, Long Island] is a game of ball in which I played, where the boys of the side at bat were put out by being hit with the ball. You made a splendid shot at me at quite a long distance, and put me out fairly and squarely while [I was] running from second base to home. My recollection is that we had a first base near the batsman’s position; the second base was a tree at some distance, and the third base was the home base, also near the batsman’s position. This … at least, as I remember it, we played at Union Hall Academy for some years.

To which Cogswell replied on January 19:

My recollection of the game of base ball as we played for years at Union Hall, say from 1849 to 1856, is quite clear. You are quite right about the three bases, their location and the third base being home. When there were few players there was a rule against screwing, i.e., making strikes that now would be called “foul.” We used flat bats, and it was considered quite an art to be able to “screw” well, as that sent the ball away from the bases.

Cogswell also supplied an interesting section on the game’s rules: a batsman is out if the ball is caught on the fly or the bound; the ball must strike the runner or touch him between bases to record an out; all must be retired before the side is out; and three home runs by the last batter would restore the side to the bat.

This New York Game of baseball had already been modified for adult players in the 1830s. William Rufus Wheaton, a pioneer member of the Gothams and the Knicks who, like Cartwright, went west in the Gold Rush and stayed there, recalled in the San Francisco Examiner in 1887:

Three-cornered cat was a boy’s game, and did well enough for slight youngsters, but it was a dangerous game for powerful men, because the ball was thrown to put out a man between bases, and it had to hit the runner to put him out….

We had to have a good outdoor game, and as the games then in vogue didn’t suit us we decided to remodel three-cornered cat and make a new game. We first organized what we called the Gotham Baseball Club. This was the first ball organization in the United States, and it was completed in 1837…. [I invite the reader to reflect back at this point upon the games that the apprentice John Oliver might have witnessed, and on the organization of the Olympic Ball Club in 1833.] The first step we took in making baseball was to abolish the rule of throwing the ball at the runner and order that it should be thrown to the baseman instead, who had to touch the runner with it before he reached the base…. After the Gotham club had been in existence a few months it was found necessary to reduce the rules of the new game to writing. This work fell to my hands, and the code I then formulated is substantially that in use to-day.

The new game quickly became very popular with New Yorkers, and the numbers of the club soon swelled beyond the fastidious notions of some of us, and we decided to withdraw and found a new organization, which we called the Knickerbocker….

Wheaton later served on the rules committee of the Knickerbocker Club, with William H. Tucker and Duncan F. Curry … and not Cartwright.

MEANWHILE IN CENTRAL MASSACHUSETTS, round ball was the game of choice, and it bore profound similarities to the Philadelphia Game and its cat-ball alternatives. Henry Sargent, who is now emerging as a great voice for the old ball game, wrote frequently to the Mills Commission of 1905. From one of his letters:

Four Old Cat and Three Old Cat were as well known to Massachusetts boys as round ball. I knew both games in 1862 and Mr. Stoddard [of the Upton Excelsiors] tells me that his father knew them and played them between 1800 and 1820. They bore about the same relation to round ball that “scrub” does to baseball now. The boys got together when there was leisure for any game and if there were enough to make up a game — even if they were 2 or 3 short of the regulation 14 on a side — they played round-ball. If there were not more than a dozen all told, they contented themselves with four old cat, or with three old cat if there were still less players…. The main thing to be remembered is that 4 + 3 old cat seem to be co-eval with Massachusetts round-ball + were considered a modification of round ball for a less number of players than the regular game required….

In another such letter Sargent added:

… If there is real interest in the beginning of baseball, you can learn more of its predecessor round-ball by a day or two spent in Grafton and Upton than in any other way. The game attained its extreme development of skill in this locality, and several of the players, who were celebrated 50 years ago [i.e., 1855], are living still. I do not know what part, if any, round-ball had in the birth of base-ball. From the arrangement of the bases it would seem that there was some connection. The square of roundball was turned to make the baseball diamond, and home was made the batter’s stand.

And finally Sargent declared to the Mills Commission, with evident irritation:

I have stated this to you before. I repeat it now, because I find that every one who remembers round-ball at all, agrees with me. So if round ball is the English rounders, and the difference between Mr. Chadwick and Mr. Spaulding is whether base-ball sprung from rounders or from four old cat, there is no difference between them. They are talking about the same thing, only they do not know it.

Echoing Mickey Mantle’s comment on a Casey Stengel oration, I agree with everything he said.

Two Roads Diverged was originally published in Our Game on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Advice for the perplexed, from baseball’s patron saint

THINK OF Abner Doubleday in Heaven as a historical explainer, or, when addressing current matters, maybe just a Magic 8-Ball. Questions for Abner may be addressed to his pearly-gate keeper via Twitter: @thorn_john.

Dear Abner,
What is made in Heaven of the Black Sox who threw the 1919 World Series? Are all the “eight men out” up there?
Holds a Brief for Buck Weaver

Dear Brief Holder,
Oh, they were guilty enough to warrant their punishment, even though ballplayers had been throwing games left and right for decades. The 1919 World Series wasn’t even the first in which gamblers took a hand, nor was it the second. Have another look at 1903 and 1914 especially.

The principal gripe of men like Buck Weaver and Fred McMullin may have been that they were left holding the bag without getting any of the swag. The other six pocketed some money, if not all that was promised, so what is there left to say, except extenuating circumstances … Shoeless Joe’s naïveté and remorse, Eddie Cicotte’s backlash against owner Comiskey’s penury.

Evidently there IS crying in baseball, and it has appeared to work for six of the eight Black Sox, who are up here with me (you may guess which ones are not), as is Charlie Comiskey, who had a Hobson’s Choice to make when he learned of the Fix. Judge Landis, on the other hand, is nowhere to be seen.

Yours in baseball,

Abner Doubleday

Here, via departed friend and baseball expert Gene Carney, who wrote these words to your secretary one year before he joined Abner in Heaven:

Abner says: “Oh, they were guilty enough to warrant their punishment, even though ballplayers had been throwing games left and right for decades. The 1919 World Series wasn’t even the first in which gamblers took a hand, nor was it the second. Have another look at 1903 and 1914 especially.”

Only objection I have here is that the White Sox octet of 1919 were certainly not equally guilty, and I doubt that they all did their darndest in every game to toss the Series to Cincinnati. I think several of them played the Series to win, maybe more than several. We don’t know more about this, because the Powers That Were in baseball at the time — notably Ban Johnson & Charles Comiskey — did. But they covered up the bribery, instead of investigating ASAP — maybe even before the Series began.

Abner says: “The principal gripe of men like Buck Weaver and Fred McMullin may have been that they were left holding the bag without getting any of the swag. The other six pocketed some money, if not all that was promised, so what is there left say, except extenuating circumstances … Shoeless Joe’s naïveté and remorse, Eddie Cicotte’s backlash against owner Comiskey’s penury.”

Weaver & McMullin never complained that they had not profited, their main beef was that they were banished. I’m not sure what the evidence is for Gandil & Risberg getting any money. I don’t think Cicotte was getting even with Comiskey, that’s Asinof’s theory. I think the “new” documents in Chicago [ https://goo.gl/mzLyy6] will show Cicotte was quite satisfied with Commy’s treatment.

Abner says: “Evidently there IS crying in baseball, and it has appeared to work for six of the eight Black Sox, who are up here with me (you may guess which ones are not), as is Charlie Comiskey, who had a Hobson’s Choice to make when he learned of the Fix. Judge Landis, on the other hand, is nowhere to be found.”

Commy’s there?

Whatever these guys did in 1919, I’d be very much surprised if it prevented them from entering the pearly gates. Cooperstown, yes, but their standards are higher.

Gene

Dear Abner was originally published in Our Game on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

In baseball it goes back, back, back.

THE STAR SPANGLED BANNER has been our national anthem only since 1931, but its ties to baseball go back, back, back … all the way to 1862. There appears to be no rule governing the playing or observance of the song at the ballpark … only custom. Here are a few background bits.

While the lyrics (to be sung to the tune of the warhorse drinking song “To Anacreon in Heaven”) were first published in broadside form, the first journal version was in The Analectic (November 1814), edited by Washington Irving. A copy came up at auction recently; I was an underbidder, alas.

***

To demonstrate that our national anthem (like our national pastime) has its origins in England, now hear this:

***

At the opening game in William Cammeyer’s Union Grounds park in Brooklyn, a former skating grounds refashioned for baseball, on May 15, 1862 — as the nation was divided by the Civil War — a band boomed out “The Star-Spangled Banner.” The first major-league Opening Day at which SSB was played took place in Philly on April 22, 1897.

These were the first opening day uses of the song, which did not become the national anthem until 1931.

The song was played at the seventh-inning break of the opening game of the 1918 World Series, when World War I was on everyone’s mind, but not until WWII was it played before every game. Playing the anthem before regular-season games was not universal in baseball till 1942 but some clubs had started the practice in 1941, before the U.S. entry into the War.

The Star Spangled Banner was originally published in Our Game on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

The Famous Veteran, A. J. Reach, Tells Who Made the First Ball Ever Used in to the National Game

Spotted this the other day in Sporting Life, March 13, 1909. Al Reach (1840–1928) received a request for his reminiscences about baseballs of the earliest days, and as a player with the Brooklyn Eckfords since 1861, he ought to know. He was a star with the Eckfords, and in 1865 became the first openly paid professional when the Philadelphia Athletics bid for his services. He continued to play second base with the A’s through 1875, the last year of the professional; National Association. For my money, he is the most important figure in the history of the game who is somehow not in the Baseball Hall of Fame.

The famous old-time player, A. J. Reach, now president of the A. J. Reach Company, the great base ball and sporting goods manufacturing concern, was recently queried by a California customer as to the original balls used in the infancy of base ball. Here is Mr. Reach’s answer, which possesses a certain historical interest and value:

Philadelphia, Pa., February 2. My dear Mr. Bekeart: Replying to your favor of the 19th ult. regarding base balls, etc., you say Mr. Lowry would like to have, will give you some thoughts from memory. As to the first base balls, my recollection of them dates from about 1855 or ’56. The most popular ball in those days was the Ross ball; Harvey Ross, the maker, was a member of the Atlantic Base Ball Club, of Brooklyn, and a sail-maker by trade; his home was on Park Avenue, where he made the balls. John Van Horn was a member of the Union Club, of Morrisania, New York; he had a little boot and shoe store on Second Avenue, New York City. These two makers turned out the best base balls for some years, and they were used In nearly all of the match games that were played up to the early ’70s. E. I. Horsman, of Brooklyn, New York, also made balls in the early ’60s for the market, not having the success, however, of the Ross and Van Horn balls among the experts of that day.

The popular clubs of those days, as I remember, were the Gotham, Eagles, Empire, Knickerbocker, Mutual and Union of New York City, most of them playing at the Elysian Fields, Hoboken; the Atlantic, Excelsior, Eckfords, Putnam and Continental were all of Brooklyn. These mentioned are the oldest contesting clubs that I remember, having no date at hand at present.

As I look back to those early days of our national game and remember the great interest displayed then by the crowds on match days in all the movements of the players, I do not wonder at its growth, and that it now takes a field in those same cities with a capacity to take care of the crowds of from twenty-five to forty thousand people, and they will even grow from these figures. Then the playing field was a pretty sight, being fully two-thirds surrounded by carriages and wagons filled with people, and inside of the line of carriages was the crowd sitting and standing until they almost encircled the playing field. I am referring back to the days when no entrance fee was charged, so while there was no money there was no lack of interest and lots of excitement when the strongest clubs got together.

With best wishes, I am, yours truly, A. J. REACH.

Ancient Base Balls was originally published in Our Game on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Action shots of early baseball are scarce and before 1884 are typically posed, as in pregame ceremonies, not instantaneous. Recently I came across a midgame photo identified as being taken in Detroit in 1887 and I was delighted to make it the header my Facebook page, along with a “scraps” color litho of Hall of Fame first baseman Dan Brouthers, as my profile avatar. (I change both quite often, so by the time you read this they may have been replaced, so I provide them herein.) But the point of this story is not the evolution of action shots — though it is a fine topic, and I may tackle it before long — but the serendipitous route by which I came to view the wonderful baseball collections of the Detroit Historical Society (https://goo.gl/Qqq370). Many of these holdings were new to me, and I’d like to ramble on a bit about them.

Here’s the “July 4, 1887” action shot from Detroit’s Recreation Park that I displayed on Facebook, which was credited to the Detroit News:

That is a plausible date, but so is 1886, which is the stated date of several photographs seemingly taken on the same day and in the possession of the Detroit Historical Society. Some different angles reveal details not visible in the image above. With its permission, I post a couple of the Society’s watermarked images below, all of them acquired in 1944.

How great are these images? The Garland sign is splendid, but so is that for Hudson’s Department Store, the great Midwestern chain whose flagship store long stood at Woodward and Farmer Streets. I could offer more fresh, unfamiliar images from the Detroit Historical Society, but why don’t you look for yourselves (https://detroithistorical.org)? Baseball is not their only gold mine.

Below, as the pièce de résistance, is a poster unique to the DHS and unknown to me until last week. An utterly glorious color poster of the 1887 Detroit Baseball Club, including sixteen portrait drawings of the players and manager, it was produced by the Detroit Lithographic Company before the 1887 season, in which the Wolverines would emerge as National League champions and, following a World Series against the St. Louis Browns of the rival American Association, champions of the world.

The Detroit Historical Society purchased this poster in 1956 from a gentleman named Andrew Ness for a price of $45. Today it would be worth at least a thousand times more; no other example, to my knowledge, has survived.

I am grateful to Nathan Kelber, Manager of Digital Projects at the Detroit Historical Society, for his help in displaying these images to readers of Our Game.

Baseball Treasures of the Detroit Historical Society was originally published in Our Game on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Not called up from the minors last week, but unearthed from the obscurity of 1884 by baseball’s greatest detective

In an email of May 23 sent to Pete Palmer and myself, baseball historian and sleuth extraordinaire Peter Morris wrote: “Gentlemen, I have recently determined that part of the record credited to Taylor Shafer with Altoona in 1884 actually belongs to a different player, whose real name was Frank Schiffhauer, but who used Schaffer as a baseball name.” Palmer concurred, replying: “Good work. ICI was fairly accurate, but they did mess up on a few players with similar names…. I see by my player file, that 1884 UA Alt-KC-Balt [statistics] were originally credited to Frank Shaffer (no bio info) by S.C. Thompson.” When Morris shared with me the step-by-step process underlying his discovery, I suggested that readers of Our Game would definitely be interested. Here is his story:

The other day, the counter of Major League Baseball players on the front page of Baseball-Reference.com clicked past the 19,000 mark — quite an imposing number, especially if viewed without the benefit of context. Yet in many ways, this group remains an extraordinarily small and exclusive one. With Major League Baseball having been around for almost 150 years, on average only 129 new members per year have made the cut.

For most of that time, baseball stood preeminent as the national pastime, meaning that it was the rare American boy who didn’t dream of being a big league ballplayer. To be sure, in recent years other sports have captured the imagination of some of those youngsters. But with the U.S. population exceeding 300 million and the pool of hopefuls now encompassing much of the world, those 129 successful aspirants per year begins to look like a very small number indeed.

Another way to gain perspective is by considering the lengths to which candidates are willing to go to gain admission. Of all the tykes who go out for Little League or the equivalent, just a select few are ever offered a professional baseball contract, and only a small minority of that select group spend even a day as a big leaguer. Yet many continue to ride the buses from one minor league town to another for years in hopes that one day their number will be called. The crop of players who joined the select circle this year includes more than a few noteworthy examples.

Thirty-two-year-old Austin Bibens-Dirkx, for instance, made his debut with the Rangers on May 17 after twelve minor league seasons during which he twice had to restart his career in an independent league. Chris Bostick joined the select circle on May 8 although he was the 1,336th player selected in the 2011 MLB Draft. Dovydas Neverauskas and Gift Ngoepe also gained admission this year despite hailing from the baseball hotbeds of, respectively, Vilnius, Lithuania, and Polokwane, South Africa. And the name of jeweler Frank Schiffhauer was added to the roll seventy-eight years after he died in Detroit. Wait, what? Settle in and pull up a chair, for the twists and turns of this saga are going to take a bit of time to recount.

Nineteenth-century game accounts typically referred to players only by their surnames except when two teammates bore the same last name. As a result, when the first baseball encyclopedias were published in the 1950s, assigning first names to many of the earliest major leaguers was no easy task and many gaps or incorrect information resulted. Over the next few decades, a long list of diligent researchers and encyclopedia compilers, including Lee Allen, Pete Palmer, David Neft, Tom Shea, Joe Simenic, Bill Haber, John Thorn, Bob McConnell, and Richard Malatzky, searched through old newspapers, censuses, city directories, reserve lists, and other primary sources to gradually whittle the list of mystery players down to a more manageable size. While Allen was the Baseball Hall of Fame’s historian (1959–1969), these efforts were centered in Cooperstown, which still assigns an individual player file to each of the 19,000 major leaguers. Eventually, however, the torch was passed to the Society for American Baseball Research’s Biographical Committee, which has been ably chaired since 1989 by Bill Carle. It is this committee that supplies birth and death and other biographical information to such invaluable on-line resources as Baseball-Reference.com and Retrosheet.org.

In recent years, research of this nature has been made much easier by the digitization of many of the sources that earlier generations had had to tediously thumb their way through. A series of clicks can be all it takes before an Internet browser reveals the solution to a longstanding mystery. In most cases the new information supplements what was previously known, but sometimes it corrects an earlier mistake, and once in a long while it uncovers a previously unknown major leaguer whose record had been buried inside that of another player. That was what happened recently as a result of my research on a player with the surname of Shaffer who in 1884 had played for three teams — Altoona, Kansas City, and Baltimore — in an upstart major league called the Union Association.

In one of the earliest encyclopedias, this player had been identified as Frank Shaffer. But years of digging by many determined baseball detectives failed to turn up anything about him except for a few tantalizing clues that seemingly led nowhere — one note said he hailed from Detroit and another that he was from Cincinnati, but no strong candidate could be identified in either city. Then in 2001, researcher Harold Dellinger came across new information showing that the Kansas City part of the record in fact belonged to a player named Taylor Shafer. When more investigation proved that Taylor Shafer had also played for Altoona and Baltimore, Frank Shaffer’s name was removed from the list of major leaguers.

Recently, however, I happened on a couple of notes that put that conclusion in doubt, so I decided to revisit the question. Taylor Shafer was credited with playing nineteen games for Altoona between April 24 and May 30, but before long I had overwhelming evidence that he did not join the team until the first week of May. A note in the Detroit Free Press on March 6 reported that local players Frank Shaffer and Jerry Moore had signed with Altoona, and a follow-up piece on April 1 reaffirmed that the Altoona player was a Detroiter. A weekly sporting periodical called Sporting Life had a correspondent who covered the Altoona team and after the February 13 issue stated that “Frank Shaffer of Detroit” would play for Altoona; there were additional references on February 27 and March 13 that also gave the player’s first name as Frank. Then in the May 14 issue, in a column dated May 7, Frank Shaffer’s release was announced. A note published that same day in the Missouri Republican confirmed that “George Shaffer’s [sic] brother [Taylor] has joined the Altoona nine. … The Altoonas have released Cleary Cross … [and] Shaffer, a Cincinnati [sic] player.” So Frank Shaffer had to have played at least five games for Altoona before he was released to make room for the unrelated Taylor Shafer, a coincidence that had denied him his rightful place in the record books. When I reported all of this information to Bill Carle, he agreed that a change was in order.

Wanting to make sure I had checked every available source, I kept digging and found that the 1884 Altoona city directory had a listing for Frank Shaffer, occupation ball player, boarding at the Central Hotel along with Moore and several other Altoona players. Better still, on February 7 the Altoona Tribune published a profile that read as follows: “Frank Schaffer [sic], who will play on third base, comes from the Detroit [sic], though he first played with [Germany] Smith in the Jenning’s [sic] of Pittsburgh. He is five feet eleven inches in length [sic] and weighs 160. He is a diamond setter by trade.” At last, I had some legitimate clues that might make it possible to identify this mystery player!

Turning next to the city directories, I found the name of “Frank Schafer, jeweler, A Schaub, bds [boards] 91 Farmer” in the 1883 Detroit CD. Then in the Pittsburgh city directories, I located an 1881 listing for “Frank Shaffer, jeweler,” at 231 Centre, and one for “Frank Schafer, jeweler,” two years later at the same address. Frank was nowhere to be found in 1884, but in his place was an “Adam Schaffer, saloon” at 231 Centre. So it looked as though a Frank Schafer with the same occupation as the ballplayer had moved from Pittsburgh to Detroit in 1883, just as stated in the Altoona Tribune’s sketch. Even the fact that this man was absent from the 1884 directories for both cities corresponded to the ballplayer’s appearance in that year’s Altoona directory. But could I confirm that the Detroit jeweler and the Pittsburgh jeweler were the same man?

By good fortune, the 1880 census listed a Schaffer family at 231 Centre in Pittsburgh and it included Frank, age 21, occupation jeweler. In another encouraging development, Frank was one of at least eleven children of Raymond and Theresa Schaffer. Such a large family, I figured, would be easy to trace, but in this it turned out that I was sadly mistaken. I located the family in Pittsburgh on the 1870 census — where Frank was listed as Francis Shaffer, age 9 — but they seemed to have disappeared entirely in the mid-1880s. Frank did not reappear in Detroit after the 1883 listing and his family apparently vanished from Pittsburgh.

At least I still had that 231 Centre address, so I used the search function available on several genealogical websites and found a Schiffhauer family living there in the years after the Schaffers apparently left town. I noticed immediately, however, that the first names of a lot of the Schiffhauers were matches, so I checked the census and, sure enough, the two families were one and the same! Presumably the family switched to Schaffer because they were tired of having the name Schiffhauer mispronounced and misspelled, but eventually decided to readopt the family name. Another perusal of the Detroit city directories revealed that a Frank or Francis Schiffhauer, occupation jeweler, showed up a few years after that lone listing of Frank Shaffer and stayed there for many years. All of the difficult work was now over, and before long I discovered a death certificate for a Francis X. Schiffhauer, occupation jeweler, who had been born in Pittsburgh in 1859 to Raymond and Theresa Schiffhauer and who died in 1939 at a hospital outside of Detroit.

Francis X. Schiffhauer

Born December 6, 1859 Pittsburgh

Died March 18, 1939 Eloise, Michigan

Frank Schiffhauer’s name will thus join those of Bibens-Dirkx, Bostick, Neverauskas and Ngoepe among the additions made this year to listings of the now more than 19,000 major leaguers. The membership perks he can expect will include his very own player file at the Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown and a page of his own on such websites as Baseball-Reference and Retrosheet. As for the statistics that will appear alongside his name, they will not be all that impressive. The estimable Pete Palmer disentangled Frank’s five games from those of Taylor Shafer for me, and they show only three hits in nineteen at-bats (.158), one run scored, and two errors in twelve fielding chances for an .833 fielding percentage. Becoming a member of such a select circle is, however, distinction enough to make anyone very proud.

A New Major Leaguer was originally published in Our Game on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

James Daugherty, later famous for writing and illustrating children’s books, was first in the field

Writing in 1949, James Daugherty (1889–1974) declared that modern art was nothing less than “liberating and expansive, rousing and freeing human consciousness from materialism to infinite possibilities of living, creating universal harmony, energy and renewal.” In 1913, his eyes were opened to a world of new possibilities by the landmark Armory Show and, as he later described it, Daugherty “went modern with a vengeance.” The Futurist movement in painting was born in Italy in the years before the Great War, and Daugherty’s friend Joseph Stella was its most important American pioneer. Daugherty produced, as far as I can tell, baseball’s first foray into modernist art of any sort — cubist, futurist, simultaneist, or constructivist.

In Daugherty’s Futurist-inspired works, swirling and intersecting figures were abstracted and fragmented in the nonstop movement of baseball and dancing. The painting above— “Three Base Hit,” in pen and ink and opaque watercolor on paper, first exhibited in 1917 at the Penguin Club, run by his friend Walt Kuhn, who was also an organizer of the Armory Show— resides in the collection of the Whitney Museum, where it is misidentified as a work from 1914.

The Whitney also purchased what it describes in its collection as an offset lithograph of this same image, titled, “Futurist Picture of the Opening Game, 1914.” I strongly suspect that it is an excerpt from a Sunday supplement published in various newspapers, including the New York Herald, on April 12, 1914, which predates the painting “Three Base Hit.” (An example from the Detroit Free Press of that date resides on my wall and is shown below.) Daugherty reworked his illustration after it had been published, both changing and adding forms and colors to create a more complex composition with little empty space, which had been a feature of the illustration.

The playful caption, not legible in the image below, reads:

TRANSLATION: This is not a picture of a baseball game. It is a representation of the various sensations of the onlooker. The picture whirls about, a confusion of head, arms and legs. The ball flashes across the diamond in curves that make a snake look like a curtain rod. The batter swings the stick in flashing semicircles, driving the ball like a comet over the first baseman’s reach into the field. The runners tear around the diamond in a hurricane of flying legs and arms. The ball comes skyrocketing back from the field to the third baseman’s mitt to block a famous slide. One side of the grand stand is a crazy quilt of waving hats and yelling mouths; on the other side the fans present a checkerboard of gloom — the losing bets. — J. Daugherty

New York Times art critic Hilton Kramer wrote, in 1971, that Daugherty “was one of those painters who somehow gleaned the essence of modernist principle at the trans-Atlantic distance” yet “got sidetracked in a career of illustration….” [He signed a 1925 New Yorker cover with his pseudonym “Jimmie the Ink.”]

Though he had a long, notable career as a writer and illustrator of children’s books, winning both the Newbery and Caldecott awards, he returned to his earlier manner of abstract painting — flat planes and brilliant color — with a final flourish that would last from 1953 until his death in 1974 at the age of 85.

While Daugherty seems not to have published any other baseball art, he did leave behind a sketchbook of nine pencil drawings on lined notebook paper of baseball-playing rats and frogs, which I have not seen. http://archiveswest.orbiscascade.org/ark:/80444/xv37393

Modern Art Meets Baseball was originally published in Our Game on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Not Cricket, not Baseball, but Wicket

The other day a young man named E.Jay Zarett called, from the S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications, a graduate program at Syracuse University. Looking to launch an online magazine about reenactors and reenactments, he had become “interested in the game of Wicket and its history,” and wished to learn more. He came to the right place.

“Wicket is a great topic,” I wrote to him, “and I have assembled a lot of documentary evidence about when and how it was played. I am happy to share.”

I proceeded to overwhelm him, probably, by sharing a Dropbox link to my folder on the subject … but I succeeded at least in disabusing him of the notion that George Washington played baseball, or cricket, at Valley Forge in 1778, as often is written. The game he played was wicket.

This exchange recalled for me an image of ball play at Dartmouth College in 1793 (below, with telling detail above). Some have written that this is the first depiction of cricket play in North America, but in my view it is surely wicket. I know of no earlier pictorial depiction of American bat-and-ball play of any sort. (I think we must eliminate from consideration a woodcut executed for English editions of Newbery’s Little Pretty Pocket-Book and later pirated, e.g. by Hugh Gaine [1762, of which no copy survives] or Isaiah Thomas [1787].)

When this engraving was first published in The Massachusetts Magazine in 1793, it was labeled: “A front View of Dartmouth College with the Chapel and Hall” by J. Dunham.

In the Dartmouth College Library Bulletin of November 1992, Kenneth C. Cramer wrote:

“In the April 1992 issue of the Dartmouth College Library Bulletin appeared a photograph of a drawing by George Ticknor depicting Dartmouth College in 1803. This is the second oldest known depiction of the College. The earliest known portrayal is an engraving that appeared in the Massachusetts Magazine for February 1793. The copper engraving is signed by J. Dunham, delineator and S. Hill, sculpt (the engraver). Dunham, we believe, was Josiah Dunham 1789, a preceptor at Moor’s Indian Charity School, and later editor of The Eagle or, Dartmouth Centinel, a Hanover newspaper, and The Washingtonian in Windsor, Vermont. Samuel Hill was of Boston and was active there between 1789 to 1803.…

“Quite out of the blue several years ago I received a letter from the curator at Marylebone Cricket Club (London), the recognized national authority with headquarters at Lord’s Cricket Ground. He wished to obtain a copy of the Dunham & Hill engraving for the club’s archives, believing that this engraving depicted one of the earliest views of cricket being played in the United States and former colonies. The American cricket archives at Haverford College has no picture or drawing earlier than the 1793 engraving.

“According to Lester’s A Century of Philadelphia Cricket the game was played in America as early as 1737. The first newspaper report of a match was reported in a 1751 New York newspaper. New York defeated a team of London players. In view of the fact that the C. C. Morris Cricket Library and Collection at Haverford does not have an earlier illustration of the game being played, the Dartmouth illustration that appeared in the Massachusetts Magazine is a landmark.”

Yes, but not as the earliest depiction of cricket but rather as not only the first depiction of the vanished game of wicket, but also as the first image of bat-and-ball play in North America.

Back in 2004 I obtained from Dartmouth College a nice digital print of the engraving from Massachusetts Magazine. It is quite clear that the wicket is low and wide (rather than the upright narrow wicket of cricket), that the batsman on the right is wielding the weighty wicket club with its upturned bulbous bowl, that a young man waiting to his right has a wicket club of his own, and that the batsman on the left is leaning upon a wicket club, too.

For other stories about wicket at Our Game, see https://ourgame.mlblogs.com/search?q=wicket

The First Image of Bat and Ball Play in America was originally published in Our Game on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

George Ade’s fables first appeared in The Chicago Record before publication in book form in 1899 as Fables in Slang. This book, and the many that followed, made him rich, an odd outcome for a Midwestern wordslinger who wrote about ordinary folks. He and David E. Ross were principal donors to the fund that created Purdue University’s Ross-Ade Stadium, erected in 1924 and still in use. “He wrote vividly about the middle of the country,” Luc Sante noted, “when it was up-and-coming, expectedly dowdy and unexpectedly modern — he stands right between Booth Tarkington and Ring Lardner…. The stories are fables in that smart-aleck morals are tacked on at the end; they are not in slang, exactly, but in the demotic of a century ago, when the American language began to dress for dinner.”

Ade’s Germanic capitalization of (mostly) nouns was peculiar, to say the least, and is preserved below.

Once upon a Time a Base Ball Fan lay on his Death-Bed.

He had been a Rooter from the days of Underhand Pitching.

It was simply Pie for him to tell in what year Anse began to play with the Rockfords and what Kelly’s Batting Average was the Year he sold for Ten Thousand.

If you asked him who played Center for Boston in 1886 he could tell you quick — right off the Reel. And he was a walking Directory of all the Glass Arms in the Universe.

More than once he had let drive with a Pop Bottle at the Umpire and then yelled “Robber” until his Pipes gave out. For many Summers he would come Home, one Evening after Another, with his Collar melted, and tell his Wife that the Giants made the Colts look like a lot of Colonial Dames playing Bean Bag in a Weedy Lot back of an Orphan Asylum, and they ought to put a Trained Nurse on Third, and the Dummy at Right needed an Automobile, and the New Man couldn’t jump out of a Boat and hit the Water, and the Short-Stop wouldn’t be able to pick up a Ball if it was handed to him on a Platter with Water Cress around it, and the Easy One to Third that ought to have been Sponge Cake was fielded like a One-Legged Man with St. Vitus dance trying to do the Nashville Salute.

Of course she never knew what he was Talking about, but she put up with it, Year after Year, mixing Throat Gargle for him and reading the Games to him when he was having his Eyes tested and had to wear a Green Shade.

At last he came to his Ninth Inning and there were Two Strikes called and no Balls, and his Friends knew it was All Day with him. They stood around and tried to forget that he was a Fan. His Wife wept softly and consoled herself with the Thought that possibly he would have amounted to Something if there had been no National Game. She forgave Everything and pleaded for one Final Message. His Lips moved. She leaned over and Listened. He wanted to know if there was Anything in the Morning Papers about the Condition of Bill Lange’s Knee.

Moral: There is a Specific Bacillus for every Classified Disease.

The Fable of a Base Ball Fan Who Took the Only Known Cure was originally published in Our Game on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Lively ball? Ban on spitballs? No, it was the Bambino who gave us the modern game; a lost story by stats pioneer F. C. Lane from 1921

THREE years ago home runs had declined to the lowest point, both in the number made and in the estimation of baseball fans, recorded in the past decade. “Batting science” was the watchword both of those who coached from the sidelines and those who howled from the bleachers, and the spectacular home run did not appeal.

Then came Babe Ruth, the same who is now going stronger than ever, and “overthrew the whole system of batting science” in favor of a “brand-new system of his own.” The home-run epidemic might better be called the Babe-Ruth epidemic, for the habit began with the so-called and so-much admired “Bambino.” This is the moral which F. C. Lane, one of the Baseball Magazine’s experts of the diamond, draws from the present “mad scramble for circuit clouts.” The career of Babe Ruth well illustrates the power of a dominating personality, says Mr. Lane:

Most of us plod along and seem to exert little influence on the scheme of things. But now and again a superman arises in the domain of politics or finance or science and plays havoc with kingdoms or fortunes or established theories. Such a superman in a narrow but none-the-less obvious field is Babe Ruth. The big bat-wielder might not make much impression in the fine arts or classical literature. Doubtless, Thomas Edison, applying his celebrated questionnaire test, would label Babe as “amazingly ignorant.” Nevertheless, in his own particular field Babe is a true superman.

The influence of the redoubtable slugger individual records has made a lasting impression on the records. And y this we dot refer to the individual records he has hung up, however marvelous they may be. To get a true vision of Babe’s influence on the sport he has come so thoroughly to dominate, we must search below mere surface indications. And the deeper we search the more impressive grows the evidence of Babe’s masterful presence.

The geologist in examining strata of slate or sandstone will trace the faint but unmistakable footprints of some prehistoric monster. Ten thousand centuries may have passed since that lumbering creature of a remote age left that footprint, but there it is in enduring stone for those whose eye is trained to see it. The baseball records offer to the statistician a field as interesting and extensive as the hundred varieties of rock strata are to the geologist. In those records the impressions left by individual players are indelibly recorded. Only one must have an eye to see those things and to draw from them their logical conclusions.

We shall not delve very deeply into the musty recesses of the dope. A ten-year period will suffice for our purpose. Let us trace the history of the Major-League home run for the past ten seasons and see if we can explain its variations.

Ten years ago, in the season of 1911, the two Major Leagues taken collectively made 507 home runs. The following season that number had slumped to 433. One year later the total rose a trifle (the course of an underlying tendency is never smooth). It rose temporarily, however, only to slump to still greater depths the following season. In 1915, after the passage of five years, the number of home runs hit in the Major Leagues had declined from 507 to 384. One year later saw a further decline, slight, to be sure, but a decline nevertheless. Another season yet and the home-run total had slumped to 335. The next year we notice a surprising falling off, surprising until we reflect that 1918 saw baseball eclipsed by the world-war. That season, curtailed by Secretary Baker’s historic decree, could hardly be expected to furnish its due quota of home runs or anything else pertaining to baseball. Consequently it marked the lowest level of the home-run plane, which stood at 235.

Grant that 1918 was an exceptional year. Admit that the evidence of that particular season must be viewed with suspicion. We are nevertheless confronted with the fact that for several seasons the total of home runs made in the Major circuits had steadily declined. What caused the decline?

The answer to that question seems clear enough. Baseball, year by year, had grown more scientific, more a thing of accepted rules, of set routine.

This slow evolution of the sport, says the writer, displayed itself, in batting, “in the form of the bunt, the place-hit, and other manifestations of skill.” Ty Cobb, we are told, perhaps had as much to do with this batting evolution as any one man. “Ty taught the world the supreme value of place-hitting.” But then came Babe Ruth, and now, the writer goes on, “We do say, and the records bear us out, that almost any batter that has it in him to wallop the ball is swinging from the handle of the bat with every ounce of strength that nature placed in his wrists and shoulders.” Mr. Ruth, it appears, has done more than upset the home-run record:

He has also upset the long-established order in batting circles. He has batted home runs at so dizzy a pace that he has fired the enthusiasm of the entire country. He has not only slugged his way to fame, but he has got everybody else doing it. The home-run fever is in the air. It is infectious. There is a disposition on the part of the managers not to hold their men back, but rather to encourage them. Every manager of the sixteen Big-League clubs devoutly hopes that some of his players will develop a home-run talent faintly reflecting Babe Ruth’s unchallenged prowess. Every owner of the sixteen Big-League clubs unites with his manager in the prayer that somehow, somewhere, he can dig up a player who can remotely parallel Babe Ruth. Babe has not only smashed all records, he has smashed the long accepted system of things in the batting world, and on the ruins of that system he has erected another system, or rather lack of system, whose dominant quality is brute force.

Home runs are not hit by carefully drilling the ball through a hole in the infield. They are hit by banging the ball over the fence, or, at least, over the outfielders’ heads. In this there is a certain science, to be sure, but there is still more brute strength. Reverting to the time-worn proverb, it is essentially a “Triumph of brawn over brain.”

Does Babe’s advent into baseball herald a new era of development? We cannot say. For a time, at least, the old order of things is in complete eclipse. The home run total in the two Big Leagues has increased enormously in the past two seasons. It bears every indication of rising to new heights in the present season. Already far more home runs have been scored in the Major Leagues this year than were scored at the same time last season. Babe himself, as we go to press, is considerably ahead of his last year’s record up to date, and what is even more surprising he has encountered the strongest kind of opposition, a formidable antagonist in the person of George Kelly, of the Giants, who actually led Babe Ruth in number of home runs made well into the month of May. From every ball park on the circuits there comes the crash of bat on ball and a tumult of applause as the whirling sphere clears the fences or lodges in the stand. We are in for a true carnival of true home-run hitting, which evidently has not yet reached its peak.

Skeptics may doubt the influence of Ruth in all this. They may claim that part at least of the surprising revival of the homer is due to the passing of freak deliveries and the advent of a livelier ball. Freak deliveries, however, do not influence home runs any more than they influence singles. If the abolishment of these deliveries was the cause, all kinds of batting would have increased no less than the home run. True, batting has improved somewhat, but the progress made in other types of hits is as nothing compared with the tremendous advance in homers.

The livelier ball may have influenced the situation to some extent. But the livelier ball is a thing so elusive that it offers the scantiest evidence. For example, the manufacturers claim that the ball in use last year was no livelier than the ball employed some seasons ago. The manufacturers ought to know what they are talking about, and we can see no reason why they should deceive the public on this point. Anyway, a livelier ball would improve all types of batting quite as much as the home run, and that result we have already seen has not followed.

We are irresistibly impelled, therefore, to see in Babe Ruth the true cause for the amazing advance in home runs. He it is who has taught the managers the supreme value of apparently unscientific methods. Babe Ruth is the true Home-Run King in a larger sense than is commonly under stood. For he has taken the place-hit from its pedestal as the batter’s universal model and has set up in its place the home run.

Source: The Literary Digest, June 25, 1921

The Babe Ruth Epidemic in Baseball was originally published in Our Game on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

“Baseball’s pressing question,” as SI headed Tom Verducci’s story

On Tuesday, June 20, “What Happened to Baseball?” by the great Tom Verducci hit my inbox; slated for the print edition of Sports Illustrated dated June 26, it provided what I called, on social media, a “fine summation of baseball’s current dilemma.” An SI editor kindly supplied this snapshot: “The two-headed monster of home runs and strikeouts, coupled with the pace of play dilemma, are threatening the future of the national pastime.” I urge you to read it, in print or online: https://www.si.com/mlb/2017/06/20/standstill-pace-play-cody-bellinger-clayton-kershaw.

The Facebook response to my posting the link was overwhelming and, I think, illustrative of how long-term fans, many of them with an advanced sabermetric understanding, view the problem in baseball today, from pace of play, to too many homers and strikeouts, to strategic dumbing-down. I offer for its possible thought provocation three days of unedited responses to my original terse post, with its link to Tom’s story.

Steve Treder Some of us have been expressing this concern for several years now, and the dynamic just continues to exert itself. Baseball is most fun and interesting when the ball is put in play with runners on base.

Gabriel Schechter I haven’t read this article yet (I will), but I suspect that its message can be summed up in what I’ve said for awhile: we’re getting more pitchers who can’t pitch (as opposed to throwing), and more hitters who can’t hit the ball. Even the mightiest sluggers average just two HR a week, and for that it has become acceptable to strike out once or twice a game. It

Don Stokes Great stuff. I’ve noticed the trend without the numbers available. Very few clubs hit and run or steal a base. There is no concern about BA any longer or making contact moving runners. Too many teams subscribe to walking, striking out or homeruns. When I watch games on television I find myself changing the station because of the pace of the game. It used to be an event if a pitcher struck out 10+ batters. Now it’s common place. Masahiro Tanaka pitching line this past Saturday sums it up:
4 innings
8 hits
3 Homeruns allowed
10 strikeouts
10 of the 12 outs he got was via strikeout

Kevin Reichard Earl Weaver won a lot of games without giving a crap about stolen bases.

Don Stokes Most teams did not have the pitching staff Earl Weaver had in his day. He just waited for the three run homer

Kevin Reichard My point is that this Golden Age of Baseball exists in your memories, not in the realities of how the game was really played on a daily basis. And Weaver played the same way no matter who he had as a starter — whether it was Gene Brabender in 1968 or Ken Dixon in 1986. Gene Mauch managed the way you seem to be advocating for and didn’t win squat; Earl Weaver did the opposite and won.

Don Stokes So Kevin Reichard what’s the need for a good manager any longer? No need to call for pitch outs any more because no one is really going to steal or hit and run. You don’t have to worry about a pitcher facing the same batter three times because he’s not going to be around to pitch to him. The only strategy left is matchups and which player is going to burn you with the longball.

Kevin Reichard It’s always been about the matchups. And managers aren’t perfect. Have you watched a Minnesota Twins game this season? Paul Molitor is doing everything wrong, according to the “experts,” and the team stats are horrible, but his team is a contender. BTW, you should check out Jim Kaat’s Twitter feed. He’s been posting about how worthless most stats are (he HATES exit velocity) and all that matters is win/loss.

Don Stokes I’m not a proponent of “exit velocity” either

David Goldberg The shift to the HR/K preference will be (is?) MLB’s version of the three-point field goal. Some will like it. Some won’t. But it will (has?) made the game permanently unrecognizable from the one that went before it.

Jerry Cohen The game has become more and more one-dimensional for decades. Younger fans seem not to have the attention span or interest in the situational aspects of the game (those many of us find most interesting), and just want to see “action” (or what they think of as action). This mentality also effects young players, who don’t come into the big leagues with the same fundamental skills as players from past eras. The result is a continual race to the bottom.

Bill Parker I just really wish people could write about these issues and propose little corrections to them without all the end-of-days hyperbole. These swings happen, baseball remains just fine. (Also, watching guys strike out on 100-MPH fastballs and hit 450-foot home runs is plenty exciting, IMO.)

Mark Armour When baseball occasionally breaks itself (which it has done now) it is not because the players are worse — it is because they are better. Pitchers are better — much better, miles better — then they were 25 years ago. It is harder to hit them. And hitters, when they do hit them, are hitting the ball harder and farther because they are also better.

John Ford I’ve been a baseball fan for forty-seven years. This is the first of those years in which the game frequently bores me.

Don Stokes I disagree that pitchers are better now than they were years ago. They just throw harder than years ago plus they also know they can “empty” the tank in regards to knowing 5–6 innings is all that is expected of starting pitchers. It doesn’t make them better

Mark Armour OK, perhaps I should say that pitchING is better. Perhaps Sandy Koufax was better than Chris Sale, but Chris Sale for 7 innings followed by two relievers that throw 100, which is today’s reality, is as good as any “pitcher” who has ever lived.

Walter Cherniak Kimbrel, as an example, is averaging something like 18 K’s per 9 IP. Basically one or two guys at most make contact against him in a typical outing.

Don Stokes Relief pitching especially the middle and late inning relievers are much better today because of the expendability of arms. There are very few true ace starters in the league right now

John Thorn Starters are better, relievers are better, hitters are better, fielders are better. Usage patterns and playing trends can, however, blind us to this.

Mike Warwick Pitchers are better period. Usage patterns keep this era’s starters from putting up the same totals as starters from previous eras.

Mark Armour Johnny Keane left a gassed Bob Gibson in Game 7 of the 1964 World Series, and it became the stuff of legend. (He allowed two home runs in the ninth, but held on.) If he had had Kelsey Jansen in his bullpen, it would have been gross incompetence to leave Gibson in the game. But he didn’t.

Jerry Cohen It seems to me the game seems “broken” when the balance of pitching, offense, defense, power, goes too far off…The key when that happens is not to panic by A) tacitly allowing cheating (the Steroids Era) or B) passing foolish rule changes (the DH).

Don Stokes How are starters better when they don’t learn how to work out of trouble ? Vin Scully himself stated this was one of the issues he has with today’s game that pitchers are not given the chance any longer as they had been in years past. And I’m not talking about the numbers or wins or innings pitched. Im talking about 2nd and 3rd with one out in the 6th inning and it’s not Kershaw or Dallas Keuchel out there.

Mike Warwick Vin Scully’s not infallible. And he’s just as prone to ‘Everything was better when *I* was young’ babble as anyone.

Mark Armour To be honest, I think its high time that baseball panicked. History and tradition are the balls and chains that keep baseball from fixing itself.

Jerry Cohen History and tradition are what keep baseball from becoming arena football.

Don Stokes Why? Don’t you like that bottom of the eighth inning two run homer so that 100 mph closer comes into the 9th inning? That’s what it’s come to now. Lift and drive the ball right out of the park.

Mark Armour What I would like is for baseball to change the rules/environment so that there are fewer strikeouts, fewer walks, fewer home runs. There are many ways to do this, but baseball will likely wait another 20 years until half the batters are striking out because … tradition.

Jerry Cohen I’m just curious, what are some of the “many ways” to do this?

Walter Cherniak Ironically, the “sabermetric revolution” is largely responsible for the growth in Three True Outcomes philosophy. I first learned from Bill James that strikeout rate = dominance, and that not making outs was the most important offensive skill.

Jerry Cohen What no one is mentioning is that everything is being driven by money. Teams invest millions in pitchers, which leads to more — not less — specialization. Baseball is not like American football, where a player spends his entire career on one specialized offensive or defensive position. Even Babe Ruth was expected to field his position for nine innings 154 times a year. The more specialized players become, the more one-dimensional the game becomes.

Richard Hershberger, to Walt Cherniak particularly: The trend was well established. Chart strikes outs per nine innings. In the mid-1920s it is about 2.8, then rises steadily for forty years to about 6. Then it drops for ten years down to about 4.8. It resumed the rise with only minor hiccups, and is not over 8. Chart home runs per nine innings for the same period and the pattern is a pretty close match. Both SOs and HRs are about three times as common as they were back then. What we are seeing today is not something new. It is a trend going back ninety years. Something will have to give eventually, but what and when is an open question.

Don Stokes The high batter strikeouts doesn’t seem to bother the average fan for some reason. They just want slugging. An example the Brewers Keon Broxton who hit 9 HR with 88 strikeouts in 75 games in 2016. This year in 67 games Broxton has 11 HR and leads baseball with 97 strikeouts. His BA is basically the same (.242 in 16, .235 this year). It’s his slugging that has gone up 30 points.

Mark Armour The point of Verducci’s column is that the average fan is bothered. Verducci is bothered. I am bothered. I doubt we are alone.

Don Stokes I’m bothered and bored with this love affair with home runs.

Walter Cherniak I think most of us would like to see more balls in play, more action generally. Give me the stolen base numbers of the 1970s and 1980s, even if many of those teams often ran unwisely.

Jerry Cohen Eliminate the DH (I know, I know…). Eliminate one of the DH-defenders arguments by teaching hitting skills again to pitchers from a young age. Teach bunting and baserunning skills again. I like the idea of making relievers face minimum number of hitters, but not sure how that would be enforced.

Mark Armour They currently have a rule that a reliever has to face one batter. This rule is enforced. If you change the rule to “two batters” it would be enforced the same way.

Jim Farmer Sr. There are more commercials between every half inning as well. When we are at the game, and the players are tossing the ball around between half innings, my kids asked me “why don’t they just play ?” I tell the because of commercials on the radio and TV are being played right now. Instead we have to wait and be “entertained” by silly scoreboard antics….Gaaaahhh !!!! Hate it.

Jerry Cohen This is the one thing guaranteed NOT to change. :)

Jim Farmer Sr. You have that right. Probably guaranteed to expand.

Richard Hershberger There was an article floating around a couple of months back. Some guy found a complete tape of a game from the ’80s, and a current game with the same number of pitches. The current game lasted substantially longer. He analyzed the differences. He concluded that commercials between innings wasn’t the problem. There are more commercials, but they cut to the commercial immediately and come back at the last instant (or a bit after), where in the ’80s the booth people did a bit of chit chat at either end. The conclusion was that the problem was time spent between pitches.

Jacob Pomrenke Grant Brisbee wrote that article and it was fantastic: https://www.sbnation.com/.../mlb-2017.../game-length/amp

Jim Farmer Sr. I have over 1000 radio broadcasts spanning 1938 to current and I can tell you, the commercial breaks are longer now. Even longer for a nationally televised games. Commercials are a PART of the reason not the main reason.

Peter Crapo Listened to a1961 O’s Yanks game -Rizzuto was the play by play guy- and he was busy trying to keep up with the pitches. Milt Pappas and Ralph Terry were wasting no time.

Robert Geel One of the trends listed, “increased pitching supply” had another effect on a game I watched the other night. Mets down 3–1, bases loaded one out. They pinch hit for the pitcher and it’s none other then another starting pitcher. Reason: teams are carrying more pitchers and less bench players these days.

Jerry Cohen Limiting the number of pitchers allowed on the roster might help.

David Dyte Yeah, make the intentional walk automatic really helped a lot.

Don Stokes Oh wait we have to get the call right from the replay booth in N.Y.C……tick..tick..tick

Mark Armour Whatever you think of the DH, it has nothing to do with this particular problem. What Verducci is talking about — what I have been talking about for years — is that there aren’t enough balls in play.

Jerry Cohen Maybe. But I take every opportunity I can to pan the DH.

Walter Cherniak You aren’t going to get more balls in play with more ABs from pitchers, that’s for sure.

Tad Richards Very good article. I’ll put forth my proposal again…limit the number of pitchers on a staff. That would cut down on the one-batter pitchers, and force pitchers to learn to pitch, and to pace themselves. Get hitters to start using the whole park. A few doubles to the opposite field, and managers will think twice about those shifts.

Mark Armour Again, if you say things like “pitchers need to learn to pitch” or “we need to teach hitters to hit again like the old days” you are definitely on the wrong track. Assume everyone is smarter and better.

Jerry Cohen I don’t know. There are a lot of hitters who don’t know how to hit situationally. I can think of a certain member of New York’s National League club, for example.

Mark Armour I think we have a tendency to think that the old guys, who spent most of their free time chasing broads and drinking, were somehow smarter than the modern players who are up late studying film. Michael Conforto probably studies opposing more this week than Art Shamsky did in his entire life.

Jerry Cohen I was thinking of a different player. When certain players think their “job” is to hit home runs rather than help their team score (and I think that is more of an issue with today’s players) then it’s a problem in a team sport that requires situational adaptation. While it is true that one can overly romanticize players from bygone eras, the opposite is also true: thinking that because today’s players are better-conditioned, they necessarily know how to play the game better. I would argue that with the amount of money and distraction in today’s game (as well as specialization) the opposite is true.

Tad Richards Pitchers are probably better, not necessarily smarter. Maybe smarter too, because they understand how the game is played today. Their job is to throw 95 miles an hour for 100 pitches, and then come out. If that weren’t their job, they’d approach pitching differently, they’d do what we used to call learning how to pitch.

Jacob Pomrenke Hitting home runs helps teams score a LOT more runs than moving runners over on a groundout to second base, that’s for sure. Let’s keep in mind that the “glory days” of the 1960s and ’70s some have mentioned were some of the worst years for offense in baseball history. Not sure we really ought to go back to those days ..

Rex Hamann I look forward to reading this article. But first I wanted to look at the ratio of HRs to strikeouts among the top HR hitters. The stats don’t lie, there is a definite preponderance of strikeouts for the top ten HR hitters (Joey Votto actually owns one of the better ratios, which surprised me). But just how different is this list and its ratios than in times past, at least for the first half of the season? Home run hitters have traditionally been prone to striking out more often than contact hitters. My issue with baseball right now is how balls and strikes are being called. They have access to the technology which allows them to know whether a pitch was a ball or a strike. Managers should be doing something to monitor this, then to bring it to the attention of the crew chief at the proper time. These bad calls make watching a baseball game unpleasant from the standpoint of the TV viewer, and are more to blame for baseball’s “dilemma” than anything else.

Don Stokes The issue is because of the trend today baseball does not encourage contact thus fewer contact hitters are created. Example Ryan Schimpf of the Padres. How many big leaguers would have stayed in the majors so long with a .158 BA as an everyday player. It was his power (14HR) which kept him in the majors.

Bruce Bonniwell Jr. Don Stokes, I agree with your posts. The game has tilted toward extreme results, K & Homer. While exciting enough in themselves, they are close to the WHOLE game now. Games which end at midnight are way too common.

Wayne Turiansky I’m not going to disagree with much of anything I’ve read here (other than the argument to eliminate the DH), but the simple fact of the matter is that nothing is going to change, repeat NOTHING IS GOING TO CHANGE as long as revenues continue to rise. There are currently 30 major league teams, and each and every one of them is drowning in money. Even the Tampa Rays, who can’t outdraw a middle school curling tournament in Saskatoon, are drowning in money. Change, schmange. Ka-ching.

Steve Treder “NOTHING IS GOING TO CHANGE as long as revenues continue to rise” Certainly true. It’s important to bear in mind that what is to us a beloved pastime, is to its investors, operators, employees, and vendors a source of income. Basic prudent common sense on their part counsels risk aversion. The calculation would have to be, persuasively, that yet more revenue and margin could be generated with a game modified by rules changes to promote more contact hitting. It isn’t difficult to see how that’s not an easy persuasion to achieve.

Harlan Ludewig Get rid of the DH!

Wayne Turiansky Um, everyone here is talking about making the game less boring. Is there anything more boring than watching pitchers try to hit?

Harlan Ludewig If you hit a batter w/ 98 u should hit

Jan Finkel I’m tired of the constant trips to the mound, pitchers stalling, and batter stepping out of the box when they haven’t moved a muscle.

Maury Brown All this hinges on the PA, but…

• Change the strike zone.
• Implement the pitch clock.
• For now, don’t touch the shift and continue the trend of having batters adjust to going inside out.
• Less mound visits.
• and if none of that works, I favor Mark’s idea of deadening the ball.

Maury Brown Oh, and put the damn DH in both leagues!

David Dyte No no no no no. (No)

Maury Brown It’s going to happen. Was discussed as part of the CBA just reached and I would be shocked if it’s not a matter for the next CBA or before.

Harlan Ludewig Damn the DH!

Maury Brown It will be in both league soon enough. It will never be abolished. MLBPA would never let it happen.

Harlan Ludewig It’s called BASEBALL- see the ball-hit the ball-catch the yada yada

Maury Brown Oh. Well that explains everything.

Bill Parker It’s called FOOTBALL- make every player a kicker

Mike Warwick Seriously — the DH has nothing to do with this and constantly complaining about something that’s been around for 45 years just makes one sound like the cliched ‘everything was better BITGOD’ crank that yells at clouds.

Mitchell Nathanson I think that what we might be seeing is what happens when the best way to play the game, technically speaking, kills it. I think we all assume that more information is better information and the more we know the better the game will be. But what if that’s not the case? I think it’s true what Verducci says — that sabermetrics has done a great job identifying the most certain ways to dominate offensively and defensively and leave the least to chance. Strikeouts do that. So do home runs. So that’s what we’re seeing — the search for pitchers with the best chance to strike hitters out and hitters adjusting their swings to get more loft on the balls they do make contact with. I think that, technically speaking, this is probably the most efficient way to play the game. But for fans this makes the games bore-fests. So what to do? You can’t really tell an organization to ignore what it knows — that it performs best when its players leave the least to chance. This is a long way of me saying that I know of no way to fix this. We’re never going back to the era of small ball and the control pitcher because those ways of playing are not the most conducive to winning. Too much can go wrong once the batter puts the ball in play. But that was infinitely more fun to watch.

Tad Richards And yet Kansas City won with smallball.

Maury Brown #Yosted

Mitchell Nathanson Yost is one of the last sabermetric holdouts. He was filleted for being so but he did win in KC. Regardless, I think the Royals will be seen as a blip on the radar. I don’t see many teams running (pun intended) to copy the style of those Royals clubs.

Tad Richards You didn’t see too many teams running to copy sabermetrics when they were new either. I’m thinking of Andy Beyer’s speed handicapping in horse racing. Nobody bought into his speed figures for a long time, until people started noticing that they worked. Then everyone started using them, and they stopped working because they no longer gave an advantage. Home runs and strikeouts will work until someone figures out a way to beat them, and then the best minds in baseball, as always, will resist the new way like crazy

Mitchell Nathanson I think that in theory you’re correct but I’m not sure how anything reduces the element of chance better than strikeouts and home runs. And that’s what seems to be the goal here. Running is great and fun to watch and all of that but it doesn’t matter if you steal 100 bases if the guys behind you can’t knock you in. Better to have a guy who can hit a bunch of homers — that way you don’t have to worry so much about the guys behind him. I don’t know how you get beyond that approach such that small ball would ever come back into vogue.

Tad Richards I am not a brilliant baseball mind, and so I am merely being theoretical here, but suppose a pitching coach who is a careful student of the game figures out a delivery that is particularly effective against the uppercutting home run swing, and all that of a sudden his pitchers are getting everyone out. And other pitching coaches start catching on. Then some smart batting coach figures out that this new delivery is not so effective against contact hitters. This is, of course, an idea that no smart baseball mind will take seriously, because smart baseball minds are resistant to new ideas. But you get a new Billy Beane, who realizes that every GM in the game is going all out to sign sluggers, and contact hitters can be gotten for bargain basement prices, so he starts signing the best ones, and he hires the smart batting coach, and he starts winning.

Mitchell Nathanson Perhaps but what I was getting at was something different: what if we have arrived upon an objective truth of baseball — that home runs and strikeouts are the most effective plays in baseball? What then?

John Thorn Baseball is an entertainment, not a symposium.

Mitchell Nathanson Right, but what happens when the best way to play the game, competitively, turns out to be boring to watch? I think this may be where we’re at right now. At that point it loses its reason for being.

Robert Tholkes Cycles…same thing post-Ruth, when the stolen base was at its nadir. It came back.

Tad Richards Mitchell Nathanson — I understood what you were getting at, and my hypothetical was only a hypothetical, but my point is that there may be no absolute objective truth. It may be that when you think you’ve found it, someone else will find a way around it.

Noah Liberman Someone is always fretting about something. As long as it’s not because of juice, I don’t mind. Interesting facts, though.

Jeff Schwitzer I’m not sure home runs and strikeouts are the best way to play baseball. The 10,12,14 Giants maybe had 1 30hr player. Put the ball in play and keep the line moving. No DH!

Jeff Schwitzer The ball is absolutely juiced. MLB loves HR’s which is why it took them so long to ferret out the roof users.

Tad Richards If the perfect defensive weapon is the strikeout, then why isn’t the best counterattack putting the ball in play?

Alan Heller Because of the 7 guys standing around the field who sometimes catch the ball that is put in play.

Tad Richards But I’m guessing that more balls get through those seven guys when the ball is put in play than when the batter strikes out. Of course, I could be wrong.

Alan Heller You’re right that putting the ball in play is better than striking out. I can’t find the stat but I believe that the chance of getting on base by putting the ball in play is about 30% better than on a strikeout. But the chance that more guys get on when they walk or hit a home run than when they hit the ball into the field of play is 100%.

Bob Keisser A lot of what we see today compares to the pitcher era in the 60s when they raised the mound. OBP plunged. Walks fell. Strikeouts increased. The HR became the primary way to score. Not baseballs best period, and neither is this. You can tell hitters know if they elevate the ball it has a chance to go out — it’s physics when most pitchers can hit 93 mph. Note that some Junkers are winning — Jason Vargas has a fastball that tops out at 86 and he has 10 wins and a low HR rate.

Kenji Takabayashi I know batting average is passé now, but when I fell in love with the game in the mid 70’s, guys that hit .250 were chastised. Now we’re paying guys that are below the Mendoza line millions to strike out. (And not care!)

Kenji Takabayashi Also, exit velo and flashing frisée lights at Yankee stadium? Just. Stop.

John Thorn Folks, I don’t agree with everything that has been posted here (of course), but I would like to run this extended conversation at Our Game later this week, maybe Friday. Anyone who might be uncomfortable with his or her inclusion should message me.

Thomas Dyja I think we’re testing the outer limits of how hard people can throw and we’re finding out that it destroys arms fast. Maybe a few more teams having to eat massive contracts for guys who then blow out their elbows will get us back to a more considered approach to pitching. What if the Mets had pumped the brakes just a little with that staff which is now in tatters?

Merritt Clifton This seems counter-intuitive, but the real answer would be as simple as going back to the big strike zone of 1963–1968, which would increase the odds of striking out so much for the low-contact, high power guys that they would have to change their batting style. As John Thorn pointed out the last time I mentioned this, the 1963–1968 era was characterized by low batting averages, but a closer look at what really happened shows a whole lot more. First, the change in strike zones appears to have badly hurt older hitters whose sense of the strike zone was well-established and hard to change, and who often were in the decline phase of their careers anyway: Stan Musial, for example, and Duke Snider. Yogi Berra, on the other hand, a notorious bad-ball hitter, prospered in 1963, the last year in which he saw significant action. Second, the larger strike zone hurt guys like Dave Nicholson, who might have become superstars in the present home run or nothing era. Third, high contact hitters who didn’t necessarily walk much prospered: Roberto Clemente, Matty Alou, Curt Flood, Pete Rose, Tony Gonzales, Manny Mota. Most of these guys would not even be regulars today because they didn’t hit for power, but they did put the ball into play to all field & keep the game exciting. Unfortunately, high-contact hitting was just beginning to come back into vogue when the weather-induced abnormally low offensive output of 1968 panicked the major leagues into returning to the smaller strike zone that made superstars of Reggie Jackson, Bobby Bonds, Mike Schmidt, and Dave Kingman, among others, despite their propensity to strike out. Could these guys have learned to fan less and make contact more, using their speed? You bet! Bonds proved it when he hit .300 in 1970, and a much more disciplined older Jackson proved it when he made a point of hitting .300 in 1980. But the way the game had begun to be played in the early sabrmetric era no longer put a premium on putting the ball into play, & that trend has only become more & more accentuated in the decades since.

Merritt Clifton An excellent individual example of what I’m talking about would be Carl Yastrzemski, who hit .300 four times during the big strike zone era of 1963–1968, winning three batting titles, but hit .300 only twice in the next 15 years. During the big strike zone era, Yastrzemski hit 40 home runs only once, & walked more than 100 times only once. Afterward, Yastrzemski hit 40 home runs twice and walked 100 times in five of the next six years. Clearly Yastrzemski changed his batting style to what was most advantageous for himself & the Red Sox relative to the playing conditions.

More responses strayed in, but I felt this was a good place to stop. — jt

What happens … when nothing happens? was originally published in Our Game on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

From The Literary Digest, April 9, 1921, a story by Hugh S. Fullerton

FROM writing baseball to interpreting politics seems to be a long step in a different direction, but there must be some analogy between a “squeeze” play and the involved maneuvering leading up to a tariff bill which enables a writer who has understood and described the one to comprehend and discuss the other. At any rate, some of our leading lights in the field of political reporting began their apprenticeship when sent out, on the city editor’s annual pass, to “write up” the championship game between the “Buzzing Bees” and the “Junior Giants.” Likewise, it not infrequently happens that the sporting editor develops into a fiction writer, which is easily comprehensible. A casual glance at the press gallery in the United States Senate will disclose some of the recruits from the junior grade of reporting, says Hugh S. Fullerton, in the New York Evening Mail, who thus describes a recent visit:

It seemed to me that almost every writer there of whom I had acquaintance had been a baseball reporter. There was Gus Karger, now one of the deans of the writers of Washington, who was a pretty fair baseball writer when he broke in and who might have amounted to something had he remained in Cincinnati and kept on detailing the doings of the Reds. There was Jim Allison, now one of the most influential political writers of the Central West, who was an able-bodied baseball writer when Charlie Comiskey managed the Cincinnati Reds. There was Sam Blythe, whose early ambition was to enlighten the baseball public, and Charlie Michaelson, who, however, wrote everything and never would confine himself to sport. Heywood Broun, who slings a nasty typewriter, was a pretty fair sort of a baseball scribe, as was Ring Lardner, who, after graduating into the magazine game, comes back and takes a postgrad course in baseball writing even now, when not busy with trifles like an inaugural.

There was Men[c]ken, who might have been a corking baseball writer if the lure of higher-brow work had not drawn him, and beside him was Henry M. Hyde, who wrote baseball in Chicago when Anson was cracking them along the base lines.

Altogether I counted more than twenty-five of the leading political writers of the country who were reformed baseball writers or who got their training writing about the national sport.

Some of us, of course, are congenital low-brows, yet it is remarkable what a great contribution sport has made to the literature of the United States. O. Henry, at one stage of his career, wrote sport, and even in his later years boasted that the best yarns he ever wrote were about ball games in Texas. Jack London wrote fight-yarns, and even after he became famous delighted in being assigned to cover a fight by some newspaper. Charlie Van Loan, who when death ended his brilliant career promised to become the best writer of short stories in America, was a sporting writer, covering all kinds of sports and glorying in fight-writing. George Ade was a baseball reporter in Chicago, and Peter Finley Dunn, creator of Mr. Dooley, wrote baseball and traveled with Anson’s team when the greatest aggregation of base ball writers ever assembled accompanied the team. That aggregation consisted of Lenny Washburn, Charlie Seymour, and Dunn. At that time, of the three Washburn was considered the greatest. He was killed in an accident while riding in an engine hurrying back to write an account of a fight.

George Barr McCutcheon tried baseball-writing, but quit when he made a hit with novels, and his brother John, famous as a cartoonist, and a younger brother, Bennie, all covered baseball. Rex Beach and Paul Armstrong both tried their hands at baseball, as did Edwin Balmer, and Jim Opper, Jack Lait, and Sam Merwin, Emerson Hough, and even Ray Stannard Baker, who wrote the very beautiful “Adventures in Contentment,” was guilty.

Perhaps the idea that watching ball games and writing about them is easy work has caused so many to try. Yet it is a remarkable fact that very few who start to report baseball will stick to the job long enough to learn the game and the men.

I have seen hundreds who declared it was a “snap” who, by mid-season, were willing to do anything to get themselves relieved of the job. . . . . . .

We had a little fellow named Jimmy Gilruth, who traveled with teams for years, and spent most of his spare time in public libraries and bookshops in research work. He was writing a history of the Children’s Crusades, and for years delved and searched for information and spent his earnings for books to prepare a complete history of those pathetic pilgrimages to the Holy Land. Bill Phelon, whose peculiar sense of humor and practical jokes have made him one of the best known men in the profession, is one of America’s leading authorities on the American Indian and the movement of the tribes. Tommy Rice, who deserted the law to write baseball, is one of the best-posted authorities in the world on the West-Indian and Caribbean countries and on earthquakes and volcanoes. Besides that he devotes a great part of his spare time to the study of criminology and possesses one of the finest libraries in America on detective and criminal history.

One of the oddest figures the game ever produced, and one who, I believe, was the best baseball writer we ever have known, was little Joe Campbell, for many years with the Washington Post. With the exception of Charlie Seymour, Lennie Washburn, and a bird at Quincy, Ill., he wrote the most enlightening and amusing slang ever used. Language failing him, he invented it. I recall one gem of a story in which, describing a dramatic strikeout, he wrote: “And Amie Rusie made a Svengali pass in front of Charlie Reilly’s lamps and he carved three nicks in the weather.”

He wrote reams of that sort of language, cleared away his desk, and wrote the leading editorials. None of us knew it for years, but he was one of the best-known authorities in America on the Shakespearean drama. In fact, no one in his own office knew it until Sir Henry Irving, visiting Washington, came to the office to discuss the subject with Campbell, he having read Campbell’s writings in England. Joe tried to lure Sir Henry to the ball-game, intending to teach him some real English language, but he failed.

Ball Reporters Who Broke into Literature was originally published in Our Game on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Dick Perez rearranged photographs to create a “new” panorama

The dazzling painting above by my friend Dick Perez was created in 1984 for the first pictorial issue of SABR’s periodical, The National Pastime, which I edited with Mark Rucker. It stops time at a precise moment in history, a moment captured on glass in the “detective camera” held by spectator Richard Hoe Lawrence. The moment depicted is the bottom of the fourth inning of a game between Boston and New York: Hoss Radbourn is on the mound, making his debut as a Red Stocking; opposing pitcher Mickey Welch is at bat; John M. Ward is on deck — play ball! All are Hall of Famers, as are Buck Ewing and Roger Connor and Tim Keefe, captured in other Lawrence photographs taken from the stands.

Reconstructing the complete vista from the series of snapshots taken from the stands on that day (see below), Perez created a panoramic view of not only a ball game but the era itself. Later issued as a limited-edition print, “The National Pastime” began life as a magic-marker rendering — brilliant, too — then as the wraparound cover of SABR’s publication by that name, which is now in its 36th year of publication. A portion of this image also graces the book jacket for my 2011 book, Baseball in the Garden of Eden.)

Dick’s specialty to this point had been portraiture, especially of every Hall of Fame inductee, as commissioned by the Hall itself. He offered a limited-edition of 200 prints which were snapped up quickly. I spoke for #1, which has graced a wall in my home ever since.

Below, bottom of the fourth inning, Dude Esterbrook leading off first, Hoss Radbourn pitching, Con Daily catching, Mickey Welch at bat, and John M. Ward on deck.

Below, Cappa’s Seventh Regiment Band accompanies the marching Giants from the clubhouse to home plate.

Below, New York and Boston, pregame, with Hoss Radbourn, standing at left, flipping the bird.

Opening Day 1886: Creating a Sportscape was originally published in Our Game on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

This meandering path started with a question: Who was the first Hispanic to appear in an All-Star Game?

On October 12, 1963, in a game slimly attended and little noted, Hispanic players from the National League squared off against their compatriots from the American League in what was dubbed the first Hispanic All-Star Game. Few of the men who gathered at the Polo Grounds in New York City — for what would turn out to be the last professional game played there — had ever made an All-Star Game squad … though many would, and four would be inducted into the Hall of Fame. The paucity of available talent produced a definition of “Latin” American that extended to Al McBean and Joe Christopher, of the U.S. Virgin Islands and to — most preposterously — Joe Pignatano, an Italian whose last big-league game had taken place the year before.

But in 1963 players born in Latin America were still something of a novelty, their total population a tiny fraction of the African-American ranks in Major League Baseball. The pipeline from Cuba that had produced so many players in the 1950s had been shut off.

Only seven years before, in 1956, Ozzie Virgil had become the first player born in the Dominican Republic to reach the majors. At this writing, 684 have followed him.

Only five years before that, in 1951, three players became the first of Hispanic birth to appear in the All-Star Game, and all were on the American League squad: shortstop Chico Carrasquel of the White Sox, from Venezuela; Cuban outfielder Minnie Minoso, also of the White Sox though he had started the season with Cleveland; and Washington Senators pitcher Conrado “Connie” Marrero, also from Cuba. All are gone now, after distinguished careers; Minoso seems destined for the Hall of Fame (look at those stats!). Marrero, 40 years old in 1951, lived to within two days of his 103rd birthday and remained vital to the end, in 2014; he was the last living Cuban big leaguer from pre-revolution days. And Carrasquel, “El Gato,” became a four-time All-Star, an inspiration to countryman Luis Aparicio, and a hero who played ball in Venezuela until 1967.

As we mark the 2017 All-Star Game in Miami, with so many Hispanic players on the rosters of both leagues, let’s look back to that 1963 Hispanic All-Star Game as a milestone in how far Hispanic players have come, and how America’s national pastime has been enriched by their presence. “Our Game” had long been “Their Game” too, of course, and now it is everyone’s — an international pastime.

The outcome of the game of October 1, 1963 was unimportant; the NL beat the AL 5–2. Juan Marichal started for the winners and threw four shutout innings. The other future Hall of Famers that day were Roberto Clemente, Orlando Cepeda and Aparicio. Felipe Alou, Tony Oliva, and Minoso also played, and each may yet garner a plaque in Cooperstown. There were other solid players on the field that day, including the man who two years later would become the first Hispanic MVP — shortstop Zoilo Versalles of the Twins — and a healthy sprinkling of players whose names will send you scurrying to the encyclopedias.

How many Latinos made an All-Star Game squad before that game of October 12, 1963, the last of its sort? Here is the record, from 1951 through 1963; several players made more than one in All-Star Game in this period and afterward, but only their debut year is offered.

1951

Chico Carrasquel

Connie Marrero

Minnie Minoso

1952

Bobby Avila

1954

Sandy Consuegra

1955

Vic Power

Luis Arroyo

1958

Luis Aparicio

1959

Pedro Ramos

Camilo Pascual

Orlando Cepeda

Tony Taylor

1960

Roberto Clemente

1961

Mike Fornieles

1962

Juan Marichal

Felipe Alou

1963

Zoilo Versalles

Juan Pizarro

Julian Javier

The All-Star Game debut of Cleveland pitcher Mike Garcia in 1952 brings one to a dilemma. Not Hispanic-born, he does not make the list above. But clearly he was of Hispanic descent. The same goes for Chuck Estrada in 1960. In years to come Reginald Martiniez Jackson springs to mind.

And there were other All-Star representatives of Hispanic descent before, notably Ted Williams, whose mother, Micaela May (Venzor) Williams, was born in El Paso, Texas, to Mexican natives Pablo Venzor and Natalia (Hernandez). And there is the tangled case of Al Lopez, the Brooklyn Dodgers catcher who played in the All-Star Games of 1934 and 1941 and then managed the American League squads in 1955 and 1960. Lopez was the son of Spanish immigrants who came to Cuba to launch a cigar business. They came to the United States in 1906, settling in Tampa, where Alfonso was born in 1908. So, not Hispanic by birth or origin, but oh so close!

Such parsing is today, thankfully, largely pointless. The game is better than in Babe Ruth’s day because its players are better, and much of the reason for that will be found in Latin America. The Hispanic influence on MLB extends to an invigorating style of play — a new infusion of speed and power and grace and joy — that has changed the face of the game as well as the way it is played.

Viva Béisbol!

This story appears in MLB’s All-Star Game Media Guide for 2017.

Early Hispanic All-Stars was originally published in Our Game on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Why Don’t They Do It Any More?

This story first appeared in ESPN’s The Diary of Myles Thomas (espn.com/1927), a real-time historical fiction adventure that ran almost every day last year; it deserved far more attention than it received. Douglas Alden was the project’s creator, Steve Wulf wrote essays and “did voices,” and I scribbled a bit, too. This was one of the most rewarding associations of my career, and I wish it could have gone on beyond the Yankees’ sweep (sshhh) of the Pirates in the World Series. There were so many remarkable seasons left for us to recreate (my vote for “next” would have been 1941), and maybe we can find a way to get back into gear for a similarly ambitious reimagining of times. gone by

Every now and then, with Doug’s kind permission, I will reprise for readers of Our Game one of my essays written expressly for The Diary of Myles Thomas. Today let’s look at a standard stratagem of the 1920s and 1930s, wrongheadedly consigned to the dustbin of baseball.

Did you know that Lou Gehrig — a lumbering slugger whose movements were so clunky that he earned the nickname Biscuit Pants — stole home 15 times?

Did you know that Babe Ruth stole home 10 times in his career?

In low-scoring periods like the deadball era of 1900–1919, or today’s pitcher-dominated times, playing for a single run rather than the big inning appears to make some sense. But given the run-scoring prowess of Murderers’ Row, such exploits are head-scratchers to today’s sabermetric set.

Working the count for a base on balls, sacrificing an out for a base, or attempting a steal — these time-honored strategies, born in the 1880s, began to wane by the 1950s. But in the 1920s and ’30s, deadball tactics still coexisted peaceably with the advent of the lively ball because, in baseball especially, traditions die hard.

The first stolen base of Gehrig’s career took place on June 4, 1925, and it was a steal of home — part of a double-steal, with catcher Wally Schang, another slowpoke, running from first base to second. Thereafter he made it something of a specialty. In 1926 he stole home twice, each time with Ruth as his partner in crime. In 1927, the year that concerns us in the present moment, he stole home three times:

• June 11, 1927 vs Cleveland in 5th: double steal with Tony Lazzeri
• June 29, 1927 vs Boston in 8th: double steal with Bob Meusel
• July 30, 1927(1) vs Cleveland in 3rd: double steal with Bob Meusel

No one stole home more often than Ty Cobb, who did it 54 times, all but four of these with the Detroit Tigers (his closest competitor and NL leader is Max Carey, with 33).

In 1927, in the wake of a betting scandal that also involved Tris Speaker, Cobb found himself, at age 40, with an unconditional release and a new ballclub, the Philadelphia Athletics. On April 26, the old man summoned up all his past glory to have a game for the ages. He collected three hits, including a double that drove in the winning run; he also walked and stole home in the seventh inning, and made a shoestring catch in shallow right that trapped the runner off first in an unassisted double play that ended the game. He stole home two other times in 1927, and one final time in 1928, at age 41.

Back in 1927, pitchers would wind up with a man on third base, figuring he was little threat to steal. This permitted Gehrig or Cobb to take a walking lead. Sometimes a wary pitcher might throw from the stretch, or use a slide step, but this was unusual.

Upon the onset of the power game in the ensuing decades, virtually no pitcher thought of holding the runner close to third.

In 1969 Rod Carew, with the encouragement of manager Billy Martin, ran wild, stealing home seven times — five of them came in the first inning, when opponents would not imagine that a man would risk running into an out. But in the years since, the art of the steal has diminished to the vanishing point, as managers started to go by “The Book.” Of course, when baseball people talk about The Book, they’re referring to the folk wisdom that has built up through trial and error, largely in the seventy-five years or so after the Knickerbockers cavorted in Hoboken. Most of the significant elements of strategy go back before the turn of the century. Even the classic “percentage play” of platooning — matching a left-hand batter against a right-hand pitcher (or vice versa) — goes back to manager Frank Bancroft in the 1880s.

Then, as now, percentage play consisted of nothing more than achieving the greatest possible gain in run scoring or run prevention while assuming the least possible risk. As the penalty for failure increases, so must the reward; otherwise the percentages are said to be working against you.

Take the case of the sacrifice bunt. When this idea first came into the minds of baseball men in the early 1880s, a time when league batting averages were in the .240s and slugging percentages in the .320s, it may have been a good idea. By 1908, when BAs had shrunk to the .230s in both leagues and SLGs to an all-time low of .304 in the American and .306 in the National, the sacrifice seemed even smarter. With every run dear and shutouts commonplace, playing for one run rather than for the big inning would have appeared to make sense.

But this idea — born of a particular time and particular conditions — became entrenched and grew, spreading itself into other times and other conditions which would not have been fertile for its invention. Managers in the 1930s or 1950s — hitting-dominated decades — sometimes instructed their fourth, fifth, or sixth batters to lay one down for the good of the team.

The stolen base also made sense in an age of low scores and plentiful errors. In the twentieth century, however, it became an overrated play, with even the best basestealers contributing few extra runs or wins to their teams. The reason for this is that the break-even point was so high, roughly two steals in three attempts.

What about stealing other bases?

Television announcers will tell you that if you want to steal third, you’d better be sure you’re going to make it. What is implicit in that remark is that your team will suffer far more for your being thrown out than it will benefit from your gaining third, because the runner on second already stands a pretty good chance of scoring. With one out or none out, sure, it would be nice to get to third and perhaps score on an out. But stealing third requires a success rate of 80–90 percent to make it worthwhile.

Now for the steal of home: Managers and players avoid the play because they presume that, as with the steal of third, the break-even point is too high to make it worthwhile. They’re wrong.

Stealing home with two out is a good play, a far better percentage play than stealing third. Because of the enormous potential gain as compared to the risk, you only need a 35 percent probability of success in order to break even. The break-even point dips below 30 percent if it’s the last of the ninth, two out, and the score is tied. The two-out steal of home is the unknown great percentage play. (This is an observation that Pete Palmer and I offered in The Hidden Game of Baseball back in 1984; we have been howling into the wind ever since.)

This 30–35 percent break-even range for stealing home with two outs similarly applies when a runner is on third and a fly ball produces the second out. If the third-base coach feels there’s a one-in-three chance of the runner arriving at the plate successfully, he should send the runner.

The same holds true for a man on second with two outs when the batter drives a single to the outfield. If the coach believes there is a one-in-three chance of the runner being safe at home, he should go for it.

Just ask Lou Gehrig or Babe Ruth.

Or Jackie Robinson.

They Stole Home in 1927. was originally published in Our Game on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.