“Baseball is a different game today than when I was a boy,” said the veteran. “When we boys played in the field behind the barn, we used a. homemade baseball and a bat cut from the nearby woods.

“To make a baseball we used an orange, an old rubber boot, an old leather boot and an old woolen stocking and button sewing thread from the family sewing basket, or waxed ends from a friendly cobbier.

“At Christmas time we began to plan for our Fourth of July game. We got our orange then. When I was a youngster oranges were so scarce that we had them only once a year, and that at Christmas time, when Santa Claus dropped one in our stocking.

“The peel was prized by a boy almost as much as the fruit itself. It was always carefully taken off in quarters and pieces of paper were cut to accurately fit each quarter. These pieces of paper were laid away carefully, for, later, they would serve as a pattern for our baseball cover.

“Some cold stormy day of winter time we boys would invade the attic hunting for material for our baseball. If we were fortunate we found a discarded rubber boot. If we didn’t find a rubber boot or some other good-sized piece of rubber, we had to postpone making our baseball until spring time, when we could discard a pair of our boots worn out by winter storms.

“Having secured an old rubber boot, we cut pieces from it, and rolled it into a little ball. Rubber boots were made of real rubber in the good old days, not of something else, so the little ball that we made out of the boot leg was as lively as could be. We used it for a center for our baseball. All good baseballs of today have a rubber ball in the center, so our old-fashioned idea of boyhood days was a good one.

“Next we hunted up an old woolen stocking. Most all stockings in my boyhood days were knitted of woolen yarn. Having secured a stocking, we boys would carefully unravel the yarn, and then, with even greater care, we would wind the yarn about the rubber ball until we had a sphere about the size of a baseball. This old-fashioned idea of our boyhood days is still in use in the making of good baseballs, though machines now wind the yarn.

“Next we wound some strong thread or string about the woolen yarn, to strengthen the ball. Then came the most important task, covering the ball.

“For a baseball cover we hunted out a pair of discarded leg boots, of calf or cowhide leather, the kind that men wore years ago. From the legs of these boots we cut pieces of leather, according to the paper patterns which we had made from our Christmas orange. The most skillful boy among us took these pieces of leather and sewed them together halfway up each seam, using thread from the family sewing basket or waxed ends from the cobbler, if he were fortunate enough to be on friendly terms with a generous shoemaker.

“Then the ball was slipped inside the cover and the seams were closed at the top. It required skillful work to close the top seams of a ball smoothly and firmly. I, fortunately, was clever at it and I did quite a little business closing up seams of balls for other boys at a jackknife per ball.

“The youngsters, by the way, didn’t have money to spend, and that is why we made our own baseballs, and gave jackknives and other things for services rendered.

“After completing the ball, our next step was to get a bat. We went into the woods and cut two, or more, little trees, or limbs of trees, that were straight and tapering. We took them home and whittled them down to the size of a bat.

“The ball and the bat completed our kit. We caught barehanded and never dreamed of a mask, a chest protector or shin pads. Our old clothes were our baseball suits, and we had the lightest running shoes, nature’s own footwear. Stones from the nearby wall satisfied us for bases. We never saw a rule book or score card. But we did have great fun playing baseball.

“I like to see the big games today. But I’d give the price of a dozen games, indeed, of a season’s games, to go to the field behind the old barn and play a game with my chums, using our homemade ball and bat.”

From The Christian Advocate, July 14, 1910. For this story I am indebted to friend Tom Shieber, who posted it to the listserv of SABR’s 19th Century Baseball Research Committee.

How Boys Made Baseballs and Bats Years Ago was originally published in Our Game on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Winsor McCay, signing as “Silas”; a baseball panel in the New York Herald, 1905

What is rarebit, you well might ask? It is a cheesy concoction masking a piece of toast underneath. I have eaten it, without nocturnal adventures of the sort endured by the devoted protagonist of the newspaper strip, which began in 1904 and was collected in a book in 1905.

In the following year, the Edison Company issued a film based on the strip. This film pales in significance when compared with his Gertie the Dinosaur, a pioneering animation short of 1914, but was a sensation when it was released. A fully drawn Rarebit feature, The Pet, came out in 1921, by which time McCay was billed as the “Inventor of Animated Drawing.”

At the same time that McCay was drawing his more famous strip, Little Nemo in Slumberland, he was doubling down with rarebit-induced phantasmagoria. That he should choose a baseball nightmare for one of his weekend panels ought not to be surprising, for as Rob Edelman noted in the journal Base Ball in 2015:

“Winsor McCay (1871–1934) … was illustrating for newspapers and magazines during the last years of the previous century. In 1903, he drew a series of comical single-panel illustrations highlighting the antics of the Cincinnati Reds; they came under the heading ‘This Is a Baseball Town’ and were published in the Cincinnati Enquirer.”

Dream of the Rarebit Fiend was originally published in Our Game on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

“Who the hell was I supposed to throw to … Klem?” Those were Heinie Zimmerman’s famous words — possibly crafted by Ring Lardner — after Eddie Collins of the White Sox, trapped in a rundown off third base, slid into home plate with the deciding run of Game 6, as Zim leapt to avoid spiking him from behind. Giants catcher Bill Rariden had vacated his position in the rundown, expecting pitcher Rube Benton or first baseman Walter Holke to cover home, but neither did. The only man between Zimmerman and Collins was home-plate umpire Bill Klem. Charles Dryden of the Chicago Examiner wrote in the obscure if colorful style of the day:

“A ninety-foot sprint by the Great Zim chased the 1917 championship of the ivory domo (or world’s baseball) series and the bulky end of the purse into the waiting pockets of the White Sox. Score, 4 to 2. We point with pride to the prediction that the coin would carry the Sox to the place they wished to go. They arrived to-day in the early part of the first dog watch. Figure that out for yourselves if versed in language nautical. We are going fishing and do not care to monkey with statistics.”

The Chicago White Sox had not been to the World Series since 1906, when their “Hitless Wonders” upset the mighty Cubs, winners of 116 games. In 1917 the Chisox went 100–54, the only time they would ever win 100 games. The Giants, on the other hand, had been perennial pennant winners, though losing to their American League rivals each year between 1911 and 1913. In 1916 they had run off two mammoth winning streaks — 17 games early in the season, 26 toward the end — yet finished a disappointing fourth. Coming into the Fall Classic, both teams coasted through September; crystal-ball gazers saw the Series as a toss-up.

The battle on the field took something of a back seat to the war raging in Europe, which the U.S. had entered in April. By the end of 1917 there were 76 American major league players in the service: forty-eight from the American League, and twenty-eight from the National League. Forty-two were in the Army, twenty-one in the Navy, and thirteen in other branches of the service. Expecting a quick resolution of the conflict, the game’s ruling body, the National Commission, had permitted the season to run 154 games (unlike the following one, which ended on September 1 and was capped at 140 games).

The Sox won the first two games of the Series at home behind complete-game performances by pitchers Eddie Cicotte and Red Faber, respectively. Back in New York, the Sox revived memories of the Hitless Wonders by not scoring a run in either Game or Game 4, despite continued fine efforts by Cicotte and Faber. Rube Benton was the shutout pitcher for the Giants in Game 3, and Ferdie Schupp in Game 4, in which Benny Kauff hit two home runs.

But Faber, the loser in that game, came in to pitch two innings of perfect relief two days later in Chicago for his second win, as the Sox rebounded from a 5–2 deficit with three runs in the bottom of the seventh to tie the game and three more an inning later to win it. Reb Russell had started Game 5 but only faced three batters, retiring none, before giving way to Cicotte and then, for an inning, Lefty Williams.

After a day of rest and a return to New York, Faber was given his third start. He pitched well enough, but his third win and the Series clincher was really the gift of some wretched Giant fielding. In the fourth inning, the first two Sox batters — Eddie Collins and Joe Jackson — reached on a high throw to first and a dropped fly. Happy Felsch, the third man up, reached on a fielder’s choice as Zimmerman chased Collins across the plate in the botched rundown referenced above. Jackson and Felsch scored the second and third unearned runs as Chick Gandil singled off the hapless Rube Benton. The Giants recovered to score two runs an inning later, but Faber shut them out the rest of the way to give his Sox the Series. In the six games, Cicotte and Faber combined to pitch 50 out of a total 52 World Series innings.

Note that many of the White Sox names cited above were back in the World Series two years later, but as game fixers: the Black Sox. The club would not return to the World Series until 1959, and would not win another until 2005. The New York Giants, on the other hand, would return to the Series many times in the ensuing decades, winning in 1921–22, 1933, and 1954.

75 years ago:

Once again, the World Series was played right after the nation entered a war. Following the December 7, 1941 attack on Pearl Harbor, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt gave a green light to continued baseball play, though players were not given the choice to “work or fight,” as had been the case with World War I. St. Louis Cardinals won 43 of their last 51 games to fend off a late charge by the Brooklyn Dodgers, defending NL champs.

The Cards lost Game 1 but swept the next four to defeat the New York Yankees, who lost a World Series for the first time since losing to the Cards in 1926 (they had won eight straight since: 1927–28, 1932, 1936–39, 1941). Cardinal rookies Stan Musial and Whitey Kurowski drove in game-winning runs for rookie pitcher Johnny Beazley in Games Two and Five as the major leagues’ youngest team scored an upset. Beazley, a 21-game winner in the regular season, would enter the Army after the Series and never regain his form. Shortly after the World Series, St. Louis general manager Branch Rickey, following growing tensions with owner Sam Breadon, ended his quarter-century association with the franchise to move on to the Dodgers.

50 Years Ago:

The Cardinals cruised into the Series, while the Red Sox eked out their pennant over Minnesota and Detroit only by a dramatic win at season’s end. The “Impossible Dream” Red Sox had finished in ninth place the year before and had not won a pennant since 1946 when, led by Ted Williams, they had lost to the Cardinals in the World Series. This time the Bosox were led by triple-crown winner winner Carl Yastrzemski, Williams’ successor in left field. The Cards, who had won the Series in 1964, were again led by pitcher Bob Gibson and Lou Brock.

Game 7 matched Gibson against Boston ace Jim Lonborg, winner of two earlier games — a one-hit shutout and a three-hitter. But the Cards’ superior firepower erupted as a weary Lonborg allowed 10 hits, including a homer by pitcher Gibson, whose three-hitter included 10 strikeouts. Brock stole three bases to set a new Series record with a total of seven.

25 Years Ago:

The Atlanta Braves had topped the Pittsburgh Pirates in a thrilling NLCS classic that ended on pinch-hitter Francisco Cabrera’s single and Sid Bream’s slide home. The Toronto Blue Jays defeated the Oakland A’s in more routine fashion, though the matchup had seemed unpromising, as Oakland had competed in three LCS in the previous four years and won them all, while . Toronto, in its first 15 seasons of existence, had competed three times in the LCS and never won.

Atlanta outscored Toronto in the six-game World Series 20 runs to 16, but the Blue Jays eked out four one-run victories to bring Canada its first world baseball championship. After the teams split the first two games in Atlanta, Toronto moved ahead with a victory in Game 3, the first World Series game ever played outside the United States. The Jays pushed their Series advantage to 3–1 in Game 4. In the fifth game the Blue Jays, who wanted to clinch the title at home, twice came from one run down to even the score. But in the fifth inning, Lonnie Smith hit a grand slam that sent the Series back to Atlanta.

Toronto scored a run in the first inning of Game 6. Atlanta tied the game in the third, but Candy Maldonado’s leadoff homer in the fourth restored the advantage to Toronto. In the bottom of the ninth, the Braves scrabbled back to tie it up again. The score remained knotted at 2–2 until the top of the eleventh, when Toronto’s Dave Winfield delivered runners from second and first with a two-out double. As it turned out, the Jays needed both runs, for Atlanta scored in the bottom of the eleventh on a single, error, and ground out. But with two out and the potential tying run on third, Otis Nixon, attempting a bunt single, just failed to reach safely, and the Series was over.

This story appears in the 2017 World Series Media Guide.

World Series Centennial Review: 1917 was originally published in Our Game on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Perhaps the greatest black pitcher of the nineteenth century, he was reported to have won 35 games for Newark in 1887

On May 11, 1998 I received an email about the mysterious lefthanded black pitcher George Stovey, which I only recently unearthed. No image of Stovey has survived, despite his having played for several high-level minor league clubs, forming a battery with Fleet Walker in 1887; it is possible that white teammates would not pose with him, as was the case elsewhere. The subject, still compelling, was how close Stovey might have come to being the first black pitcher signed to a major-league contract.

The correspondent was Negro Leagues expert Jerry Malloy, my dear departed friend whose classic study, “Out at Home,” is available at Our Game [links at the bottom of this story]. What follows is Malloy’s email.

Gordon Hylton inquired about two items from Sporting Life regarding racial discrimination in 1886 and 1891. I do have a citation on the latter:

Probably in no other business in America is the color line so finely drawn as in base ball. An African who attempts to put on a uniform and go in among a lot of white players is taking his life in his hands.

This is from Sporting Life, April 11, 1891.

As for the New York Giants’ attempt to sign George Stovey in September 1886, I do not have the Sporting Life reference, but I, like Gordon, sure would like to have it.

However, the February 13, 1892, edition of the Cleveland Gazette, an African-American weekly, contains a lengthy account of Stovey’s 1886 season as recalled by Pat Powers [full clip reproduced below — jt]. Powers, later a long-time president of the International League, was manager that year of the Jersey City team in the Eastern League (later called the International League). Needing a pitcher to fortify an injury-depleted mound corps, Powers turned his attention to his hometown of Trenton, where the Cuban Giants were playing their initial summer season as the first all-black professional baseball team. Cuban Giants skipper S.K. Govern had recently signed Stovey to a contract, and on June 25 Stovey made his debut, striking out eleven in a 4–3 loss to the Eastern League’s Bridgeport team in an exhibition game.

It proved to be his only game of the season for the Cuban Giants. Shortly thereafter, Powers snuck into Trenton at midnight, aroused Stovey, and persuaded him to sign with Jersey City.

“Meanwhile,” according to Powers, “some Trenton people got onto the scheme and notified the police to prevent Stovey from leaving town. I became desperate. I worked a member of ‘Trenton’s finest’ all right, and finally hired a carriage, and, amid a shower of missiles, drove Stovey to a station below, where we boarded a train for Jersey City.”

Govern vigorously protested this violation of the Cuban Giants’ contract with Stovey. But since the Cuban Giants were not affiliated with any minor league, and, therefore, deprived of the protection of the National Agreement, and with Powers’ threat to blackball lucrative exhibition games between the Cuban Giants and all Eastern League teams if Govern pursued the matter in court, the Cuban Giants were forced to acquiesce in the theft of George Stovey.

“That same season,” Powers stated in the interview, “the New York league team had a fighting chance to win from Chicago, and Walter Appleton, of the New York club, was very much in favor of having Stovey sent to Chicago to pitch the last four decisive games [September 6–8, including a scheduled doubleheader — JT]. In fact, a deal was fixed between Appleton, the Jersey club, and Stovey to this end. Stovey had his grip packed and awaited the word, but he was not called owing to the fact that Anson had refused to play in a game with colored Catcher[Fleet] Walker at Toledo [in 1883], and the same result was feared.”

• Out at Home
• Out at Home, Part 2
• Out at Home, Part 3
• Out at Home, Postscript

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

Yes, it happened once before … in the very same way

Old friend and baseball savant Richard Hershberger posted this story to SABR’s 19th Century Research Committee listserv on Friday. I had never heard about it, and was stunned. Richard graciously permitted me to share it at Our Game. [I have added first names and images.] If you like this sort of thing, consider joining SABR, long famous for more than sabermetrics: http://sabr.org/join.

Here is some crunchy 19th century controversy to chew on in this off-season:

[Boston at Philadelphia 8/26/1889; home team elected to bat first, as was their prerogative] [bottom of the 12th inning, tie score (4–4), Boston at bat, two outs, King Kelly at second and Dan Brouthers on first] “[Dick] Johnston followed with a solid crack to centre and ran leisurely to first, bat in hand. When within ten feet of the base, seeing that Kelly had scored, he turned towards the right and ran over towards the stand. [Jimmy] Fogarty made a wild throw in, the ball getting away from [Sid] Farrar. It was finally secured by one of the Boston players, who passed it to Kelly. Farrar, Ed Delahanty and [Ben] Sanders ran after Kelly and tried to wrest the ball from him, but he would not give it up. The crowd then surged into the field and several passes were made at the ‘only,’ but none of them landed. Finally, with the aid of the officers, he was hustled into the dressing-room. Johnston did not touch first base. In fact, he stopped within ten feet of it; but even if Farrar had secured the ball and made the claim it would not have been allowed, as neither [umpires Wes] Curry nor [John]McQuade saw the play.”

“Kelly when seen said that he supposed Farrar wanted to substitute an old ball for a new one, as he did not tell him that he wanted the ball to make a play. Farrar admitted that in the excitement he did not tell Kelly what he wanted the ball for, but supposed that Kelly knew. The excitement was intense for a half hour, a great crowd being assembled on the outside of the grounds.” The (Philadelphia) Item August 27, 1889

The fact set is essentially the same as that of Merkle’s Boner. If anything, Merkle had a better reason for not completing the run to his base, as the crowd was coming onto the field. Here in 1889, the crowd seems only to have come onto the field once the controversy arose. So how this did play out in the inevitable protest? I’m glad you asked:

“President [Nick] Young yesterday [9/16] telegraphed Director [Arthur] Soden that the Boston-Philadelphia game had been declared by the League directors a victory for the Bostons. Three out of four members of the Board of Directors of the League voted for Boston, and it was not necessary for President Young, as chairman ex-officio, to cast his vote. President John B. Day stated in his communication to President Young

“‘To all practical intents and purposes the game in dispute was won for Boston on Johnston’s hit, which, having passed the centrefielder, permitted Kelly to score the winning run.’” Mr. [Robert C.] Hewett when the case was presented to him concurred in the opinion of Mr. Day and cast his vote accordingly. His opinion was not given, however, until yesterday and was a verbal reply to President Young’s message. For the Indianapolis Club President [John T.] Brush decided: “The umpire is sole judge of the game, and if he did not declare Johnston out for not running to first it must be presumed that he did reach there safely, in which case the run counted.”

“Messrs. Day, Brush and Hewett, it will be seen favored the award of the game to the Bostons, while President [William A.] Nimick, of Pittsburg, was the only director opposed to the leaders. This effectually disposed of the story that Mr. Day is inimical to the Bostons, and speaks well for the fair minded New Yorker.” The (Philadelphia) Item September 27, 1889

I suppose this is why we never hear of Johnston’s Boner.

Boston was at this point in a tight pennant race with New York — hence the praise for Day’s impartiality. My critique of the ruling in Merkle’s Boner is not on any point of the rules, but that the heat of a pennant race is not the time to suddenly start enforcing a rule. It isn’t often that we see the National League of the 1880s taking the high ground of sweet reason. — Richard Hershberger

ADDENDA: Richard provided me with the accounts from the Philadelphia Times and the Boston Herald, to give different perspectives on the play. Each below, respectively:

Merkle’s Boner … in 1889 was originally published in Our Game on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

The great Charles Dryden wrote this recap of the 1905 World Series, between the New York Giants and the Philadelphia Athletics, for the Chicago Tribune. Emblematic of what came to be known as the Deadball Era, this Series produced shutouts in each of its five games: three by Christy Mathewson, one by his teammate Joe McGinnity, and another by the Athletics’ Chief Bender, who topped McGinnity in Game Two.

New York, Oct. 14, 1905 — Mathewson pitched the world champion­ship into New York and the National League by smiling out the white elephants in the three games he worked. The star man of the Giants turned the trick today with a score of 2 to 0. His opponent was the Indian, Bender, who won the only game in the series for the American League champions by shutting out the Giants here last Friday.

The series established a remarkable record in that the losing team was blanked in all five games. During the contest the Athletics counted but three tallies, made off McGinnity in the game Bender pitched against him.

Although bested in the struggle for the supremacy of the world, and parts of New Jersey, the white elephants are not too much cast down. They handed the Giants the best they had, and it was not enough. All the luck broke for the victors, and the pitching of Mathewson was entirely too potent. He tossed out a score the open­ing day, and the buffalo lasted right through to the bitter finish. To­night the town is burning red fire and mucous membrane in honor of McGraw and his men, who deserve all they get in the way of adula­tion, free cigars, etc.

A crowd that swamped the grand outpouring at the local open-game last Tuesday, boosted for the Giants this afternoon. The throng numbered 27,000 and slopped over into all parts of the field. The brass band came back for luck, and the melody inspired the eyes, arms, and legs of the victorious host.

Barring two spasms of wildness, Bender pitched a strong game. The enemy hit him five times, and they counted the first run without the use of swats. Passes to Mertes and Dahlen in the fifth, Devlin’s sacrifice, and the out of Gilbert tallied what proved to be the winning run. A pass to Matty in the eighth, Bresnahan’s double, and the infield out of Browne sent in the second run.

The American League champions had no more of a look-in than a man peering down a well at midnight. Matty put the lid on the can and soldered it fast in Philadelphia last Monday. And he had his stick of solder and the hot iron in his repertoire today. Philadelphia sent but one man as far as second base. Powers hit a double in the fifth after two had perished. Bender’s bump to Devlin killed Mike on the way to third. The nearest the Athletics got to a run was the rundown of the doctor.

The fame of Mathewson will go abroad in the land as the great­est pitcher of his day and generation. Quite right. He won the title fairly. Three shutouts in a series of five, in which the losers failed to score, is a record.

Matty Clinches World Series was originally published in Our Game on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

I delivered this hot-stove talk in my hometown of Catskill on a November Saturday, as I have done every year since 2011.

There’s something happening here, what it is ain’t exactly clear … but baseball is changing, on the field, in the front office, and in the stands. Teams are acting more effectively than ever in their pursuit of talent and their goal of victory. The players are better than ever, in all aspects of the game. But is the game itself better — or at least as enjoyable as it was when we first fell in love with it?

Baseball is a lot like life, only more so. It is affected by trends in the larger society, sometimes lagging and other times taking the lead … with business and popular culture both taking a cue from this silly little game of ours. In its relentless pursuit of perfection baseball sometimes takes a detour into mere novelty, or unconscious recapitulation of formerly discarded ideas.

But most often in baseball, evolution plays out more rapidly than in real time … as in time-lapse photography: Darwin’s theory writ small. And “survival of the fittest” can produce brutish outcomes: who would argue that we are better off today for having one species of horse where formerly we had one hundred?

Even though evolution is taking place all around us, the process operates so slowly that it is not observable except over thousands or hundreds of thousands of years, except for bacteria and fruit flies. But I have been a baseball fan long enough to see not only how the game has changed but also how — in a lagging, grudging way — we think about it.

I am by no means the first to note that the balance between pitchers and batters has been radically changed in part by the increasing reliance upon relief pitchers. The complete game has been on the path to dodo-hood since, well, forever. About relief pitching Lou Criger, Cy Young’s catcher, said in 1908: “Clark Griffith started it a few years ago and nowadays all the managers are falling over themselves to see which can take out the most pitchers in the course of a season. Some day they will put the man who pitches a full nine-inning game in a glass case and trot him around the museums.”

Seventy years later (40 years ago) I wrote a book called The Relief Pitcher, which I daringly subtitled “Baseball’s New Hero.” The future of relief pitching, I wrote, “rests in the hands of the power pitchers. This trend, slowly developing since the introduction of artificial turf a decade ago, repudiates the wisdom of the past 75 years, that in the pinch what was needed was a sinkerballer who could ‘throw those grounders’ and get those double plays….” One day soon, I concluded, “it will be meaningless to think of the starting pitcher as primary and the finishing pitcher as secondary; they will be equally important. We are not really far at all from that being the truth.” If my crystal ball has proved a bit cloudy, I point out in defense that I wrote the book at a time when smaller ballparks were being phased out for larger ones, Astroturf was supplanting grass, and a ball hit in the air was a better outcome than one hit on the ground.

Bullpenning, as my friend and former neighbor Brian Kenny calls it, is the outcome of baseball’s irresistible move toward specialization … not invisibly, as with species, but before our very eyes. Pitching staffs today have five or six nominal starters, and one of them may pitch 200 innings (Boston had two). Some starters are on red alert after two turns through the batting order, as was on view controversially with the Dodgers’ Rich Hill in the World Series. In 2017, only two pitchers threw more than two complete games. Pitching staffs routinely include seven relievers, most of them charged with an inning or less. For 2018 the Mets announced yesterday that they will look to establish a norm of carrying eight relief pitchers, restricting starters to fewer innings.

Warren Spahn, who knew a thing or two about the subject once said. “Hitting is timing. Pitching is upsetting timing.” That’s why the lefty replaces the righty and the 100-mile-per-hour guy comes in at the end. Not all runs are created equal — that is the presumption in MLB today. A run allowed or prevented in the ninth is more valuable because either your team or your opponent will be unlikely to respond.

The lot of the batsman is not a happy one. Defensive alignments — overplaying infield and outfield positions in response to advanced metrics and tracking of individual batter tendencies — also have changed the game, depressing offense as superior fielding is supposed to do.

But it is offense — with the trend toward rising strikeouts and home runs, accompanied by diminished walks — that will mostly concern us today. Bill James noted this week that in 1987 there were 41 major league players with 1000 plate appearances and more walks than strikeouts. In 1997 there were 26. In 2007 there were 13. Now there is 1. Albert Pujols is the only major-league veteran with more walks than strikeouts.

This year saw an unprecedented barrage of home runs, topping all previous seasons (even those in the so-called steroids era). Was the ball juiced? No, I don’t think so. Were the outfield walls pulled in, as the Mets did at Citifield in hope of restoring David Wright’s power? No. What has changed is the approach of the hitter.

Physicist Alan Nathan has observed, “The way that you hit more home runs is some combination of swinging harder and you have to get some loft to the ball … trying to get between 20 to 35 degrees launch angle.” He further noted that with “all the infield shifting that’s done nowadays,” hitters may think that it just makes sense to “get it over the infield” instead of seeing their one-time line-drive hits and seeing-eye grounders go for naught.

Daren Willman, Director of Baseball Research & Development for MLB, tweeted this illuminating chart yesterday; read it and weep:

Swing & Miss % since 2008

2017 24.5%

2016 23.8%

2015 23.2%

2014 22.7%

2013 22.4%

2012 22.2%

2011 21.1%

2010 21%

2009 20.6%

2008 20.4%

This evolution or devolution in the game has been chalked up to sabermetrics and in some measure to SABR, the acronym for the Society for American Baseball Research, from which Bill James coined the term. Only yesterday, Sean Forman, who created the great encyclopedic website baseball-reference.com, tweeted, “the war is over on sabermetrics. In broad strokes, we know what winning baseball is.”

I agree. Baseball people are smarter than they have ever been, and continue to spin out ingenious new ways to construct clubs and to score runs or prevent them. No MLB front office today evaluates young talent based on scouting alone, nor bids on free agents based on gut feeling, metrics be damned. But it may be too early to declare the complete revenge of the nerds, a tribe with which I proudly identify, even as I continue, as historian and figure filbert, to straddle the line between stats and story.

While the dictionaries continue to treat nerd and square as synonyms, and sociologists attempt to distinguish both from dorks, dweebs, and geeks, today nearly everyone detects a difference: while all these terms connote a measure of social ineptitude or at least discomfort, nerd has come to be associated with intellect. It is worn as a badge of honor, even by those not reduced to quivering jelly in the presence of the opposite sex. Indeed, times are good for nerds right now: the internet has brought myriad ways for birds of an exotic feather to flock together and to influence mainstream society.

Did it all begin with Moneyball, Michael Lewis’s bestselling book from which a very good film was made? Of course not, though its baseball paradigm of making much from little by evaluating assets smartly has penetrated the larger culture. The nerds who viewed the game differently from the grizzled scouts and hidebound executives had long been there, more comfortable with computers (or, back in the early days of SABR, index cards and shoeboxes!) than with human beings. I knew them; I was one of them.

Today the outsiders are in, many one-time insiders are out, and baseball is in a brave new world. I’m not certain I like it, but at least for the moment, there’s no turning back.

Bullpenning, Sabermetrics, and the Revenge of the Nerds was originally published in Our Game on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

This story comes to me via Paul H.D. Kaplan, Professor of Art History, State University of New York, Purchase, and author of a great new article on the subject of baseball sculpture, which fascinates me; I encourage you to read it (http://journalpanorama.org/marmorean-ballplayer-sheriff-john-mcnamee-of-brooklyn-and-his-sculptural-career-in-florence/).

While poking around in a now forgotten (and not yet digitized) American weekly newspaper published in Paris and London, The American Register, beginning in the 1860s, Kaplan found “another interesting piece about early transatlantic baseball, that as far as I can tell hasn’t appeared in modern scholarship.”

The American Register, April 13, 1872, p. 3:

“Base Ball in Berlin” from our own correspondent. Berlin April 7. “With the return of spring and sunshine has come a revival of the interest so universally manifested by Americans, whether at home or abroad, in their great national game — base ball. An occasional game at the Hippodrome — a large field, situated between Berlin and Charlottenburg, which his Imperial Highness, the Crown Prince of Prussia, has kindly accorded as a ball ground — finally resulted in a match, which was played on Tuesday afternoon last, in the presence of a large throng of spectators. Prince Bismarck and son, Gen. Vogel von Falkenstein, and many officers of the staff attended.”

The piece then goes on to describe one ball hit so well it went 300–400 meters [!] and hit the horse of an officer; the horse is said to have thought it was a French bullet and reared. There is also a lot about organizing other games in Germany. (Josh Chetwynd, in his Baseball in Europe, dates the earliest game in Germany to 1909.) I just love the idea of Bismarck showing up at this game. [Note: Bruce Allardice cites, at Protoball.org, a game played in Dresden on July 14, 1869, between two clubs composed of Americans, mostly students. — jt]

When I think of a German link to baseball I think of Guts Muths, and I think of Schlagball; well, anyway, that’s what I think of after Germany Schaefer’s grinning countenance comes into view.

The 1796 Guts-Muths description of “das englische Base-ball” was a great discovery by David Block, described here: https://ourgame.mlblogs.com/das-englische-base-ball-in-1796-was-it-baseball-or-rounders-b1b4df675687

Schlagball, a primordial form of long ball, may date to the middle ages, yet a national schlagball championship was played as recently as 1954. For more, see: http://protoball.org/Schlagball. But the game that Otto von Bismarck viewed was neither schlagball nor das Englische Base-ball; it was good old (really, not so old) American baseball.

When Bismarck Went to the Ball Game was originally published in Our Game on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Indian Peace Medals under James Buchanan and Abraham Lincoln

This outstanding article by Oliver D. Hoover, Adjunct Curator and Editor of the American Numismatic Society, appeared in ANS Magazine, Summer 2010, Volume 9, Number 2. For more about the Society, visit www.numismatics.org.

Following a tradition that had developed during the British colonial period, the U.S. government regularly made gifts of silver (and copper) medals to important Indian chiefs as a means of cementing ties of friendship and commemorating the conclusion of treaties (for the colo­nial medals, see the Spring 2010 issue of the ANS Maga­zine). During the presidencies of George Washington (1789–1797) and John Adams (1797–1801), two varieties of medal were distributed: a large oval medal in silver de picting Washington sharing a peace pipe with an Indian chief (fig. 1) and small silver and copper “seasons” medals depicting scenes of sowing, animal husbandry, and domestic industry (fig. 2). The “seasons” medals were intended to inspire Indian recipients to adopt the customs of “civilized” American life.

From the presidency of Thomas Jefferson (1801–1809) to that of Zachary Taylor (1849–1850), the types for medals to be distributed to Indians followed a standard and somewhat pedestrian model (fig. 3). The obverse carried the portrait of the incumbent president, while the reverse depicted crossed peace pipes and two hands clasped in friendship — an element ultimately derived from ancient Roman coins (fig. 4). However, a revolutionary new ap­proach to the Indian peace medal took place when the New York engraving team of Salathiel Ellis and Joseph Willson received the commission to design the Indian peace medal for the presidency of Millard Fillmore (1850–1853) (fig. 5). Ellis engraved the presidential portrait in high relief, while Willson, looking back to Washington’s posthumous “seasons” medals, skillfully reinvented the didactic reverse type.

Through the influence of their patron, Representative Ransom H. Gillet of New York, Ellis and Willson received commissions to produce further Indian peace medals for the presidencies of Franklin Pierce (1853–1857), James Buchanan (1857–1860), and the first term of Abraham Lincoln (1860–1865). The medals struck for the U.S. Of­fice of Indian Affairs during the Pierce administration reused the reverse dies originally executed for the Fill­more medals, but Willson produced new dies under Buchanan. The reverse types used for the large and small Buchanan Indian peace medals represent a great refine­ment in the symbolic instruction of Willson’s initial di­dactic reverse for the Fillmore medals. The new design is important for what it tells us about both the policy of the Office of Indian Affairs in the later 1850s and the developing national identity of the United States-an identity that included the relatively new game of baseball (Knickerbocker rules).

Savagery and Civilization

The reverse design employed by Willson for the large and small Buchanan medals was intended to visually represent the abandonment of Indian customs considered to be “savage” and their replacement with the “civilized” practices of white America (figs. 6–7). An outer ring de­picts the old native ways with a predictable and stereo­typical emphasis on violence. In the upper half of the ring one Indian brave scalps another, recalling the Indian custom that most terrified the early European colonists of North America and that still struck fear into the hearts of settlers on the expanding western frontier of the United States in the mid-nineteenth century. Below the two Indians appear the traditional Indian weapons of the bow and arrow (despite the fact that long before, most native peoples had exchanged their bows for muskets and rifles as weapons of war) along with the peace pipe. At the base of the ring appears the head of a native woman, apparently mourning.

In stark contrast, the inner roundel of the reverse por­trays the tranquil joys to be had by Indians who gave up their traditions and embraced what was considered civi­lized culture. In the foreground, an Indian, having given up his traditional role as a hunter-warrior, plows his cornfield as a settled farmer. This image reflects a very old American trope, which imputed laziness to Indian males because it was not their custom to tame the land and grow crops through backbreaking labor in the imported European manner. It was misguidedly thought that the appropriate method for integrating native peoples into Euro-American culture was through the replacement of their ancient hunter-warrior traditions with the rhythm of settled agricultural life.

This general agricultural iconography develops that which Willson had previously used for the Indian peace medals produced during the Fillmore and Pierce admin­istrations (fig. 5). On these, a plow and axe stand prominently between the American settler and the Indian, who contemplate the American flag. Also evolving from the Fillmore medals is the landscape scenery behind the In­dian plowman on the Buchanan medals. The former featured elements of civilized settled life such as grazing cattle, a farmhouse, and a sailboat on a calm lake, while a log cabin and a church are prominent on the latter. The cabin symbolizes the abandonment of the nomadic lifestyle typical of many of the Plains Indians in the nine­teenth century. Because of the need to follow the move­ments of the diminishing bison (buffalo) herds and other quarry, the Indians traditionally lived in tipi tents that could be disassembled easily and carried to new loca­tions. Log cabins were appropriate only to Indians who had adopted the settled lifestyle endorsed by and increasingly insisted upon by the Office of Indian Affairs. The rural church building serves a similar purpose to that of the log cabin in that it symbolizes the rejection of tradi­tional and revived Indian religions in favor of Christianity. From almost the very beginning of the European colonial experiment in North America until well into the twentieth century, the desire to civilize and integrate the Indian was inextricably intertwined with conversion to Christianity. The latter was considered by the Office of Indian Affairs to be a religion of decent settled folk, whereas native beliefs were at best thought to be supersti­tion and at worst subversive.

All of these elements of the reverse type can be under­stood as a general idealized representation of the policy of the Office of Indian Affairs toward the Plains Indians in general and the Santee (Dakota) Sioux in particular. In 1851, the Treaties of Traverse des Sioux and Mendota re­stricted the Santee to a small reservation along the upper Minnesota River, where they were encouraged to become settled farmers. Little Crow, the chief of the Mdwakantowan Santee, attempted to aid his people in a difficult situation by modeling what was expected of them by the Office of Indian Affairs: He began to wear trousers and jackets, took up farming, and joined the Episcopal Church. Ultimately, repeated encroachments by white settlers, reneged-upon financial promises of the U.S. government, and severe failure of the corn crop forced Little Crow to give up his attempts at accommodation and led the Santee in the disastrous Dakota War of 1862. When Willson was devising his reverse design, Little Crow was still trying to live up to the requirements of the Office of Indian Affairs, making one wonder whether he might have been the specific inspiration for the Indian plow­man on the medals. The reverse type of the Buchanan medals is almost prescient, for in March 1858, Little Crow and a delegation of twenty-six Sioux chiefs arrived in Washington to seek redress for the broken promises of the 1851 treaties. If not for the fact that Willson had died suddenly on September 8, 1857, one might think that his reverse design consciously anticipated the arrival of the Santee Sioux leaders.

Baseball as Civilization

In addition to the elements already noted, Willson's re­verse type also includes a further remarkable feature. As part of the background elements representing American civilization, five children (four boys and one girl) can be seen playing what appears to be a game of baseball. One boy holds a bat and stands ready for a throw from a sec­ond boy who stands facing him. A girl stands behind the former, waiting to catch the ball; two other boys appear in the field (one is obscured by the farmer’s horse). Be­cause of this subsidiary scene on the reverse roundels, the Buchanan medals have been described in sale catalogues as bearing the earliest depictions of a baseball game. As of 2007, however, this distinction belongs to the vignette on a formerly unknown ticket commemorating the first an­nual ball of the New York Magnolia Ball Club held on February 9, 1844 (fig. 8). After the medals, the next earli­est representation of baseball is thought to be a woodcut of a game in progress at the fabled Elysian Fields of Hoboken, New Jersey, published in the Porter’s Spirit of the Times on September 12, 1857 (fig. 9). Other images of bat-and-ball/safe-haven games produced before 1844 (some go back as early as the 1820s in America and the 1740s in England) depict games seemingly related to cricket or rounders, rather than baseball, despite occa­sional printed descriptions as “base ball” (fig. 10).

The natural impulse for American numismatists of the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries has been to ex­plicitly identify the game depicted on the medals with the familiar modern game of baseball, but closer analysis re­veals that this may not be precisely accurate. There are not enough children present to make up one, let alone two baseball teams, even assuming a reduced team con­sisting only of one catcher, one pitcher, three basemen and a short fielder (later known as the shortstop). Like­wise, there is little sign that any of the players are guard­ing bases or that the children are even using anything as bases (except for home) — a key requirement for a baseball game. The absence of bases is particularly noticeable on the small-size Buchanan medal (fig. 7), which provides a somewhat elevated view of the playing field. As­suming that they are not merely the result of artistic license, these anomalies may suggest that Willson has de­picted a game related to but not actually baseball.

In the nineteenth century and even as late as the 1920s, a variety of other bat-and-ball games enjoyed local popu­larity alongside baseball (“the New York Game” and later rules). These included cricket, town ball (“the Philadel­phia Game,” “the Massachusetts Game,” and other rules), rounders, and old cat (also called ol’ cat or cat­ ball). A basic version of the latter, known as “one old cat” bears a somewhat closer resemblance to the game played by the children on the Buchanan Indian peace medals than does baseball. The game of one old cat involved a pitcher (the “giver”), a batter (the “striker”), a catcher, and one or two fielders. The object of the game was for the striker to hit a ball thrown by the giver and then run to a single “base” (often the position of the giver) and back. The fielders, giver, and catcher attempted to get the striker out by catching the ball in the air or “stinging” him (hitting him with the ball) on the run. This game and its variants for larger groups, “two,” “three,” and “four old cat,” were widely played throughout the nineteenth century. Numerous reminiscences of playing three and four old cat (involving the use of triangular and square base layouts as well as three and four strikers, respectively) were collected by the Mills Commission during its investigation of the origins of baseball from 1905 to 1907. A game similar to that depicted on the medals appears in a woodcut illustration in Robin Carver’s The Book of Sports (Boston, 1834) (fig. 11). In the illustration, seven children play ball on the Boston Common but lack bases and fielders. It has been suggested that they might be playing by rounders rules, but in the absence of bases one old cat seems much more likely.

Nevertheless, it seems possible that Willson’s depiction of what appears to be a game of one old cat may have taken some slight inspiration from the baseball scene that adorns the ticket produced for the first annual ball of the New York Magnolia Ball Club (fig. 8). Both the ticket and the medals juxtapose a ball game with a building. In the case of the medals, it is a long cabin, while on the ticket it is the stately Colonnade (later the Colonnade Hotel or McCarty’s Hotel), where several ball clubs of the Elysian Fields regularly dined. On the ticket, a top-hatted waiter stands on the steps of the Colonnade watching the game while holding a tray of drinks for the thirsty players. Similarly, on the small Buchanan medal, the mother of the children can be seen standing and watching the game from inside the doorway of the cabin. One can imagine that she too would offer the young players some refresh­ment after the game. The yacht that appears on the ticket may perhaps be echoed in the riverboat seen in the far distance on the large medal, although Willson had previ­ously incorporated a sailboat into the scenery on the In­dian peace medals produced under Millard Fillmore and Franklin Pierce.

Regardless of the probable identity of the game played on the Buchanan medals as one old cat, there can be little doubt that the game appears as a cipher for true baseball. Indeed, the various forms of old cat were regularly played as substitutes for baseball (or town ball) when there were insufficient players to form proper teams. Unlike old cat and town ball, by the mid-1850s baseball (Knickerbocker rules) had become the favorite sport of the New York metropolitan area. In 1856, the year before Willson was commissioned to design the Buchanan medals, the game was being touted as the American “national game” or “national pastime” by several New York journals, the earliest of which was the Sunday Mercury of December 5.

The first annual baseball convention of sixteen area clubs was convened in New York City in the year that Willson executed the reverse dies. In 1858, the convention estab­lished the National Association of Base Ball Players (NABBP), the first organization to govern American baseball.

As Willson executed the designs for the Buchanan medals while resident in New York City, he can hardly have been oblivious of the local craze for baseball and the transformation of the game into a symbol of national identity.

This invention of the “national game” was extremely timely and fit perfectly with Willson’s iconographic pro­gram illustrating the cultural inducements of the settled United States in opposition to the supposed savage lifestyle of the Plains Indian. Just as the medals presented farming as the civilized method of supporting oneself and one’s family, a fixed dwelling as a civilized home, and Christianity as a civilized religion appropriate to citizens of the United States, by including the scene of one old cat, Willson also cast baseball as the game of American civilization. Willson’s reverse designs were not only in­formed by the contemporary New York baseball craze, but they also perpetuated the idea of the “national pas­time” and projected it beyond the western frontier into the lands still possessed by the Plains Indians. The subtle implication of the medal is that for true civilization to come to the Plains Indian, he should not reinvent himself in the image of any white American, but as a New Yorker in particular.

Joseph Willson died before any of the Buchanan medals were struck, but his reverse types continued to be used for the Indian peace medals produced by Ellis and the Philadelphia Mint under Abraham Lincoln (figs. 12–13). However, after eight large Lincoln medals were struck at the end of 1862, the original die broke, forcing the mint to prepare a new die. The new reverse roundel followed Willson’s original design very closely but omitted his name and a few details, including the legs of the ball player who stands behind the plowman’s horse on the large Buchanan medal. This reduction of the number of players from five to four underscores our contention that the game played in the background was intended and un­derstood to be symbolic of baseball rather than as an ac­tual depiction of a baseball game. The correct number of players was unimportant so long as the scene could still conjure the idea of baseball.

Although Ellis was granted the contract for the medals by Commissioner of Indian Affairs William P. Dole rather than by the president himself, one wonders whether Lin­coln might have privately appreciated the inclusion of the ball game in Willson’s original design. Abraham Lincoln is thought to have been a town ball player in the 1840s and reportedly played the game with the children of his associate Francis Preston Blair. Lincoln and his opponents in the 1860 presidential election also appear dressed as baseball players in a Currier and Ives political cartoon of that year (fig. 14). This print has been taken by some as (somewhat dubious) evidence for the president’s personal interest in baseball, but it does effectively illustrate the speed with which the identification of base­ball as the national game was internalized. Lincoln is also the focus for numerous apocryphal baseball anecdotes, including one in which the dying president supposedly admonished General Abner Doubleday (the man falsely identified in 1907 as the inventor of baseball) not to let baseball die. Regardless of whether Lincoln was truly the baseball aficionado that some have made him out to be, it is difficult to imagine that there was not some appeal in the tranquil image of children playing the national game together in a farmer’s field at the same time that their fathers — the nation itself — lay divided and bleeding on the fields of Bull Run (Manassas), Shiloh, and Anti­etam (Sharpsburg), to name only a few.

Nevertheless, Willson’s reverse types with their remark­able ball game scene were retired at the end of Lincoln’s first term as president. In 1865, they were replaced by a new design by Anthony C. Paquet, featuring an allegori­cal depiction of an Indian clasping the hand of Columbia in friendship before a monument to George Washington and peace (fig. 15). It is unknown whether Lincoln’s successor to the presidency, Andrew Johnson (1865- 1869), was at all disappointed to see it go. Unlike Lin­coln’s heavily mythologized association with the game, Johnson’s attachment to the national pastime is well documented. He was an honorary member of at least twenty baseball clubs and in August 1865 is known to have given government employees time off so that they could watch an intercity tournament between the Washington Nation­als, Philadelphia Athletics, and the Brooklyn Atlantics.

Baseball as Art

Willson’s ball-game reverse almost certainly represents the earliest use of a baseball-related image to project national propaganda into regions technically beyond the borders of the United States. Later, in similar vein, baseball equipment was routinely included in the kit of U.S. Marines both to provide an off-duty leisure activity and as a conscious attempt to export the American cultural identity to Europe and the Pacific during the two World Wars. The ball-game reverse may also reflect the earliest sculptural depiction of a baseball-related game known from documentary sources.

Newspaper reports of 1854 and 1856 recently discovered by John Thorn reveal that Willson was already experi­menting with children playing bat-and-ball games as an artistic image years before he was commissioned to design the Buchanan medals. According to an item in the New York Times of July 3, 1854 (dateline May 25, 1854), while studying sculpture in Italy, Willson produced a “fine statue of a boy engaged in playing ball, modeled in plaster.” Later, in the January 26, 1856, edition of the Home Journal, this same sculpture is mentioned as “a boy in the act of striking a ball with a bat” along with the re­mark that Willson “intends to make a companion piece — a boy throwing the ball.” At present the current location of the original plaster statue is unknown (as­suming that it survives), and there is no documentary ev­idence to suggest that the artist ever began work on the planned companion piece.

Willson 's earlier interest in children playing ball as a legitimate sculptural subject adds a further dimension to the interpretation of the ball-game scene on the Buchanan and Lincoln Indian peace medals. If his statue of a boy about to hit the ball is indeed lost and not quietly residing in a collection somewhere, one wonders whether the depiction of the striker/batter on the medals can be taken as an accurate reflection of the lost work.

Although it is common for lost ancient works of art to be reconstructed from their depictions on coins, the Indian peace medal reverses could potentially represent one of the only occasions when the appearance of a lost artwork of nineteenth-century American vintage could be recon­structed from a numismatic source. Similarly, it may be worth asking whether the giver/pitcher who appears on the medals may be taken as a model in bas-relief for the sculpture that Willson appears to have planned but never executed. Assuming this figure does encapsulate the artist's ideas for the proposed statue of a boy throwing the ball, it is tempting to speculate that Willson might have been using the ball-game scene on the medals as a study for a full statue group that he was not destined to complete. If the possibility of a medallic study for a sculptural group is accepted, then the artist must again be considered to have been ahead of his time. The earliest baseball statue group presently known consists of the cast-iron figures (fig. 16) patented by the New York designers Carl Muller and John Deacon on May 12, 1868, to capitalize on an American taste for decorative house­hold statue groups that reached its pinnacle between 1859 and 1892 under the celebrated sculptor John Rogers. It is interesting but perhaps not surprising that the two figures in the Muller and Deacon group are a batter and pitcher, just as in the proposed group that Willson origi­nally described to the Home Journal more than a decade earlier.

Postscript: The Limits of Civilization

A remarkable example of the large Lincoln medal is in the collection of the American Numismatic Society (fig. 17). This piece is said to have originally belonged to the Ute Indian chief Honkapkna, who probably received it in 1864 after a series of treaties created a reservation for the Ute in what is now northern Utah. In 1872, Honkapkna sold the medal in its present condi­tion to the Dakota gunsmith John P. Lower. The chief had been shot in battle, probably in the late phases of the Black Hawk War (1865–1872), but the medal saved his life by preventing the bullet from penetrating his body. Nevertheless, Honkapkna reputedly sold the medal in disgust because he had expected its “medicine” to have completely shielded him from harm. The force of the bullet’s impact had initially left him unconscious. Despite the great effort that Joseph Willson put into creating a design that could aid in the conversion of the Plains Indian to the settled life deemed suitable for citizens of the United States, in the case of Honkapkna, and no doubt many other Indians, it seems to have struck out. The Ute chief understood the medal in the terms of his own people rather than in those intended by its designers and distributors. To him, it was a failed talisman of the Great White Father in Washington rather than a com­pelling advertisement for white American civilization. And so it would be throughout the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries as native peoples and the U.S. govern­ment continued to come into conflict over what it means to be safe at home.

Acknowledgments

The author is especially grateful to John Thorn, who offered comments on earlier drafts of this paper and generously supplied many of the non-numismatic images used for illustration. Thanks are also due to George Rugg and Jay Ferguson for commenting on the text.

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

June 14, 1870: still the greatest game ever played

This article by George Bulkley appeared in SABR’s The National Pastime in 1983. Described by Ernie Lanigan as a “demon researcher,” Bulkley wrote more than thirty articles for the old Baseball Magazine and was regarded by his neighbors in Jersey City, NJ as an ambulatory baseball encyclopedia. Born in 1910, Bulkley pored over dusty old volumes of the Spalding Guide and metropolitan newspapers when he wasn’t working as a machinist for the Jersey Central Railroad. When Jackie Robinson broke into Organized Baseball with Jersey City in 1946, it was Bulkley who wrote about African-American pitcher George Stovey’s time in that city in 1886 (see: https://goo.gl/WFXTF5). When Robinson played in Jersey City again ten years later, in his final season with the Brooklyn Dodgers, it was Bulkley who declared that this would be the first major-league game in his city since the New York Giants and Boston Beaneaters had opened the 1889 National League campaign with two games at Oakland Park. (A few editorial corrections and expansions are presented in italicized, bracketed form, with my initials.)

TUESDAY, JUNE 14, 1870, was fair and warm in New York City. The mercury on this pleasant day climbed slowly and steadily until the thermometer at Hudnut’s popular pharmacy at the corner of Broadway and Ann Street registered 86 degrees at 3 P.M.

Up the Hudson a few miles, at West Point, relatives and friends of the 1870 Class were grateful that the planning committee, in arranging for tomorrow’s graduation ceremony, had selected a shady, grassy plot rather than the customary treeless parade ground. Today the cadets would stage their last drill.

But for most Manhattanites, those who were sportsminded at least, the doings up the Hudson were of little moment. The big story for them was the battle scheduled to take place in the city across the East River, sleepy old Brooklyn.

It was a glorious day for a game of ball and Patrolman Wilson, of the 28th Precinct, was unquestionably the only baseball addict in the bustling city of a million and a half souls whose blood didn’t race through his veins at the thought of the big doings that lay ahead. Officer Wilson had other thoughts on his mind, for last night, according to James Gordon Bennett’s Herald, a cowardly sneak thief, entering his bedroom at 111 Prince Street, stole his pants, his shield (№1,530), his fire alarm key (№6), and $7 in cash. Wilson, who had intended going to the ball game (his off-duty day), was destined to spend the morning and most of the afternoon making out reports and attempting to regain his status symbols — along with his trousers.

For the rest of NewYork’s ball fans, there was but one thing to do and that was to make tracks for the Capitoline Grounds in Brooklyn. The Cincinnati Red Stockings — the mighty Reds — were in town and scheduled to cross bats with the once mighty Atlantics.

Nothing like the Red Stockings had ever happened to baseball before. Organized in 1869 as the first avowedly all-professional baseball club, they had proved a remarkable success on the field and become the greatest gate attraction the game had known.

When the English-born Harry Wright sat down with his club directors in the winter of 1868–69, he proposed to get the very best players in the country, many of whom were in the status of what was subsequently called semiprofessional players — those who shared in gate receipts but worked outside baseball for a living — and turn them into outright professionals, drawing regular salaries which would enable them to do nothing all summer except play baseball. But how much would it cost, the directors asked. Harry had it all figured out and, if he could get the players he wanted, he told them the payroll would come to $9300.

Top salary would go to Wright’s younger brother George, who in 1868 was playing with the Unions of Morrisania, a region of Westchester County then, since absorbed by the Bronx. George would go west for a wage of $1400, and they say he was worth every cent of it, inasmuch as he was the outstanding player of his day. Harry himself would draw $1200 for managing the club and playing the outfield (and managing the club entailed all the duties that are now delegated to the general manager, the manager, and the road secretary, as well as the scheduling of games).

From New Jersey came Doug Allison, Irish-born Andy Leonard, and Charlie Sweasy, whose name through the years has been misspelled more ways than any other ballplayer’s including Carl Yastrzemski. [All three had played with the Buckeyes of Cincinnati in 1868, as had Charley Gould the prior year. — jt] Cal McVey hailed from Montrose County, Iowa [and came to Cincinnati in 1869 from the Actives of Indianapolis — jt]; except for Cincinnatian Charley Gould, [McVey] was the only midwesterner on the club [among the regulars — jt]. The other four regulars, the Wright brothers, Asa Brainard, and Fred Waterman, came from New York State. The locales of substitutes Hurley, Fowler, Bradford, and Taylor are not known. [NOTE: Later research has revealed that Oke Taylor was from Cincinnati — the “plucky shortstop of the Walnut Hills club” who next played with the Copecs of Covington, across the Ohio River in Kentucky. Dick Hurley came to the Reds from the Columbus Buckeyes, along with Sweasy and Leonard; they had come by way of the Irvington, NJ club, while Hurley had played with Columbia College in New York. James Fowler was a Yale man, while James Bradford’s previous club remains unknown. — jt]

Because Gould was the only Cincinnati native on the team there were some critics who insisted on calling it an “eclectic” nine (“all-star,” future generations would term it). These critics predicted some terrible things would come of such an arrangement, a team whose motivation was pecuniary rather than civic. (The same dire sentiments have more recently been directed toward George Steinbrenner’s “eclectic” nine.)

The Reds swept the baseball scene literally from coast to coast in 1869, defeating all comers and arousing such interest that by the spring of 1870 every city of any size had organized its own team of professionals to beat the Reds when they dared to come to town. From that point on there was no question as to which way baseball was going. Gone was the heyday of the amateur and semiprofessional teams, except as feeders for the play-for-pay game.

As the Reds invaded New York in 1870, they were riding a two-year winning streak of 90 games. And only yesterday they’d trounced the Mutuals to make it 91.

The Capitoline [the second enclosed baseball park, after William Henry Cammeyer’s Union Grounds] lay between Nostrand Avenue on the west and Marcy Avenue on the east, and between Putnam Avenue on the north and Halsey Street on the south. It was located on part of a farm leased from the Lefferts family, who had owned the land since Revolutionary days, by Reuben S. Decker’s father. Reuben Decker it was who, along with H. A. Weed, built the stands in 1862. (Later, in 1879, the original farm was forced into physical oblivion as Jefferson Avenue and Hancock Street were cut through the ballpark by the city. Today this four-city-block area is part of the Bedford-Stuyvesant section, much in the news in recent years.)

Many years later Decker’s daughter recalled the 1870 scene for the writer.

Sheds and stables were located about half the length of the Putnam Avenue side, beginning at Nostrand Avenue. In front of these were permanent buildings housing the restaurant, bandstand, private rooms for the families of the proprietors, sitting rooms for the ladies on the second floor and, on the first floor, lockers and storage rooms for the baseball teams. In addition, bleachers for the accommodation of 5,000 persons were erected along the Nostrand Avenue and Halsey Street sides of the grounds. The entrance was on Nostrand about 200 feet south of Putnam.

The field was known formally as the “Capitoline Skating Lake and Base-Ball Ground.” In November the grounds were flooded from a city main at the corner of Halsey and Nostrand and used for skating all winter, as well as baseball matches on ice featuring many of the stars of the field. Come spring, the water was drained off and the grounds turned over first to Phineas T. Barnum for his circus, and then prepared for the baseball season.

If you were a baseball fan in 1870 and lived in Manhattan you crossed the East River to Brooklyn on the ferry. Construction work on the Brooklyn Bridge had just started and wouldn’t be finished until 1883; indeed, so little progress had been made that, stare as you might while crossing the river, you could see nothing that indicated a bridge was being built.

In your horsecar, you then followed Fulton Street in a southerly direction through the heart of downtown Brooklyn (population 419,921, 1870 census), and turned eastward for a ramble through the countryside. The total distance from the ferry slip to the ball field was three and a quarter miles. You left the horsecar at the corner of Fulton and Nostrand and walked north a few hundred feet to the Capitoline.

One street west of Nostrand is Bedford Avenue, and if you had left the car at the corner and followed Bedford Avenue south exactly one mile you would have found yourself at the future site of another ballpark that figured large in baseball history — Ebbets Field.

On this second day of the Reds’ 1870 invasion of the metropolis the fans sensed the possibility of an Atlantic victory. They flowed toward the Capitoline from all directions, starting shortly after noon, until the field was engulfed with humanity. The grounds were jammed to capacity and many hundreds stood on the field itself, along both foul lines and behind the outfielders.

Harper’s Weekly estimated the crowd to be between 12,000 and 15,000 shoehorned into a park that could seat at best 5,000. Said the New York World: “Hundreds who could or would not produce the necessary fifty-cent stamp for admission [Harry Wright always insisted on that fee although twenty-five cents was the norm of the period] looked on through cracks in the fence or even climbed boldly to the top, while others were perched in the topmost limbs of the trees or on roofs of surrounding houses.”

The cause of this wellspring of optimism isn’t quite clear. Only the day before, the Red Stockings had mauled the Mutuals, 16 to 3. Yet on their previous visit to New York they had eked out a 4–2 win — an unprecedentedly low score for the time, at this level of play — over these same Mutuals before moving on to clobber the Atlantics by 32–10. On comparative records, then, the visitors appeared likely to overwhelm the Brooklynites.

Add to this the fact that the Atlantics had already suffered defeat three times in 1870, due mostly to trouble within the ranks — trouble so acute that it was freely predicted that Dickey Pearce and other stars would not play in the game with the Reds.

Tactless Bob Ferguson, captain of the Atlantics, was in the midst of a feud with the baseball writer of the New York Herald. A lively discussion between these worthies had ended with the writer charging the other with running off his best players by his insolence, and Ferguson countering with an offer to do some dental work on the scribe without benefit of a forceps.

As a result, the Herald man refused to cover the Atlantics-Cincinnati game, although he had reported the previous day’s Mutual match with a thousand word story. And so, while other papers gave the game of June 14 full coverage, the Herald man stayed at home and devoted just 200 words to a critique of the game and the unruly nature of the crowd. And his paper didn’t even print a box score of the greatest game of baseball played up until that time.

That the gamblers did not expect a hometeam win is shown by what the racing people call the morning line. Before thegame, betting was 5–1 on the Red Stockings — and when Cincinnati moved ahead in the early innings, 3–0, the odds zoomed to 10–1 with few takers.

The Atlantics, however, had patched up their differences and their strongest team took the field, nattily attired in long dark blue trousers (with a light cord down the outer seams), shirts with the initial letter of the club name embroidered on the chest, and light buff linen caps. The Reds wore their customary knickerbockers and bright red stockings. They had an Old English “C” on their shirt panels. During the day George Zettlein, the hard-working pitcher of the home team, deviated somewhat from the uniform of the day: he worked much of the game stripped to a silk undershirt and his uniform pants.

Every newspaper commented on the boisterous and unruly conduct of the spectators. “As the Red Stockings entered the field,” said one paper, “a few of the toughs in the assemblage attempted to hiss them, but at once a round of applause greeted the strangers….” Another reported that “the visitors were annoyed throughout by catcalls, hisses, and jeers, their misplays being applauded, and their finest efforts received in silence.”

As the opponents squared off, the batting orders looked like this:

The Reds lost no time once the game got under way, George Wright singling down the left field line and, after the next two men were retired, scoring on singles by Allison and Harry Wright. On the latter’s blow there was an error by McDonald, and Allison also crossed the plate. The Reds increased their lead to 3–0 in the third with hits by George Wright and Waterman proving the decisive blows. Dickey Pearce ended the threat of a big inning by coming up with Allison’s sharp grounder and starting a fast double play.

The Atlantics, meanwhile, could do nothing with Brainard’s delivery. Pitchers in 1870 worked from a distance of only forty-five feet from home plate but were restricted by the rules to an underhand “pitch.” The wrist snap needed to throw curve balls would not be legalized until 1872, so pitchers had to rely on nothing except speed and a change of pace.

Cincinnati was at its defensive best this day. Henry Chadwick, baseball editor of the New York Clipper, was fascinated by the style in which the fielders moved about as the different batsmen took their turns. A model display, he thought. “In fact,” said Henry, “Harry Wright would at one time be seen playing almost back of second base, while Sweasy would be nearly a first base fielder, and so they changed about, coming in nearer or going out further, just as they judged the balls would be sent to the different batters. It is in the lack of judgment like this that our outfielders show their inferiority to the skillfully trained Red Stockings.”

Zettlein, greatest fastballer of his day, was the first line of defense for the Atlantics, who were noted more for their batting prowess than for their fielding finesse. The Reds had never seen Zettlein before, but fastball pitching didn’t usually bother them. The previous year, when the Reds clobbered the Atlantics, they pounded Tom Pratt, a fastballer, from pillar to post.

Singles by Pearce, Start, and Ferguson and a two-base overthrow by Waterman gave the home team lads two runs in the fourth. In the sixth, the Atlantics’ slashing drives handcuffed Sweasy and Waterman to account for two more, sending them into the lead for the first time.

Cincinnati had not scored in three innings, but as soon as they found themselves trailing they resolutely hammered out a new lead. Brainard, Sweasy, and the irrepressible George Wright pounded out clean hits in the seventh, the younger Wright’s hit driving in his fellow Reds.

But the boys in blue weren’t licked yet. With one out in the eighth, Smith tripled to deep left field and Start (first player to earn the nickname “Old Reliable”) clouted viciously down the right field line. Cal McVey, traveling at top speed, made a brilliant catch and threw quickly to the plate. Smith, holding third until the catch, tried to score but McVey’s spectacular throw had him beaten. And then, in this most crucial moment, Allison muffed the ball. The crowd really let loose as Smith crossed the plate with the tying run.

Only three men faced each pitcher in the ninth. Pike closed out the Reds by taking George Wright’s hot grounder and converting it into a double play, and Andy Leonard retaliated in the last half with a great catch of Hall’s line drive.

Entered at this point the rules book. Several of the Atlantics’ directors, reasoning that a tie with the invincible Red Stockings was better than a probable loss, even an extra-inning one, instructed Captain Ferguson to take his team off the field. Exactly opposite reasons prompted Cincinnati to play it out; Harry Wright was so ordered by president Aaron B. Champion.

As the Brooklyn players began to “stack bats” preparatory to leaving the field, the crowd, uproarious all afternoon, swarmed over the field. President Champion clambered onto a bench and announced that the Reds would claim the game by forfeiture if Brooklyn refused to continue. He pointed to Rule 5, which plainly stated that in case of a tie score at the end of nine innings the game should be continued “unless it be mutually agreed upon by the captains of the two nines to consider the game as drawn.”

And now Father Chadwick got into the action. Henry was the supreme expert on the rules and the author of several of them. Year after year he served on the rules committee, where his voice was the most respected of all.

“How about it, Henry?” asked Harry Wright, and Chadwick agreed that the visitors were right. It was the first time the Reds had been forced into extra innings.

Some of the Atlantics had already reached the clubhouse but they were hastily recalled, the field was cleared with some difficulty, and the game resumed.

Cincinnati was easy in the tenth and the Atlantics were turned back once more by George Wright. With one out McDonald and Pearce singled in succession. Smith lifted a high fly to shortstop; Wright, playing the ball so as to catch it close to the ground, intentionally dropped it, thus forcing the runners to leave their bases. This, of course, was the play whose abuse in later days led to the adoption of the infield fly rule to protect the helpless baserunners. At that time, there being no infield fly rule, Wright scooped up the ball and started an easy double play.

Years later Albert G. Spalding, writing the first large-scale baseball history, jumped to the conclusion tha t this was the origin of the trapped-ball play, and present day writers relied upon Spalding for the dope. Spalding, however, was wrong: When the Reds beat the Mutuals in 1869, Fred Waterman, Cincinnati third sacker, pulled an identical play after the New Yorkers had tied the score in the ninth inning, and there’s no reason to imagine that this was the first instance of the trapped-ball maneuver.

The Red Stockings cast deep gloom over Flatbush by tallying twice in the eleventh, apparently sewing up the old ball game. After Leonard was retired, Brainard doubled to right center. Sweasy lifted one in the same direction and Hall was about to make the catch when McDonald, cruising over from right field, ran into him.

McVey also hit into Hall’s territory, but this time his mates gave him plenty of room and he grabbed it, Brainard scoring easily from third after the catch. The poisonous George Wright then singled to score the second run of the inning, making the score 7–5.

Charley Smith, who had batted into the spectacular double play to end the tenth inning, led off for the home team in its last chance at bat. If that sounds a bit peculiar, take a look at the 1870 rules. Rule Three, Section 2, specified that: “Players must strike in regular rotation, and, after the first inning is played, the turn commences with the player who stands on the list next to the one who was the third player out.”

Now, while Smith had hit into the double play in the tenth he had not been put out: McDonald and Pearce were the victims of Wright’s skullduggery. Pearce was the third player put out, and Smith followed Pearce in the batting order. An odd consequence of this rule was that Pearce, the Atlantics’ lead-off man, batted only five times while the next three men — Smith, Start, and Chapman — each batted six times.

Smith opened the eleventh by punching a sharp single toward left field. He went all the way to third on a wild pitch. The crowd really came alive when Joe Start slammed a drive to deep right field that landed in the fringe of the crowd. McVey was on the ball in an instant, but as he bent to pick it up a spectator leaped on his back. By the time McVey could fight his way clear and hurl the ball to the infield, Start, representing the tying run, was on third and the complexion of the game had changed.

Now, that’s the way the story has always been told. Everyone who has attempted to recount the story of the great game of 1870 has reported the naughty behavior of the Brooklyn crowd and every sportsman-reader has, presumably, responded with “tch! tch!” and rolled his eyes piously heavenward. Not so, said McVey, shortly before he died. Cal told a newsman that he remembered the play very well and that no one climbed his back. He said that he encountered some difficulty in digging the ball out of the crowd, but that no one deliberately interfered with him.

At any rate, Chapman, the next batter, hit hard to third, but Waterman handled the ball well, held Start at third, and threw the batter out.

If the Atlantics had learned anything at all it was that George Wright could do nothing wrong today. And so, with the object of keeping the ball out of Wright’s grasp, Ferguson, a righthanded batter, went up to the plate to hit lefthanded. This seems to be the first recorded instance of a batter switching, although the New York Clipper, leading sports weekly of the day, suggested it was not the first time he had done so, remarking that Ferguson “can use one hand as well as the other.”

That stratagem worked. Ferguson ripped the ball past the second baseman and scored Start with the tying run. Zettlein kept the rally alive with a torrid smash to Gould’s right. The first baseman couldn’t handle it, and when he did recover the ball he flung it to second in a desperate attempt to force Ferguson. The ball, however, was in the dirt and Sweasy missed it completely, the sphere scooting into the outfield. As Ferguson stretched his legs and raced for home base all Brooklyn went mad.

The impossible had happened! Cincinnati had lost!

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

Fun stuff, amassed over the decades

I have gathered and saved these baseball nuggets, never quite figuring out how to use them in this book or that one. Enjoy; I’ve got more (!). These are presented in no particular order. Now and then I’ll gather another bouquet.

CASEY STENGEL: Asked about the prospects for two of his twenty year-old players, Ed Kranepool and Greg Goosen: “In ten years, this guy has a chance to be a star. In ten years the other guy has a chance to be thirty.”

WARREN BROWN: Asked which of the two contestants for Game 7 of the 1945 World Series would win, the Tigers or the Cubs: “I don’t think either of them can.”

RALPH KINER: “The earth is two-thirds covered by water. The other third is covered by Garry Maddox.”

MARTY SPRINGSTEAD, umpire: “The best way to test a Timex watch would be to tie it to Earl Weaver’s tongue.”

TIM McCARVER: “Bob Gibson is the luckiest pitcher in baseball. He always seems to pitch on the day the other team doesn’t score any runs.”

SATCHEL PAIGE: “ How fast was ‘Cool Papa’ Bell? He was so fast that when he flipped the wall switch in a hotel room, he’d be in bed before the light went out.”

LEO DUROCHER: “You don’t save a pitcher for tomorrow. It might rain tomorrow.”

YOGI BERRA: “Ninety percent of this game is half-mental.”

CHUCK CONNORS: “Branch Rickey had both money and players. He just didn’t like to see the two of them mix.”

JACQUES BARZUN: “Whoever wants to know the heart and mind of America had better learn baseball.”

PHILIP ROTH: “For someone whose roots in America were strong but only inches deep, and who had no experience, such as a Catholic child might, of an awesome hierarchy that was real and felt, baseball was a kind of secular church that reached into every class and region of the nation and bound millions upon millions of us together in common concerns, loyalties, rituals, enthusiasms, and antagonisms. Baseball made me understand what patriotism was about, at its best.”

MONTE IRVIN: “Baseball has done more to move America in the right direction than all the professional patriots with their billions of cheap words.”

ROBERT COOVER: “There were things about the games I liked. The crowds, for example. I felt like I was part of something there, you know, like in church, except it was more real than any church, and I joined in the scorekeeping, hollering, the eating of hot dogs and drinking of Cokes and beer, and for a while I even had the idea that ball stadiums, and not European churches were the real American holy places.”

DAVID HALBERSTAM: “By and large it is the sport that a foreigner is least likely to take to. You have to grow up playing it, you have to accept the lore of the bubble-gum card, and believe that if the answer to the Mays-Snider-Mantle question is found, then the universe will be a simpler and more ordered place.”

ABE MARTIN: “Knowin’ all about baseball is just about as profitable as bein’ a good whittler.”

A. BARTLETT GIAMATTI: “It breaks your heart. It is designed to break your heart. The game begins in the spring, when everything else begins again, and it blossoms in the summer, filling the afternoons and evenings, and then as soon as the chill rains come, it stops and leaves you to face the fall alone.”

DONALD HALL: “Baseball is continuous, like nothing else among American things, and endless game of repeated summers, joining the long generations of all the fathers and all the sons.”

DWIGHT DAVID EISENHOWER: “When I was a boy growing up in Kansas, a friend of mine and I went fishing and as we sat there in the warmth of a summer afternoon on a river bank we talked about what we wanted to do when we grew up. I told him I wanted to be a real major league baseball player, a genuine professional like Honus Wagner. My friend said that he’d like to be President of the United States. Neither of us got our wish.”

BUG HOLLIDAY: “This is a funny business. We get paid to knock the cover off the ball, and pitchers get paid to keep us from hitting it.”

DAMON RUNYON: “Mathewson pitched against Cincinnati yesterday. Another way of putting it is that Cincinnati lost a game of baseball. The first statement means the same as the second.”

CHRISTY MATHEWSON: “I have seen McGraw go on to ball fields where he is as welcome as a man with the black smallpox…. I have seen him take all sorts of personal chances. He doesn’t know what fear is.”

GRANTLAND RICE: “McGraw’s very walk across the field in a hostile town was a challenge to the multitude.”

CONNIE MACK: “I have never known a day when I didn’t learn something new about this game.”

RING LARDNER, about Walter Johnson: “He’s got a gun concealed about his person. They can’t tell me he throws them balls with his arm.”

SAM CRAWFORD, about Ed Walsh: “He threw a spitball — I think that ball disintegrated on the way to the plate and the catcher put it back together again. I swear, when it went past the plate it was just the spit went by.”

GEORGE STALLINGS: “Oh, those bases on balls!”

BUGS BAER, on a steal attempt by Ping Bodie: “He had larceny in his heart, but his feet were honest.”

YOUNG BOY: “Say it ain’t so, Joe. Say it ain’t so.” JOE JACKSON: “Yes, kid, I’m afraid it is.” YOUNG BOY: “Well, I never would have thought it.” (Conversation that supposedly took place outside a Chicago courtroom after Joe Jackson testified to a 1920 grand jury on his part in the World Series fix.)

JIMMY CANNON, about Babe Ruth: “He was a parade all by himself, a burst of dazzle and jingle. Santa Claus drinking his whiskey straight and groaning with a bellyache caused by gluttony….Babe Ruth made the music that his joyous years danced to in a continuous party….What Babe Ruth is comes down, one generation handing it to the next, as a national heirloom.”

JOE DUGAN, about Babe Ruth: “Born? Hell, Babe Ruth wasn’t born. The sonofabitch fell from a tree.”

WAITE HOYT: “Don’t tell me about Ruth; I’ve seen what he did to people. I’ve seen them, fans, driving miles in open wagons through the prairies of Oklahoma to see him in exhibition games as we headed north in the spring. I’ve seen them: kids, men, women, worshippers all, hoping to get his name on a torn, dirty piece of paper, or hoping for a grunt of recognition when they said, ‘Hi ya, Babe.’ He never let them down; not once. He was the greatest crowd pleaser of them all.”

WAITE HOYT: “Wives of ballplayers, when they teach their children their prayers, should instruct them to say: ‘God bless Mommy, God bless Daddy, God bless Babe Ruth!’ Babe has upped daddy’s paycheck by fifteen to forty percent.”

TOMMY HOLMES: “Some twenty years ago, I stopped talking about the Babe for the simple reason that I realized that those who had never seen him didn’t believe me.”

WAITE HOYT: “The secret of success as a pitcher lies in getting a job with the Yankees.”

CARL MAYS: “Championship baseball teams are not founded on bats. They’re built on a backbone of catching, pitching, a second base combination and a center fielder.”

MILLER HUGGINS, Yankee manager (once described by Gerald Holland as “the skinny little scrap of a fellow who did not seem to be able to find a uniform small enough to fit him”): “A manager has his cards dealt to him, and he must play them.”

LEE ALLEN, on Rogers Hornsby: “He was frank to the point of being cruel, and subtle as a belch.”

LOU GEHRIG, addressing the crowd at a day in his honor at Yankee Stadium, July 4, 1939: “Fans, for the past two weeks you have been reading about what a bad break I got. Yet today I consider myself the luckiest man on the face of the earth…. I might have had a tough break, but I have an awful lot to live for.”

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

Before Rarebit Fiend, before Little Nemo, before Gertie the Dinosaur: a portfolio of his little known baseball work

Winsor McCay’s fame rests on his pioneering animation work and stylized, gorgeous cartoon panels for Little Nemo in Slumberland. But once upon a time he was merely a cartoonist for the Cincinnati Enquirer, a fan of the Reds and National League ball, and an artist who returned to the game every now and then in surprising contexts. A baseball panel for Dreams of the Rarebit Fiend may be seen here: https://ourgame.mlblogs.com/dream-of-the-rarebit-fiend-ac459ca22d48.

Another baseball themed piece, an unfinished panel for Little Nemo from 1913, below:

But let’s focus here on the brief period when the artist, not yet famous, could truly be termed a baseball cartoonist. In 1891 Zenas Winsor McCay, in his twenties and uncertain of his career path except that he wanted to draw, had moved from Michigan to Cincinnati, where he met his future wife and would stay for more than a decade. In 1900 he became art director at the Cincinnati Enquirer, where most of the baseball sketches below first appeared. By year’s end he had moved to New York to work for the Herald. His heavily outlined figures, perhaps a product of his stained-glass training in the mid-1890s, gave his comic drawings a unique look. Students of McCay’s style may look for some of the exaggerated effects — for example, Jake Beckley’s length — as harbingers of the phantasmagoria made famous by Little Nemo in Slumberland.

And here’s the film footage promised at the top…

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

What if replay had existed way back when?

My old friend Bill Felber and I were kicking around some thoughts about instant replay last week and, typically indefatigable, he was inspired to look back at some of baseball’s celebrated disputes and, well, replay them. Would any or all of them have amounted to a hill of beans if instant replay had been available?

Whatever else it has done, the implementation of replay review has toned down some of baseball’s most argumentative moments. Gone are the days when a Bobby Cox, Lou Piniella, Sparky Anderson or Earl Weaver could combine cathartic exercise with theatrical relief disputing an umpire’s judgment call. The modern skipper just signals for the replay booth.

How different the game would have been if replay review had always been in effect. Possession of one or two World Series championships might have changed hands, at least one lost perfect game would have been ratified, a handful of umpires might have kept their jobs and a few players — and fans — would have stayed out of jail.

Below is a chronological description of a few of the most contentious disputes whose precipitation would have been avoided by replay, had that methodology existed at the time.

Baseballgate: May 3, 1899, Louisville Colonels at Pittsburgh Pirates. Ballparks could be quirky places in the 19th Century, and those quirks could present confounding circumstances. The visiting Colonels led 6–1 entering the bottom of the 9th inning when Pittsburgh staged a rally, scoring twice and bringing the tying run to the plate in the person of Jack McCarthy. He pulled a ball down the right field line that Colonels outfielder Charlie Dexter believed had landed foul. Base umpire Billy Smith thought otherwise and signaled it fair. Then things really got bizarre: the ball kicked wildly toward what the Pittsburgh newspapers described as a gate leading to the Pirates’ dressing room. A child near the gate opened it and appeared to kick the ball through it, then closed the gate to prevent Dexter from making a play and dashed off to anonymity. In the time it took Dexter to leap over the gate and fish through a clump of weeds for the ball, both runners and the batter had scored, tying the game. The next batter homered, sealing possibly the strangest comeback of all time. It was, anyway, until the visitors filed a protest regarding the boy’s actions, which was upheld and the game declared void.

Under review: Was McCarthy’s hit fair or foul? If so, did the boy interfere with play and if he did, where should the runners have been placed?

The good people of Baltimore vs. Tommy Connolly: Aug. 21, 1901, Detroit Tigers at Baltimore Orioles. In only his fourth of what would become a 35-season Hall of Fame career, Tommy Connolly had already generated a particular antipathy among the Baltimore fandom. So it was that Connolly’s assignment to umpire the Orioles’ game with the Tigers on May 21 provoked unusual passion, even among that always passionate throng. In the gathering heat, Orioles ownership asked Connolly to recuse himself from the scene of that day’s game. When he refused, the team called for a squad of 50 policemen to patrol the park. They would be needed.

In the fourth inning, Orioles third baseman Jack Dunn smashed a grounder toward Detroit first baseman Pop Dillon, who knocked it down, picked it up and raced Dunn to the bag. Connolly’s “out” call precipitated an argument that included Orioles pitcher Joe McGinnity spiking Connolly’s foot. Connolly reacted by declaring the game a forfeit to Detroit, which prompted a general melee, spectators muscling to reach Connolly and the police trying to restrain them. A bruised Connolly was hustled into the Orioles’ ticket office, where he was given refuge for an hour while the situation cooled, then driven way in an escorted coach. McGinnity, Detroit infielder Kid Elberfield, and a fan who punched Connolly were all arrested.

Under review: Was Dunn safe or out at first?

Tim Hurst’s spitting image: Aug. 3, 1909, Chicago White Sox at Philadelphia Athletics. Connie Mack’s A’s were four games behind the defending champion Tigers when play began in a doubleheader against the Chicago White Sox. The A’s won the first game 2–1 and rallied with a five-run seventh to take a 6–4 lead entering the bottom of the eighth inning of the second game. They had added three more runs when left fielder Heinie Heitmuller approached the plate with the bases full. Heitmuller lifted a fly ball to center that produced the inning’s fourth run, and which eventually prompted Eddie Collins, Philadelphia’s runner at first, to try for second. The base umpire was Tim Hurst, a veteran known for his combative nature and short fuse. A dozen years earlier, during a game at Cincinnati, Hurst had been the target of verbal abuse by the home crowd that turned physical when one fan fired a glass beer stein that landed at or on his feet. Hurst had reacted by picking up the stein and firing it back at the fan, striking him and opening up a forehead gash. For that action, Hurst had been arrested, found guilty of assault and fined $100.

There were no steins within reach as Collins slid into second, kicking at the ball held — perhaps insecurely — by second baseman Jake Atz. Some said Collins jarred it loose, others contended that Atz was already in the process of dropping the ball without Collins’ assistance. All witnesses, however, agreed that Collins was safe. All, that is, except Hurst, who called him out, claiming interference. A violent argument ensued during which Hurst fired a mouthful of tobacco juice directly into the popular hometown second baseman’s face. The angry Philadelphia crowd tried after the game to accost Hurst as he left the field, but police managed to keep the peace, barely. Reports inevitably reached American League President Ban Johnson, who called Hurst onto the carpet and fired him on the spot.

Under review: Did Atz drop the ball on his own?

Charles not in charge: Aug. 16, 1937, Cleveland Indians at New York Yankees. Charles Johnston was a nondescript American League umpire in his second season of work when he settled behind the plate for a game between the pennant-bound Yankees and the Indians. Cleveland led 6–5 with runners at second and third and one out when Red Rolfe tried to check his swing on a pitch in the dirt. Johnston signaled Rolfe had failed to do so, ringing up strike three when catcher Frankie Pytlak tagged Rolfe. Yankee manager Joe McCarthy protested, and Johnston — rather than standing by his call — confused the issue by telling McCarthy that Rolfe had tipped the ball. Were that the case, though, Rolfe would have continued to bat. McCarthy pointed out that fact, prompting Johnston to assume a third position. Now, he said, Rolfe had not swung at the pitch, which was outside the strike zone for ball three. Indians manager Steve O’Neill protested that change, causing Johnston to ask base umpire George Moriarty for help. Moriarty called Rolfe out on a dropped third strike. McCarthy announced he would file a formal protest.

The next hitter was Joe DiMaggio, who sent a line drive down the third base line where Odell Hale tipped it with his glove before the ball kicked into foul territory. That’s not the way Johnston saw it, however. He raised his hands and yelled foul, then denied that Hale had touched it. McCarthy appealed to Moriarty, who again overruled Johnston, allowing both runs to score, and ending the game 7–6 in New York’s favor. Now O’Neill filed a protest on two points: that Moriarty had no right to overrule Johnston, and that the only reason the runner at second had scored was because when Johnston called the ball foul O’Neill’s fielders had quit chasing it. AL President Will Harridge upheld the protest, declared the game invalid and ordered it replayed in its entirety. New York won the replay 3–1. Johnston’s contract was not renewed for 1938.

Under review: Did Rolfe foul tip the pitch? Did Hale touch DiMaggio’s line drive in fair territory?

Combat, by George: July 15, 1939, Cincinnati Reds at New York Giants. The first place Reds trailed the second place Giants 4–3 entering the eighth inning. With one out and a runner on first, Reds outfielder Harry Craft slammed a low line drive down the short left field line for what plate umpire Lee Ballanfant ruled a two-run home run. His call prompted outrage among the Giants, who, believing the ball had been foul, confronted Ballanfant and then base umpire Ziggy Sears. Sears, who had been stationed near second under the three-umpire system in use then, recused himself, in the process ejecting Giants outfielder Jo-Jo Moore. When first base umpire George Magerkurth joined the fray in an effort to assist Sears, Giants infielder Billy Jurges got into a verbal bout with Magerkurth that soon escalated into fisticuffs. Ballanfant ejected Jurges, but both he and Magerkurth were summoned to National League offices by President Ford Frick who — unable to determine fault for the fray — gave both of them $150 fines and 10-day suspensions.

Under review: Was Harry Craft’s ball fair or foul?

Food and drink: Aug. 21, 1949, New York Giants at Philadelphia Phillies: Seeking a split of their Sunday doubleheader, the Giants led 3–2 with one out and a runner at third when first baseman Joe Lafata sent a sinking liner in the direction of Phillies centerfielder Richie Ashburn. Ashburn raced in to make what the home fans saw as a shoestring catch, but first base umpire George Barr ruled otherwise, declaring that Ashburn had trapped the ball for a run-scoring hit. Manager Eddie Sawyer led a charge of Phillies personnel in the direction of Barr, and that further raised the ire of the home fans. They launched an extended array of empty bottles and fruit in Barr’s direction, and after a few moments without letup, plate umpire Al Barlick declared the game forfeited to New York.

Under review: Did Ashburn catch the ball or trap it?

Two balls in play: July 30, 1959, St. Louis Cardinals at Chicago Cubs. Sometimes umpires get distracted. That’s the only explanation that accounts for what happened to plate umpire Vic Delmore in the fourth inning of the game between the Cardinals and Cubs at Wrigley Field. Stan Musial, the batter, checked his swing on a 3–1 pitch that sailed past Cubs catcher Sammy Taylor to the backstop. Taylor, convinced that Musial had tipped the ball, did not chase it, but instead argued with Delmore as the ball rolled to the bricks behind home. While third baseman Alvin Dark retrieved the ball, Musial sprinted around first and headed toward second, trying to beat Dark’s throw. While all that was happening, Delmore absent-mindedly gave pitcher Bob Anderson — who had joined Taylor in the dispute at home — a second ball, which Anderson also fired toward second. The two balls arrived at virtually the same moment, Dark’s sailing into center field and Anderson’s winding up in the grasp of shortstop Ernie Banks. Musial, seeing a ball rolling into center, headed for third only to run into Banks, who tagged him. Now what? Delmore and umpire Al Barlick conferred and declared Musial out at second. St. Louis protested, but League President Warren Giles was spared the need to sort out the whole mess when the Cardinals won 4–1. Instead, Giles fired Delmore.

Under review: Did Musial foul tip the 3–1 pitch?

Umpire interference: October 10, 1970, Baltimore Orioles at Cincinnati Reds. The first game of the World Series was tied 3–3 in the bottom of the sixth when Reds manager Sparky Anderson sent Ty Cline to the plate to pinch hit for infielder Woody Woodward. Bernie Carbo carried the lead run at third and Tommy Helms an insurance run at first. Cline managed only a tap high off the plate that Orioles catcher Elrod Hendricks waited for as Carbo raced down the line from third. The plate umpire, Ken Burkhart, was a former pitcher with 17 years experience on the National League umpiring staff, but in this critical moment he forgot his positioning fundamentals and in so doing touched off an uproar. When the ball was hit Burkhart took up a position straddling the line just feet from home. That forced Carbo to slide behind Burkhart, who was knocked onto his backside by the confluence of Carbo and catcher Elrod Hendricks lunging behind the umpire to make the tag. From his rear, facing away from the play, Burkhart signaled “out,” precipitating an argument with Anderson. Surviving video is just grainy enough that reasonable minds might differ about whether Carbo was actually safe or out. Despite Burkhart’s insistence that he saw Hendricks tag Carbo, it’s unlikely that the umpire — with his back to the action — was in position to know either way. As crucial as it was at the moment, Burkhart’s call became more so when the Reds failed to score. The Orioles produced a seventh inning run to win the game 4–3, and they eventually won the Series 4–1.

Under review: Was Carbo safe or out at home?

The sacrificial lamb: Oct. 14, 1975, Boston Red Sox at Cincinnati Reds. The 1975 World Series was tied at a game apiece when Ed Armbrister came to bat with a runner at first in the 10th inning of a 5–5 tie. Armbrister was a light-hitting reserve outfielder with one mission from manager Sparky Anderson: bunt Cesar Geronimo over to second where the top of the Reds order — Pete Rose, Ken Griffey or Joe Morgan — could get him home. Armbrister produced the requisite bunt … but it was a weak one traveling only a foot or two before Sox catcher Carlton Fisk grabbed it and fired to second. As Fisk did so, however, he ran squarely into Armbrister who was attempting to leave the batter’s box in front of Fisk. Fisk’s jostled throw sailed into center field, enabling Geronimo to slide safely into third and Armbrister to reach second. Fisk and Sox manager Darrell Johnson lobbied vainly for plate umpire Larry Barnett to declare Armbrister out for interference. Barnett refused and moments later Morgan’s single produced the winning run. The Reds went on to win the Series in seven games.

Under review: Did Armbrister interfere with Fisk’s throw to second?

The hippie Yankee: Oct. 14, 1978, Los Angeles Dodgers at New York Yankees. The Dodgers led two games to one and led the fourth game 3–1 in the sixth inning when the contest pivoted suddenly on Reggie Jackson’s hip. Jackson was on first and Thurman Munson at second when Lou Piniella hit a low liner that Bill Russell short-hopped to set up what appeared to be an inning ending double play. Russell stepped on second, retiring Jackson, and threw to first, the ball striking the hip of Jackson — who was still in the baseline — and deflecting away. Dodger manager Tommy Lasorda argued strenuously — and correctly, as replays later verified — that Jackson had slightly thrust his hip toward the ball, subtly but deliberately deflecting it. But first base umpire Frank Pulli disagreed, allowing Piniella to reach first and Munson to score.

The Yankees pushed across the tying run in the eighth and scored the winning run in the 10th, eventually claiming the Series in six games.

Under review: Did Jackson interfere with Russell’s throw to first?

The Denkinger call: Oct. 26, 1985, St. Louis Cardinals at Kansas City Royals. Rare is the moment when it can be said with certainty that an umpire’s bad call reversed a game’s legitimate outcome, and the sixth game of the 1985 Series doesn’t fit that description, either. But don’t tell that to Cardinal fans. In the ninth inning, the Cardinals were three outs away from wrapping up the title. They led 1–0 as pinch hitter Jorge Orta led off with a light bouncer to the right side that Cards’ first baseman Jack Clark fielded. Replays showed that Clark’s flip to pitcher Todd Worrell beat Orta, but that’s not the way Denkinger saw it. He called Orta safe, much to the chagrin of Cardinal manager Whitey Herzog, who protested vehemently to no avail. Fast-forward through a succession of interesting “what-ifs” to find the Royals’ Dane Iorg facing a bases-loaded, one out situation. Iorg dropped a game-winning single into right field. The next night, with Denkinger now calling balls and strikes, the Cardinals came apart. John Tudor allowed five runs in the first two innings, both Herzog and Joaquin Andujar were ejected during a six-run Royals fifth for disputing Denkinger’s strike zone, and Kansas City won the World Series.

Under review: Was Orta safe or out at first base?

Child’s play: Oct. 9, 1996: Baltimore Orioles at New York Yankees. The first game of the 1996 ALCS was tied 3–3 in the bottom of the eighth inning when Derek Jeter lifted a fly ball deep to right field. With his back brushing the wall, Orioles outfielder Tony Tarasco prepared to make the catch, only to look up and see a glove-wielding kid reach over the wall and snatch the descending ball, carrying it into the seats. Right field umpire Rich Garcia, who was positioned perfectly to make the call, immediately ruled that the kid — later identified as a 12-year-old named Jeffrey Maier — had not interfered with a ball in play, although replays made it plain that’s exactly what had happened. Orioles manager Davey Johnson disputed Garcia’s call, getting ejected for his trouble, but not before filing a formal protest, which AL President Gene Budig rejected on the ground that judgment calls are not subject to protest. The Yankees won the game in 11 innings, won the Series in five games and defeated the Atlanta Braves in the World Series.

Under review: Did Jeffrey Maier interfere with Tarasco’s opportunity to catch Jeter’s fly ball?

The imperfect game: June 2, 2010: Cleveland Indians at Detroit Tigers. Armando Galarraga was on his way to a 4–9 record for the Detroit Tigers when he took the mound that summer day in Detroit. Galarraga retired the first 26 hitters he faced, leaving only Indians rookie Jason Donald between him and a perfect game. Donald hit a ground ball midway between first and second that Tigers first baseman Miguel Cabrera grabbed and fired to Galarraga, covering first. Despite the fact that replays appeared to plainly show the throw had beaten Donald and that Galarraga had touched first, umpire Jim Joyce ruled Donald safe, spoiling the perfect game. After reviewing the replay, Joyce admitted his mistake and tearfully apologized to Galarraga.

Under review: Was Jason Donald safe or out at first base?

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

My old friend and inveterate Mets fan Muhammad Cohen shared this with me a few days ago. Thought provoking.

Seems to be that there may be fewer active drop-dead Hall of Famers playing right now than at any time in the past couple of decades. By drop-dead, I mean they drop dead today and they’re in. Part of that is because there are so many young talented players who haven’t passed the 10 year threshold, such as Trout.

As I see it, current ddHoFs are Pujols, Beltre, Miguel Cabrera, Ichiro, and Kershaw, who just crossed the 10-season mark (to my surprise). After that, you’re into probables, such as Verlander, Cano and, I spit on the ground and fart in the general direction of all things Budweiser, Yadier Molina (ba-fahn-gool). One-blue-eye Scherzer, also just past the 10 year mark, and large black guy Sabbathia, a cut below. Who else?

Posey is at nine years, Adrian Gonzalez, Adam Jones and Nelson Cruz lack the body of career work to date, Wright and Reyes go in the Hillary Clinton “Woulda, Shoulda, Coulda” wing.

I wonder if there’s anything more to this than just coincidence, or whether trends toward cutting players rather going to arbitration and thus declaring them marginal, the slower free agent market for middling types, and the devaluation of power (let’s see who wants Todd “Down Goes” Frazier this winter) leads to fewer guys being able to amass career numbers the way Cruz has — remember he nearly got run out of the big leagues before the O’s signed him.

For the record, I think moving the Hall of Fame to Jerusalem is a terrible idea, though is there a fan out there who hasn’t wished for a wailing wall at one time or another?

Pitchers and catchers in 61 days.

Catch Muhammad Cohen in Forbes, Inside Asian Gaming, South China Morning Post’s This Week in Asia, Asia Times, The Guardian, on Facebook and Twitter @MuhammadCohen. Find his blog, online archive and more at www.muhammadcohen.com.

Active Hall of Famers was originally published in Our Game on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

More fun stuff, amassed over the decades

A few weeks ago I offered a bouquet of baseball quotations, gathered with no particular end in mind. Folks seemed to like ’em, so here’s more, presented in no particular order, except for a rousing finale in Stengelese.

RUSS HODGES, after Bobby Thomson hit the home run that won the 1951 playoff. “The Giants win the pennant! The Giants win the pennant! I don’t believe it — the Giants win the pennant.”

RABBIT MARANVILLE: “There is much less drinking now than there was before 1927, because I quit drinking on May 24, 1927.”

BUGS BAER, on Lefty Grove: “He could throw a lamb chop past a wolf.”

FRANKIE FRISCH, who played both second and third during his career: “There’s nothing tough about playing third, All a guy needs is a strong arm and a strong chest.”

TED WILLIAMS: “All I want out of life is that when I walk down the street folks will say, There goes the greatest hitter who ever lived.”

BRANCH RICKEY: “Leo Durocher is a man with an infinite capacity for immediately making a bad thing worse.”

BOBBY BROWN: “The art of hitting is the art of getting your pitch to hit.”

WARREN SPAHN: “A pitcher needs two pitches — one they’re looking for and one to cross’em up.”

ENOS SLAUGHTER: “I’ll never quit. They’ll have to tear my uniform off.”

JOE DIMAGGIO: “There is no trick to catching a ball in the open field…. The test of an outfielder’s skill comes when he has to go against the fence to make a catch.”

JIMMY CANNON (1947): “Jackie Robinson is the loneliest man I have ever seen in sports.”

WILLIE MAYS: “It’s not hard. When I’m not hittin,’ I don’t hit nobody. But when I’m hittin’, I hit anybody.”

PREACHER ROE: “I got three pitches: my change; my change off my change; and my change off my change off my change.”

FRESCO THOMPSON, on Willie Mays’s glove: “Where triples go to die.”

BILL VEECK: “I try not to break the rules but merely to test their elasticity.”

RED SMITH: “Rooting for the New York Yankees is like rooting for U.S. Steel.”

WARREN SPAHN, who played for Casey Stengel in 1940s when he managed the Braves and in his last year as manager of the Mets: “I’m probably the only guy who worked for Stengel before and after he became a genius.”

WHITEY FORD: “You would be amazed how many important outs you can get by working the count down to where the hitter is sure you’re going to throw to his weakness and then throw to his power instead.”

JIMMY BRESLIN: “Having Marv Throneberry play for your team is like having Willie Sutton play for your bank.”

ELIJAH “PUMPSIE” GREEN: “Some day I’ll write a book and call it How I Got the Nickname ‘Pumpsie’ and sell it for one dollar, and if everybody who ever asked me that question buys the book, I’ll be a millionaire.”

RICHIE ASHBURN, who finished his long, distinguished career with the hapless Mets: “I don’t know what’s going on, but I know I’ve never seen it before.”

STANTON DELAPLANE: “Oh, once I tried to be a sportswriter. I wrote, ‘Snively hit a home run.’ The sports editor was aghast. He said, ‘He wafted the spheroid over the pickets! Can’t you write English?’ I had to admit I couldn’t. Not sports English. So they put me back on pistol-packing mamas, talking dogs and club luncheons. I made a living out of it.”

SANDY KOUFAX: “I became a good pitcher when I stopped trying to make them miss the ball and started trying to make them hit it.”

DON DRYSDALE: “I’ve got one way to pitch to righties — tight.”

VERNON LAW: “If you don’t play to win, why keep score?

BOB BELINSKY. After throwing a no-hitter in 1962, the Angels’ glamour boy said, “If I’d known I was gonna pitch a no-hitter today, I would have gotten a haircut. My only regret in life is that I can’t sit in the stands and watch me pitch.”

TIM McCARVER: “Bob Gibson is the luckiest pitcher I ever saw. He always pitches when the other team doesn’t score any runs.”

JIM BROSNAN: “Umpires are most vigorous when defending their miscalls.”

BROOKS ROBINSON: “I could field as long as I can remember. But hitting has been a struggle all my life.”

MICKEY LOLICH: “The only thing running and exercising can do for you is make you healthy.”

CURT FLOOD: “I am a man, not a consignment of goods to be bought and sold.”

RON SWOBODA: “Why am I wasting so much dedication on a mediocre career?”

JOSH GIBSON, Jr., on the induction of his late father into the Hall of Fame in 1972: “I want to say something personal to my father. Wake up, Dad, you just made it in.”

DICK ALLEN, toward the end of his career: Your body is just like a bar of soap. It gradually wears down from repeated use.

BOB LEMON: “I had my bad days on the field, but I didn’t take them home with me. I left them in a bar along the way.”

GRAIG NETTLES, on Sparky Lyle, after the award-winning reliever was traded to Texas following the 1978 season: “He went from Cy Young to sayonara in a year.”

CASEY STENGEL: “The secret of managing a club is to keep the five guys who hate you away from the five who are undecided.”

CASEY STENGEL, accepting congratulations for another Yankee pennant: “I couldna done it without my players.”

CASEY STENGEL: “What’s the use of askin’ a man to execute if he can’t execute?”

CASEY STENGEL: “I always heard it couldn’t be done, but sometimes it don’t always work.”

CASEY STENGEL, on why the Mets chose a catcher as their first pick in the expansion draft: “You have to have a catcher, because if you don’t, you’re likely to have a lot of passed balls.”

CASEY STENGEL: “You gotta lose ’em some time. When you do, lose ’em right.”

CASEY STENGEL, age seventy-five: “Most people my age are dead at the present time, and you could look it up.”

CASEY STENGEL: “There comes a time in every man’s life and I’ve had plenty of ’em.”

CASEY STENGEL: You look up and down the bench and you have to say to yourself: “Can’t anybody here play this game?”

CASEY STENGEL, in spring training with the Yanks in 1956 after Don Larsen banged his car into a telephone pole at 4 A.M. “He was probably mailing a letter.”

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

Not all of baseball’s great quotations are snippets

ERIC ROLFE GREENBERG: “To be a pitcher! I thought. A pitcher, standing at the axis of event, or a catcher with the God-view of the play all before him; to be a shortstop, lord of the infield, or a center fielder with unchallenged claim to all the territory one’s speed and skill could command; to perform the spontaneous acrobatics of the third baseman or the practiced ballet of the man at second, or to run and throw with the absolute commitment of the outfielder! And to live in a world without grays, where all decisions were final: ball or strike, safe or out, the game won or lost beyond question or appeal.”

A. BARTLETT GIAMATTI: “It breaks your heart. It is designed to break your heart. The game begins in the spring, when everything else begins again, and it blossoms in the summer, filling the afternoons and evenings, and then as soon as the chill rains come, it stops and leaves you to face the fall alone. You count on it, rely on it to buffer the passage of time, to keep the memory of sunshine and high skies alive, and then just when the days are all twilight, when you need it most, it stops.”

EARL WEAVER: “You can’t sit on a lead and run a few plays into the line and just kill the clock. You’ve got to throw the ball over the goddamn plate and give the other man his chance. That’s why baseball is the greatest game of them all.”

EDNA FERBER: “Any man who can look handsome in a dirty baseball suit is an Adonis. There is something about the baggy pants, and the Micawber-shaped collar, and the skull-fitting cap, and the foot or so of tan, or blue, or pink undershirt sleeve sticking out at the arms, that just naturally kills a man’s best points. Then too, a baseball suit requires so much in the matter of leg. Therefore, when I say that Rudie Schlachweiler was a dream even in his baseball uniform, with a dirty brown streak right up the side of his pants where he had slid for base, you may know that the girls camped on the grounds during the season.”

W.P. KINSELLA: “As I look around the empty park, almost Greek in its starkness, I feel an awesome inarticulate love for this very stadium and the game it represents. I am reminded of the story about the baseball fans of Milwaukee, and what they did on a warm fall afternoon, the day after it was announced that Milwaukee was to have a major-league team the next season. According to the story, 10,000 people went to County Stadium that afternoon and sat in the seats and smiled out at the empty playing field-sat in silence, in awe, in wonder, in anticipation, in joy-just knowing that soon the field would come alive with the chatter of infielders, bright as bird chirps.”

GEORGE BERNARD SHAW: “What is both surprising and delightful is that the spectators are allowed, and even expected, to join in the vocal part of the game. I do not see why this feature should not be introduced into cricket. There is no reason why the field should not try to put the batsman off his stroke at the critical moment by neatly timed disparagements of his wife’s fidelity and his mother’s respectability.”

LEO DUROCHER: Why don’t you admit they were real home runs? asked Red Barber. Why don’t you be a nice guy for a change? “A nice guy! A nice guy! I been around baseball for a long time and I’ve known a lot of nice guys.” Gesturing toward the Giant dugout, “Nice guys! Look over there. Do you know a nicer guy than Mel Ott? Or any of the other Giants? Why, they’re the nicest guys in the world! And where are they? In last place! Nice guys! I’m not a nice guy — and I’m in first place. Take it from me, nice guys finish last.”

WILLIAM SAROYAN: “Two events are supremely beautiful: the strikeout and the home run. Each is a difficult and unlikely thing flawlessly achieved before your eyes.”

THOMAS WOLFE: “Is there anything that can evoke spring — the first fine days of April — better than the sound of the ball smacking into the pocket of the big mill, the sound of the bat as it hits the horsehide…? And is there anything that can tell more about an American summer than, say, the smell of the wooden bleachers in a small-town baseball park, that resinous, sultry, and exciting smell of old dry wood.”

GEORGE F. WILL: “In the deepest sediment of my soul, I know that the Cubs have been good for me. They have taught me the first rule of reasonable living: discern the inevitable and submit to it without tears.”

HEYWOOD BROUN, Philadelphia Record, July 30, 1936: “No Landon speech is likely to startle anybody. You know in advance that he will never take a full cut at the ball, try to steal a base or catch a line drive with one hand. Alf W. Landon is up there under instructions from the bench to wait’em out. He has yet to take his bat off his shoulder. Just once he tried to bunt, but that was foul.”

ERNIE HARWELL: “Baseball is cigar smoke, hot-roasted peanuts, The Sporting News, Ladies’ Day, Down in Front, Take Me Out to the Ball Game, the seventh-Inning Stretch and the Star-Spangled Banner. Baseball is a highly paid Brooklyn catcher telling the nation’s business leaders: ‘You have to be a man to be a big leaguer, but you have to have a lot of little boy in you too.’ This is a game for America — this baseball. A game for boys and for men.”

DONALD HALL: “Baseball connects generations. When you are small you may not discuss politics or union dues or profit margins with your father’s cigar-smoking friends when your father has gone out for a six-pack; but you may discuss baseball. It is all you have in common, because your father’s friend does not wish to discuss the Assistant Principal or Alice Bisbee Morgan.”

BRUCE CATTON: “Baseball is conservative. What was good enough in Cap Anson’s day is good enough now, and a populace that could stand unmoved while the Federal Constitution was amended would protest with vehemence at any tampering with the formalities of baseball.”

ALLEN SANGREE: “The fundamental reason for the popularity of the game is the fact that it is a national safety valve…. Now a young, ambitious and growing nation needs to ‘let off steam.’ Baseball furnishes the opportunity…. It serves the same purpose as a revolution in Central America or a thunderstorm on a hot day….”

JUDGE I.B. COOPER, in Flood v.Kuhn, 1970: “Baseball’s status in the life of the nation is so pervasive that it would not strain credulity to say the Court can take judicial notice that baseball is everybody’s business. To put it mildly and with restraint, it would be unfortunate indeed if a fine sport and profession, which brings surcease from daily travail and an escape from the ordinary to most inhabitants of this land, were to suffer in the least because of undue concentration by any one or any group on commercial and profit considerations. The game is on higher ground; it behooves everyone to keep it there.”

FORD FRICK: To the St. Louis Cardinals, rumored to be planning a strike in May 1947: “If you do this you will be suspended from the league. You will find that the friends you think you have in the press box will not support you, that you will be outcasts. I do not care if half the league strikes. Those who do it will encounter quick retribution. They will be suspended and I don’t care if it wrecks the National League for five years. This is the United States of America, and one citizen has as much right to play as any other. The National League will go down the line with Robinson whatever the consequence.”

DAVID HALBERSTAM: “By and large it is the sport that a foreigner is least likely to take to. You have to grow up playing it, you have to accept the lore of the bubble-gum card, and believe that if the answer to the Mays-Snider-Mantle question is found, then the universe will be a simpler and more ordered place.”

PAUL GALLICO: “As a matter of fact, no game in the world is as tidy and dramatically neat as baseball, with cause and effect, crime and punishment, motive and result, so cleanly defined. The consequences of a single error or failure pyramid inexorably as the game goes on and finally prove to be the events that have won or lost the day, exactly as the minor, unnoticed incidents unfolded at the beginning of a well-constructed play suddenly loom up as prime and all-important to the climax.”

RUBE FOSTER: “The real test comes when you are pitching with men on bases. Do not worry. Try to appear jolly and unconcerned. I have smiled often with the bases full with two strikes and three balls on the batter. This seems to unnerve. In other instances, where the batter appears anxious to hit, waste a little time on him and when you think he realizes his position and everybody yelling at him to hit it out, waste a few balls and try his nerve; the majority of times you will win out by drawing him into hitting at a wide one.

They Said It … Just a Little Bit Longer was originally published in Our Game on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Mac Mann, Ham Avery, and Candy Cummings square off at the nexus of legend and fact

Who threw the first curve? The first no-hitter? This story challenges the conventional answer to the first, Candy Cummings, and the second — George Bradley, on July 15, 1876 if you count from MLB’s founding in 1876, or Joe Borden’s on July 28, 1875 in the National Association. Complicating the no-hitter question is Pud Galvin’s no-hitter in an exhibition game against the Philadelphia Athletics of the NL on July 4, 1876, when he was with the St. Louis Red Stockings, an NA participant in 1875 that was not admitted to the NL for 1876. Among the challengers to Cummings’ primacy with the curve, names tossed about have included Fred Goldsmith, Hamilton Avery, Bobby Mathews, Phonney Martin, and even Jim Creighton.

All the pitchers mentioned above, however, may have to stand aside for Joseph McElroy (“Mac”) Mann of Princeton (1856–1919). In 1876, the year of his graduation from Princeton, he set the first official world record in the shot-put at 9.44 metres (31 feet). Setting baseball aside — he had thrown too many curves, he believed — he joined the staff of the New York World. From 1886 until his death he was with Charles Scribner’s Sons, employed in the publication of Scribner’s Magazine.

Here is his baseball story, excerpted from Athletics at Princeton: A History, 1901.

1874–75 PRINCETON UNIVERSITY BASEBALL CLUB. J.M. Woods, ’76, Captain.

THE NINE. J.O. Denny, ’77, c; J.M. [Joseph McElroy] Mann, ’76, p.; J.A. Campbell, ’77, 1st.; J.M. Woods, ’76, 2nd.; M.W. Jacobus, ’77, 3rd.; D. Laughlin, ’77, ss.; J.F. Duffield, ’76, lf.; L.M. Walker, ’76, cf.; S.W. Bradford, ’75, rf. Substitutes: W.R. Bruyere, ’74; R.F. Karge, ’78; H.B. Kaufman, ’77; G.W. Mann, ’72; H. Moffat, ’75 ; T. Sheldon, ’75.

The ball season of the autumn closed with the Philadelphia game, in which Princeton was defeated by the strong pitcher, Cummings.

In this game, the Philadelphia catcher missed a good many balls and to excuse himself after one very costly passed ball, he said, “That ball went zigzag.” Probably he meant that the ball curved, for the pitcher was Cummings, whom the professionals call the “inventor of curves.” Undoubtedly Cummings did pitch curves in this game, and even earlier, and he says he learned the trick from curving clam shells on the beach. But, as this history shows, E. Davis, ’70 had been pitching curves much earlier than Cummings. In this Philadelphia game, Cummings would stand at the home base when the ball was not in play and pitch (he did not throw underhand), the ball down to second base and it curved to the left just before it was caught. Another player, York, would throw the ball in from left field and it looked as if it would go away off into right field, but suddenly the ball seemed to drop right down to the base. These peculiar balls puzzled the college players, especially Mann; they saw that the balls curved, but did not realize how it was done.

The excitement of the fall elections had divided the college into two political parties, and the baseball season was closed by a grand game of baseball between the Democrats and Republicans. “Mac” Mann had been pitching more than usual in the previous week and had a very sore second finger, where the ball, on leaving his hand, had worn off the skin. Mann played third base until the game was well advanced, when the opponents sized up the pitcher and were batting him all over the field. Then Mann was coaxed into the box to save the game. In order to save his sore finger, he let the ball go out of his hand in a different manner than usual. The first striker up missed the ball. The second ball was also missed, and Mann noticed that it was peculiar, but could not determine in what respect. He turned to M.W. Jacobus, ’77, who was playing shortstop, and said: “Here goes for three strikes.” Sure enough the batter struck out. Then Mann said, “Those balls curved.” Not content with knowing how to pitch curves he set to work to find why they curved. Finally he worked out the following demonstration:

“B is the ball going toward home plate H, at the rate of 50 feet per second; at the same time revolving on its axis at the rate of 50 feet per second. Hence the portion of the ball at A, as far as the atmosphere is concerned, will be going 100 feet per second. The portion of the ball at C will be going toward H, but as it is also revolving in the opposite direction at the same rate, as far as the atmosphere is concerned, there is no advance. Hence we have an atmospheric pressure on one side of 100 and of 0 on the other. Therefore the ball will be forced out of its course toward E. In order to get the opposite curve, the ball must be twisted so as to revolve in the opposite direction.”

All winter long Mann practised in the Gymnasium and in the spring, he had the pleasure of facing many surprised batters. His greatest curve was the outshoot, but he was able to pitch the inshoot and the drop also. This latter, however, had a very small deflection for the rule of that year forbade a pitcher to raise his arm in throwing above his waist. Two years later, when Mann had strained his arm, this rule was changed, and with a full arm motion W.M. Smith, ’77, developed the drop, which he used with so much effectiveness that he has the credit for its invention. As “Mac”Mann himself says, he did not invent the curving of a ball for “as long as baseball has been played and baseballs have had seams with which to catch the air, curve balls have been thrown; and the curve was especially noticeable in the case of a left handed thrower, whose curve was in the opposite direction from that of a right handed thrower. “ What he did accomplish was to demonstrate the effectiveness of the curve from the pitcher’s box, and to revolutionize the manner of delivering the ball to the batter. Unfortunately, however, he was young at the time and too inexperienced to conceal his secret. The chief topic of comment in baseball circles was Mann’s pitching, and many players came to Princeton to watch the college nine play. The fact that so many professionals seemed ignorant of curve pitching and hurried to see Mann, proves conclusively that Mann was the first pitcher to use the curve with any judgment and control over the ball. Very few people outside of ball players knew anything of the discovery and it is extremely amusing to read the following query in the Scientific American of July 28, 1877. “ It is claimed that certain baseball pitchers are able to throw a ball so that it can describe a horizontal curve in the air. Is such a thing possible with a perfectly spherical ball and in a still atmosphere?” The cautious editor ventured only to reply: “We have never seen it done.” This led to a long public discussion, which finally resulted in some practical experiments, or tests, at the Cincinnati baseball grounds, on October 20, 1877, which were of course successful.

[…]

The second game [of the 1875 season, after an opening game loss to the Chelseas of Brooklyn] was a defeat also, by Harvard. The nine did not play together and support Mann, who pitched very effectively.

Tyng, the Harvard third baseman, writes: “The first man to the bat on our side promptly struck out, the second followed suit, and the third did the same. Out of the first nine men at the bat, eight I think were unable to hit the ball. We had no idea what the trouble was, except that the bat and ball seemed to have a repulsion for each other which we could not overcome. About the fifth inning one of our men, who had been standing behind the catcher, came back with the announcement that the balls were curving away from the batsmen. There was a general exodus on our part to the back stop to watch this unheard-of phenomenon. Sure enough there were the balls coming in for the middle of the plate, and curving off beyond the reach of the bat.

“But we also noticed that Mann was pitching nothing but curves.

“By the time we had fully realized what was happening, six innings of the game had been played, and the score was 7–2 against us. Taking the longest bats we could find and letting the apparently good balls go by, and devoting our energies to those which seemed to be coming directly at us, on the supposition that the curve would carry them out where we could hit them, we began to ‘connect’ with the ball and finally managed to pull the game out of the fire. Of course Mann’s mistake of not varying his curve with a straight ball, was a fatal one. He had got a ‘good thing’ and on the principle that you cannot get too much of that kind of a commodity, he made the fullest use of it.”

After winning the game on May 20, with the Flyaways, of Brooklyn, the nine was defeated on the following day by the Centennials, of Philadelphia, in a close match, with the remarkable score of 2–1.

As the Centennials were a professional club, it was supposed their victory would be easy, but so hotly was the game contested that in the eighth inning the score stood 1–1. The first run was made by Princeton, during the second inning; while the Centennials did not score until the third. From this time forth, until the ninth inning, not a run was made by either nine. At the close of the ninth inning, the Centennials scored the winning run on an error. The outfield had almost nothing to do on account of Mann’s pitching.

Three days later, Princeton defeated the famous Atlantic Club, of Brooklyn, by the then remarkable score of 3–2.

The result of the Centennial game increased the attendance at this game. The day was fine and never did Princeton play better. For one hour and twenty minutes the audience was in almost breathless suspense watching the issue of the game, alternately applauding the playing of either side. The peculiar pitching of Mann gave the Brooklynites great trouble, while the catching of Dessar [sic; surely Denny is meant — jt] won the admiration of all, and when at the close of the game it was announced that Princeton was the winner by a score of 3–2, Princeton enthusiasm knew no bounds and their cheers rent the air. There were but few errors on either side. The excitement ran high at the beginning of the ninth inning, when the Atlantics had one man on second and third and two men out. Mann made a beautiful play, however, and touched out the man on second who had ventured too far from his base.

[After bruising losses to Yale and Harvard]on May 29, the nine met for a second time this year with the unusually strong nine of Yale.

Both nines were well trained and disciplined — Yale by a succession of victories, Princeton with the discipline of defeat.

[Charles Hammond] Avery for Yale, and Mann for Princeton, were the most effective pitchers ever brought on the field by college nines. In the first inning, Princeton scored one run and two more in the eighth.

Yale, through errors, succeeded in getting a man on first, both in the first and second innings. From that time throughout the game no Yale man reached first base.

The game on both sides was faultless in the fielding. Laughlin at short, and Woods on third, played without errors. Denny behind the bat, and Campbell on first, were equally faultless in their play, while Duffield in left, and Moffat on second made some difficult running catches, Walker, Mann and Denny leading at the bat. The feature of the game, however, was Mann’s pitching; while Princeton made eight base hits on Avery’s pitching. So successfully did Mann pitch, that Yale failed to secure a single base hit; he had learned by the experience of the Harvard games to vary his pitching and the Yale men, unfamiliar with his motions, could not tell which ball would curve and which straight.

The score of 3–0 in Princeton’s favor went upon record as the best college game ever played and the best amateur game at that time recorded.

[Princeton closed out the season with an 11–1 loss to Cummings and the Hartfords, followed by victories over Burlington (6–2) and the New Haven club of the National Association (4–2).]

It had been a wonderful season, full of small scores and good playing; though the chief credit belongs to the pitching of Mann. Small scores were less frequent then than now, and Princeton was proud of the nine that had lost and won the games with the scores of 2–1, 3–2, 6–2, 4–2. And even yet Princeton boasts of the 3–0 game with Yale, for it is the only game with Princeton in which Yale did not score a single base hit.

Next time, a prologue of sorts: an even earlier history of baseball at Princeton and the Old Nassau club. See: https://ourgame.mlblogs.com/baseball-at-princeton-and-more-about-mann-and-the-curve-501b668ea6a7

Curve Pitching at Princeton was originally published in Our Game on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Bas[t]eball goes back, back, back to 1786

Back in 2004 I created a bit of a stir when I announced at a press conference in Pittsfield, Massachusetts that I had come upon a mid-19th century reference to baseball being played under that name in that place in 1791. Moreover the city had, amazingly, retained the original prohibition of ball play within eighty yards of a newly constructed meeting house; the aim was the preservation of the windows. The newsworthy feature of this find was to place baseball’s beginnings not in Cooperstown in 1839 or New York City in 1823 but in western Massachusetts at a time when the United States of America was a teenager and the Constitution a mere toddler, four years old. And if baseball were among the games banned in 1791 — including wicket, cricket, batball, football, cat, and fives (handball) — then surely it had not first been played in the year of its prohibition.

In fact a game featuring the essential aspects of baseball — two opposing teams, a bat, a ball, and a circuit of bases that must be run to create a tally — appears to have been played in the Colonies as early as 1735, most often called roundball — not describing the ball, obviously round, but the circular tour of the bases. (For more in this vein, see “The Pittsfield Bylaw: What It Means”; https://goo.gl/of45Mx.) But as promised in the title above, today’s post is about Princeton, so let’s get on to that.

Anticipating Pittsfield’s wish not to incur the cost of new glass panes, Dartmouth College— where wicket and cricket were the students’ games of choice — prohibited ball play near windows in 1780, and the University of Pennsylvania followed suit in 1784. Three years later, the faculty of Princeton (then known as the College of New Jersey) prohibited ball play:

It appearing that a play at present much practiced by the smaller boys among the students and by the grammar schol­ars with balls and sticks in the back common of the College is in itself low and unbecoming gentlemen & students and in as much as it is an exercise attended with great danger to the health by sudden and alternate heats and colds as it tends by accidents almost unavoidable in that play to disfiguring and maiming those who are engaged in it for whose health and safety as well as improvement in study as far as depends on our exertions we are accountable to their Parents & liable to be severely blamed by them: and in as much as there are many amusements both more hon ourable and more useful in which they are indulged: Therefore the Faculty think incumbent on them to prohibit both the students & grammar scholars from using the play aforesaid.

One year earlier, Princeton student John Rhea Smith (1767 — 1830) had noted in his diary for Wednesday, March 22, 1786: “A fine day; play baste ball in the campus, but am beaten for I miss both catching and striking the Ball.” Smith is portrayed above, some 15 years after his graduation, and below in silhouette in 1785, the year he went to Princeton, matriculating as a junior by examination.

Smith used baste as a corruption of “base” in two separate contexts: “baste ball” and “prisoners’ baste,” a game of tag. This in my view renders the Princeton diary the first textual reference to a game we should regard as baseball, even if one not precisely so named, thus leaving Pittsfield with perhaps only an orthographic “first.” In any event, baseball was played in North America before either 1791 or 1786.

Now let’s look to Athletics at Princeton: A History (1901) for the walkup to the apex of Princeton baseball in the 1870s, when the college competed on a level playing field with the top professional nines. Passages reproduced verbatim are presented in italics.

***

Handball or “ fives” was the first game of ball played in Princeton, but no records of any matches were kept. In 1850, a brick wall or “ alley “ was built back of Edwards Hall but in seven years a new game superseded handball in student favor — it was “townball” or the old Connecticut game. In the fall of ’57, a few members of the Freshmen class organized the Nassau Baseball Club to play baseball although only a few members had seen the game and fewer still had played.

But it became popular among the class, and a diamond was laid out in the “pasture” lot, by the present Casino, under the direction of the following officers: C.H. Dodd, ’61, President; J. Wiley, ’61, Secretary; H.H. Janeway, ’61, Treasurer; V.A. Lewis, ’61, R.K. Noye, ’61, L.S. Atwater, ’61, Standing Committee.

The object of this standing committee was to remove all bricks, stones, and other obstructions on the ground, which were liable to cut the feet and impede the operations of the energetic club.

After a few weeks playing, with the audacity peculiar to Freshmen, they challenged the Sophomore class to a match game. The Sophomores were as innocent of all knowledge regarding the game as new born babes, but they were not to be downed by a lot of Freshmen. One faction favored the contest, but the other, inwardly fearing it would go hard with them, declared it was beyond the dignity of their class to submit to such impertinence. However, after much consideration, the challenge was accepted and the Presidents of the two clubs were chosen as umpires. A referee was also elected, whose duty it was to decide between the umpires, whenever they should disagree. Each side consisted of fifteen players, and the whole game was conducted with laudable sport and good feeling.

After each party had played five innings, the Sophomores had beaten their antagonists by twenty-one rounds, and were declared victorious. The announcement was received by the Sophs with deafening hurrahs. The Freshmen, throwing their caps into the air and showing other indications of a spirit unbroken by defeat, replied by giving them three lusty cheers for their immortal class.

In the following spring of ’58, baseball clubs of all descriptions were organized on the back campus and “happiness on such occasions seemed to rule the hour.” But in the fall of ’58, baseball proper began at Princeton, when some Freshmen entered college from Brooklyn, the home of baseball. They had brought their bats, balls, and suits with them and played every Saturday during the fall. By spring, it was felt wise for the players to join in a club and on March 14, 1859, the following men from the Freshman class met and formed the “Baseball Club of the Class of 1862, Nassau Hall”:

L.W. Mudge, J.L. Munn, H.S. Butler, A. Marks, Jr., W.H. Bayles, E.P. Brewster, J.J. Coale, J.O. Green, A.P. Morse, H.H. Robinson, H.L. Sampson, W.D. Mershon, C.W. Petrie, W.W. Knox, E.B. Freeman, Jr., W. Butler, W. Baldwin, E.S. Atwater, C. Young, R.H. Van Pelt, D.W. Guy, H.R. Freeland, E.R. Burkhalter, C.W. Remington, C.W. Nassau.

They organized their club very carefully and adopted a rather quaint, though formal Constitution and By-Laws, which gave the captain absolute direction of the game. The expenses of the club were slight, amounting in the first year to $9.43 for bats, balls, etc., and they were defrayed by the initiation dues of fifty cents, and the monthly dues of ten cents. A small revenue was received from fines; for members who used “profane or impious language while assembled for field exercise” were fined ten cents; those who disputed the decisions of the umpire or refused obedience to the captain in the exercise of lawful authority, were fined five cents; any person who audibly expressed his opinion on a doubtful play before the decision of the umpire is given, was fined three cents.

[…]

Although only members of the class of ’62 were eligible to active membership, a large number of upper classmen were elected Honorary Members, with all the privileges of the game and field. In this way the best players of the college were gathered into this club which, in 1860, became known under the old title of Nassau Base Ball Club.

Daily matches were played at the noon hour and on Saturday afternoons in the field back of Edwards. Their game was very much like the present one, except that the ball was made of both leather and rubber. It was “live” — in other words, it could be knocked a great distance and would bounce lightly. This accounts for the large scores and for the rule that a catch on the first bounce, as well as on the fly, was out. This last rule was, however, soon dropped, for in most places the ground was so rough that the ball seldom bounced true, and the men who waited for a bounce usually missed. The manner of pitching was slightly different also; all the throwing and pitching was underhanded. This rule was neglected, however, until the spring of ’68, when it was so strictly enforced that E. Davis ’70, was forced to give up pitching curves; and it was not finally abandoned until the late seventies.

In the fall of ’59, the game was taken up by the Seminary students and match games were played every two weeks, in which the Nassaus were usually the victor. One year later the First Nine of the Nassau Club was invited by Dr. E. D. Pierson ’54, of Orange, to come to Orange and play a team of amateurs. This of course marked an important development in the sport, and it was only after much persuasion that the Faculty consented and on October 22, 1860, the nine went to Orange to play the first game of baseball in which representatives of Princeton played a team outside of Princeton itself.

In the spring of 1863 the Nassaus, feeling their oats, challenged two notable Philadelphia clubs, losing to the Athletics and defeating the Olympics. In the fall of that year they defeated the Athletics at Princeton, scoring 29 runs, the precise number they had allowed in their road loss to the A’s in the spring. From a Philadelphia paper:

“No one but a topographical engineer could describe that ground. To get to 1st base you ran up a hill, ran down to 2nd base, up to 3rd base and home base. The right field played at the top of a hill, the centre field at the bottom and the left field in a gully. To the Nassau players, who had been accustomed to and had overcome the difficulties of fielding on such a ground, the irregularities were of no account, but the effect was terrible on the Philadelphians, while the weakening feeling of playing on empty stomachs also told heavily against them.

“The Athletics, however, always play a good uphill game, (and this was decidedly up hill and down hill too) and they went at it. Malone pitched in the 1st, 2nd, and 9th innings, McBride pitched the balance of the game; the fielding of the Athletics being marked by a fine fly catch by Malone at short field — a beauty by Collum at right field, fine ones by Smith and Berkenslock, crowned by a magnificent one by Gratz at centre field, and which he elegantly threw to 1st base, putting a man out, thereby making the only double play of the day. The star play of the game was when Malone was put out at the home plate. The ball had been batted to deep left field; Malone started from second, and as he passed third base, Wickham turned away from the home plate as though it was useless to try to prevent the run. This induced Malone to moderate to a jog-trot. Milspaugh threw the ball to the home plate, but Wickham made no effort to catch it until it was almost there. Then, by a sudden jump, he caught the ball, and put out Malone, who was the most surprised man imaginable. The best score was by Mr. Smith, who played 2nd base admirably. The gallant catcher of the Athletics was badly hurt on the face and left eye in the early part of the game by a foul ball, but he pluckily kept his position.

“From first to last, the Nassaus played with the steadiness, judgment, and skill of masters of the game. Knowing the ground well, they ran their bases with bold ness and success. Their pitcher [Frederick Porteous Henry] helped them greatly. He gives a slow ball with a heavy twist and is extremely irregular. The Athletics found it difficult to bat him for two or three innings. The game afforded a superior exhibition of nerve and skill on the part of the Nassaus, andof wretched muffing and feeble batting on the part of the Athletics. No doubt their empty stomachs rebelled against hard work. After play, the Nassaus conducted their guests to the Mansion House and gave them a hearty and most welcome supper. Here the ball was presented by Col. Fitzgerald, and received by L.B. Halsey, ’64; and the occasion was marked by an interchange of many delicate courtesies; after which the Athletics tore themselves away from their gentlemanly and highly esteemed competitors.”

At this point, I will skip past the notable history of Princeton baseball that runs to 1874, where I began my post the other day, “Curve Pitching at Princeton” (https://goo.gl/Uxn3p5). There I wrote that a case could be made for Joseph McElroy “Mac” Mann as the first collegiate pitcher to have mastered Candy Cummings’ “trick” — first exhibited by flipping clamshells on the banks of the Gowanus — and then mysteriously as a member of the Brooklyn Excelsiors at a time when the rules prohibited a snap of the wrist or a lifting of the arm from straight underhand to sidearm. (See: https://goo.gl/Xhsrrk.)

In response to “Curve Pitching at Princeton” my erudite friend Richard Hershberger neatly described the confusion regarding the curve ball of the 1860s on Facebook the other day:

Early curve balls are difficult to detect in the newspaper record because there was not a clear distinction between a breaking ball and the arc of the ball due to gravity. So there were discussions, for example, of Phonney Martin’s slow curves. These might have had a break, making them sink more than would otherwise be expected, but they might simply have been eephus pitches. Discussions of a “twist” don’t help. This almost certainly referred to putting spin on the ball, but more likely to give the pitch a bit of movement rather than what we could consider a breaking ball. The earliest unambiguous references are from 1870, citing Candy Cummings’s “horizontal curves.” Bobby Mathews by his own account learned the technique from Cummings a couple of years later. All this college stuff from the mid-1870s is simply their playing catch-up, combined with a dollop of self-absorption imagining themselves to be ahead of the game. 1875 was the breakout year when lots of pitchers, even on country clubs, were experimenting with curve balls.

I agree, but I think a rules change in 1872 was the trigger. Like Creighton and others who imparted spin prior to this year, when the sidearm pitch became legal, delivering a ball that curved along a horizontal arc meant cheating. Here’s the rule:

The pitcher must deliver the ball while within the lines of his position and must remain within them until the ball has left his hand. He shall not make any motion to deliver the ball while outside the box.

Whenever the pitcher delivers the pitch with an overhand or roundarm throw, the umpire shall call a “foul balk.” Should the pitcher persist in such action, the umpire, after warning him of the penalty, shall declare the game forfeited. Baserunners are awarded one base on “foul balks” as on any other balk.

Note: This rule legalized the jerk, wrist snap, and bent-elbow deliveries and, thus, the curve ball. It was now legal for the pitcher to snap his wrist as long as he kept his hand, while in the forward motion, below the hip.

Let me close this post, ostensibly about Princeton but succumbing at last to the undertow of how curve pitching began, with excerpts from J.C. Kofoed’s article “Early History of Curve Pitching” in the August 1915 Baseball Magazine, below. Kofoed exhibits the same sort of confusion over nomenclature that has bedeviled this subject since Cummings rudely interrupted the happy life of bivalves at high tide.

Stocky, heavy shouldered Al Orth declares that Grover Alexander has an uncanny control over his curve ball, and that it is his sharp shoots even more than his blinding speed that makes “Alex” the great pitcher he is. National League fans remember “Miner” Brown’s meteoric slants, and it isn’t so long ago that Rube Waddell buzzed over his snaky curves. In fact, barring Orth [known as “the curveless wonder” — jt], himself, I cannot recall a really great pitcher in the past fifteen years who did not possess some sort of a curve.

Yet, when that form of twirling first made its appearance, Henry Chadwick said, “It is of no earthly use. The pitcher does not know when he is going to pitch it, and the catcher does not know when it is coming. It makes a lot of passed balls and delays the game.”

Historians usually credit “Candy” Cummings, of Brooklyn, with being the inventor of that style of delivery. Cummings twirled on the Star, Excelsior and Athletic clubs at different times, and it is said he learned the trick by curving clam shells on the beach. In reality, “Candy” was not the inventor, as contemporary newspapers show.

Before the Civil War, Porter’s Spirit of the Times questioned whether or not a slow curve was better than a fast ball. The New York Clipper correspondent wrote voluminously upon the question, too. As long as baseball has been played, and baseballs have seams with which to catch the air, curve balls have been thrown, though Cummings and J. M. Mann, of Princeton, were the first to realize their possibilities.

Frank Henry, a Nassau (Princeton) College man, pitched the “rah-rah” boys to a victory over the Athletics on September 26, 1863. The score was Nassau 29, Athletics 13, and the batteries, Henry and Kickham, for Nassau, Malone and Kleinfelder, for the Athletics.

A Philadelphia newspaper remarked, “The Nassaus’ pitcher helped them greatly. He gave the ball with a heavy twist that was extremely irregular. The Athletics found it difficult to bat him for two or three innings.”

Later it is claimed that Ed Davis, also of Princeton, pitched curves, and his classmates used to gather on the campus to marvel at his shoots.

In Henry’s case, the “twist” was not a curve, as a curve is understood to-day. The idea was that, if enough twist could be put on the ball unless it was hit squarely by the batter the effect would be the same as when the “English” is put on a billiard ball, and the result would be a pop fly.

It was Davis’ peculiar delivery that attracted attention, and not the fact that he pitched curves. The rules at that time called for a straight arm delivery (the arm being parallel with the side and the hand below the hip). Davis’ delivery was with a bent arm and an almost underhand throw, so this unheard of manner of pitching attracted great attention. It has been said, “Davis was made pitcher because few batters could hit his pitching effectively.” Yet, of the three games in which he pitched he lost two by 27 to 15 and 21 to 20 scores — the other he won 46 to 26. This was certainly not very good work.

By practicing against a brick wall Davis noticed that the ball bounded back, according to the twist he gave it. Then he endeavored to give the ball a perpendicular twist so that when the batter hit it the ball would go straight up in the air. There was no attempt made to prevent the batter from hitting, nor did Davis think then of curving the path of the ball.

This also bears out the theory in reference to [Frank] Henry. A writer of the time said that Davis learned “that it was easier to field hits off the handle of the bat, and it was not long before he was pitching an inshoot with a perpendicular twist.” Can you beat that?

The Athletics [this an error; the club was a rival Philadelphia club, the White Stockings — jt] traveled up to Princeton on October 23, 1874, and roundly trounced the college boys 12 to 2. “Candy” Cummings was on the slab for the professionals, while “Mac” Mann hurled for the collegians. That was the first time that Mann was impressed with the idea that the ball could be curved at will.

“It was on June 1, 1875,” said Mr. Mann recently, “that Cummings completely fooled us while pitching for the Hartford nine, and in that game “Dug” Allison, the old Cincinnati Red Stocking catcher, made the remark usually attributed to Craver. Woods had just made a three bagger. The next batter had been retired. Then I came to bat, and Cummings evidently made an extra effort to get me, for Allison failed to judge one of his shoots, and Woods came home. When Allison came up under the bat he remarked to me, ‘That ball went zig-zag.’ He meant, of course, that the curve was too great for him to judge. Cummings pitched far better ball against us then than he had in the previous game and his shoots were far sharper. During the following winter I worked in the gymnasium to perfect the curve, and in the spring I used it rather successfully against our rivals.”

That last statement is a modest one, for Mann immediately leaped to fame as the greatest amateur pitcher of his time. When it is remembered that a half dozen of the strongest professional teams were usually on the college schedule it will be seen what opponents the Princeton youth had to face. Can you imagine any of the present-day institutions listing games with the Braves, Athletics, Giants and Phillies, and going in the game with any expectations of winning?

About 1872 another Princeton man, J. W. Hageman, of the class of ’72, was reputed to be a curve ball pitcher, but it was his change of pace that fooled the batsmen. His delivery was the same for both his fast ball and “floater,” and this, no doubt, puzzled the hitters, who sought to excuse their inefficiency against him by claiming that he pitched curves.

It was not until “Mac” Mann made a scientific study of the art that players began to realize its full value. “The fact that so many professionals seemed ignorant of curve pitching and hurried to see Mann proves conclusively that the Princetonian was the first to use the curve with any judgment and control over the ball.”

Mann …. was a hard worker, several times twirling eight games in two weeks against the strongest National League and college squads. On May 25 [sic; it was May 29], 1875, the day after losing a tough contest to Harvard by reason of his teammates’ errors, Mann pitched the first no-run, no-hit game in the annals of baseball. The victim was Yale, Princeton’s deadliest rival.

This record is usually credited to Jim Galvin, of the St. Louis Reds, against the Cass Club at Iona, Mich., but Mann’s conquest antedated Galvin’s by nearly fifteen months.

It is a pity that Mann was so far ahead of his time in a baseball sense. There is no doubt that he possessed a keen, analytical brain, and all the physical attributes with which a great pitcher must be endowed. When not working in the box, “Mac “ played every position in the infield, and batted well over .300 during his three years on the college team. Can’t you imagine to what heights he might have risen had he the opportunity for working under a master like McGraw or Mack? […]

Baseball at Princeton; and More about Mann and the Curve was originally published in Our Game on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

With a sidelight regarding the first series of baseball cards

Call them Cincinnati’s first “Big Red Machine.” Traveling 12,000 miles from coast to coast, the city’s Red Stockings were undefeated in 1869. They are a fabled club, in more ways than one, as commentators accord them a monumental status that obscures their real accomplishment: they were the team that made baseball famous.

It is often written that the Cincinnati Reds were the first professional club, which is not so, as many professional clubs had dotted the Northeast in the years after the Civil War. Those inclined to a more nuanced definition will declare the Reds the first openly professional club, which is not quite true either, as any of the several clubs paying their players no longer had to hide that fact after 1868, when the national amateur association recognized a separate professional class of clubs.

Many Cincinnati fans believe that their current club descends in a straight line from the Reds of 1869, but this famous club was blown up after the 1870 season. While baseball returned to the Queen City with the advent of the National League 1876 it vanished yet again in midseason the following year. Today’s Reds may trace their lineage only as far back as the 1882 club in the American Association, which was a ten-year major league in its debut campaign.

So: what may rightly be said about the Cincinnati Red Stockings of 1869–70? They were the first all-salaried team; other professional clubs at that time paid some of its players a salary and let others share in turnstile receipts, or were full “cooperative nines,” dividing a portion of the gate. And while Cincinnati did not field a club in baseball’s first professional league — the National Association of 1871 (NA) — its players of 1869–1870 helped to usher in the new league as stars on other clubs. The players’ affection for the city that had made them national heroes was so deep that even after the directors of the club had sent them packing, they returned for one final reunion game in mid-1871, little noted until now.

In 1869 the Red Stockings’ directors, determined to become the nation’s top baseball club, provided Harry Wright with an enlarged war chest, to recruit on a Steinbrennerian scale not seen before. First baseman and Cincinnati native Charlie Gould was a holdover from the 1868 club, as were pitcher Asa Brainard, plucked from Washington, DC; New Yorker Fred Waterman; and Philadelphian Doug Allison. For 1869, Harry Wright turned away all the club’s remaining local lads except for Gould; signed Cal McVey from Indianapolis; hired two New Jersey players, Andy Leonard and Charles Sweasy; and secured the services of Harry’s brother George, the greatest player in the land and something of a vagabond, who had played with four baseball clubs in the previous four seasons.

Thus were the 1869 Red Stockings established at $9,300 in salaries. Here are the fabled figures offered to the starting nine and principal utility player:

Asa Brainard, pitcher, $1,100

Doug Allison, catcher, $800

Charlie Gould, first base, $800

Charlie Sweasy, second base, $800

Fred Waterman, third base, $1,000

George Wright, shortstop, $1,400

Andy Leonard, left field, $800

Harry Wright, center field/manager, $1,200

Cal McVey, right field, $800

Dick Hurley, substitute, $600

The hundreds of nonplaying members of the Red Stocking club knew that with so many Hessians from back East they would be “rooting for laundry” in 1869, and would have to dig deep into their pockets to sustain their summer-long tour. But they did so gladly, even when year-end figures revealed that for all their success on the field, the 1869 Red Stockings had netted only $1.39 for the entire year.

The Reds took the field again in 1870, with all their regular players returning, and started the year with 24 consecutive victories, including a swing through the South. Counting their final eight victories in 1868, this brought the Reds’ three-year streak against top-tier clubs to 89; factoring in all of their games, historian Lee Allen set the undefeated skein at 130, perhaps too high. “But defeat came eventually,” Allen wrote, “and under heartbreaking circumstances”:

On the afternoon of June 14, 1870, before a crowd of nine thousand at the Capitoline Grounds at Brooklyn [at a new peak admission price of fifty cents a head; each member of the gate-sharing Atlantics took home an incredible $364 — a year’s salary for a common laborer], the Red Stockings were defeated by the Atlantics, 8 to 7, in eleven innings. . . . After nine innings, the game . . . was tied, 5 to 5. The Atlantics wanted to call the game a draw, but Harry Wright’s boys insisted on playing extra innings. When the Reds scored twice in the eleventh, it appeared that victory would be theirs. But the Atlantics rallied for three runs and the game.… President Champion announced the sad news in a telegram to Cincinnati:

new york, june 14, 1870 — atlantics 8; cincinnati 7. the finest game ever played. our boys did nobly, but fortune was against them. eleven innings played. though beaten, not disgraced. — aaron b. champion, cincinnati base ball club.

The bubble had burst. Attendance began to decline, and although the Reds won their next fifteen games, battled to a 16–16 tie with the Forest City of Rockford, then won three more, the club’s fans and especially its financial supporters grew restless. Five other defeats followed in 1870, including one to Rockford and two to the new Chicago White Stockings, created on the Red Stocking model with players recruited from Eastern clubs. On November 21, 1870, the club’s new president, picture framer A. P. C. Bonte, disbanded the club via an open letter:

… we have arrived at the conclusion that to employ a nine for the coming season, at the enormous salaries now demanded by the professional players, would plunge our club deeply into debt at the end of the year. The experience of the past two years has taught us that a nine whose aggregate salaries exceed six or eight thousand dollars can not, even with the strictest economy, be self-sustaining.

The Red Stockings quickly made new employment arrangements for 1871. Harry and George Wright took their game and their club’s name to Beantown, where the newly created Boston Red Stockings also employed Charlie Gould and Cal McVey. The other players, excepting sub Hurley, went to the Olympic club of Washington, DC.

The schedules of these two clubs intersected in July of 1871. Boston’s Red Stockings, having just played in Philadelphia, came into Cincinnati. Washington’s Olympics, also known as the Blue Stockings, came in from Chicago. The two clubs had agreed that they would play their next scheduled league game at Cincinnati’s Union Grounds, a neutral site, on July 4. But because this game brought together all the former Cincinnati players of 1869–1870 (excepting Hurley), they agreed to stage a reunion game on the prior afternoon. The two nines divided off and played a nine-inning game, with one side comprised of the old Red Stockings and the other being designated as a “picked nine.”

Traveling with the Boston club was former player and printing entrepreneur Maxson Mortimer “Mort” Rogers, who would serve as umpire. Rogers was born in Brooklyn in 1845, the son of a fish dealer named Albert Rogers Sr. It is worth noting that the 1850 federal census lists him as age 1, and thus some sources have him born in 1849, but the 1865 NY State census lists him more plausibly at age 20: consider that he began playing ball for the Resolutes of Brooklyn in 1861 and married in 1867! Rogers went on to a diverse career as a baseball executive and a commercial printer (Rogers & Fitts, in Boston). His brother Fraley played with the Boston Red Stockings of 1872–1873 and in 1881 became baseball’s first suicide (https://goo.gl/71AN3g).

Mort Rogers would also oversee the distribution of his special “Base Ball Photographic Cards” — an “invention in the score card line,” according to the Cincinnati Daily Gazette — at the ballpark and at George Ellard’s Base Ball Emporium, 28 West Fourth Street.

The Cincinnati Daily Gazette of July 3, 1871 declared:

A game of rare interest and excellence will be played on the Union Grounds this afternoon, the old Red Stockings (with the exception of [the injured] Geo. Wright), appearing in their old positions against a picked nine from the other members of the Boston and Olympic clubs. The reappearance of the Red Stocking nine upon their old stamping ground against so strong a corps of opponents is an event in these days of base ball degeneracy which will undoubtedly attract the largest audience of the season.

The Cleveland Plain Dealer of July 5, 1871 reported on the game, won by the picked nine by a score of 15–13:

THE OLD ORIGINAL RED STOCKINGS VANQUISHED AGAIN.

The Famous Victors of 1869 Discover That This Is 1871. — Red Stockings Beaten by the Field, 15 to 13 — A Close Game.

…It was the pleasing idea of the managers of the principal base ball display in this city [Ellard’s Depot] to have the original First Nine of the Red Stockings combine for one more contest, and to give their new associates an old fashioned lesson…. Justice renders it necessary to say that the Red Stockings of yesterday’s game are rather what remains of the old band. George Wright, the flower of the flock — George of the gleaming teeth and the mischievous shines, but George also who played ball with telling power, is laid by, nursing a leg that has almost entirely disabled him for two seasons…. Harry Wright (facetiously and inappropriately known as Old Harry — he is on the sunny side of thirty-something) — was there, and as like the sterling Captain of the Old Reds as one pea is like another. He is losing his grip, is he, eh? What’d you think of that one-handed catch yesterday? Isn’t a good Captain, you say? Boston thinks he will do for Boston, and much obliged to you. We hope Harry will continue as an active ball player until the year 1900.

The report continued in that vein with praise for each of the old Reds and jibes for their former directors, concluding, before a lengthy play-by-play of the game: “Each of the other Reds, as they made their appearance, were greeted with a hearty clapping of hands; while over the back stop was a large muslin banner inscribed, ‘Welcome, Red Stockings.’”

On the following day, July 4, 1871, the two clubs were restored to their usual rosters. The Bostons (behind pitcher Al Spalding) defeated the Olympics of Washington (pitcher, Asa Brainard) in a scheduled National Association game. Cincinnati’s Red Stockings had provided their last hurrah, and would never again be seen at the site of their former glories.

***

The Cincinnati Daily Gazette of July 3, 1871 revealed how the scorecards made their appearance at the Union Grounds on Monday and Tuesday of that week in 1871 and how Rogers had established an agency at Geo. Ellard’s baseball depot, on Fourth Street, to sell the scorecards. The paper also announced Rogers’ plans for “doing likewise in other western cities.” Cincinnati’s Union Grounds, behind Lincoln Park and next to the Union Railroad Terminal, was the neutral site selected for the National Association game of July 4, between Boston and the Washington; it also hosted several other NA games featuring out-of-town teams in 1871. This site was used in 1871 for NA games on May 13 (Olympics vs. Forest City of Cleveland) and July 22 (Forest City of Cleveland vs Athletics of Philadelphia). It is likely that Rogers’ scorecards were sold at each game.

The Cleveland Leader of July 13, 1871 confirmed what had been reported in Cincinnati, as Rogers sold his cards at the grounds of the Forest City club of Cleveland. The paper reported, “Mort Rogers, of Boston, now with the club, has gotten out an exceedingly neat photographic score card. This series which he proposes to publish, will comprise pictures of every professional ball player in the country, and will make a valuable collection. This afternoon, score cards with photographs of each member of the Forest City Club will be for sale at the grounds.” Supporting this report is the surviving score card featuring the image of Cleveland player Eugene Kimball.

Some have speculated that all the players portrayed in the Rogers cards were photographed when they visited the studio of James Wallace Black, but he could not have been the photographer outside Boston. Is it possible that the 1871 National Association team cartes de visite (“cdv”) — examples do not survive for all teams in the circuit— contain within their oval composites the very portraits that would have found their way on to scorecards? Note the Levi Meyerle pose in the scorecard below and the similar one in the Philadelphia Athletic cdv; likewise for Davy Force and the the Washington Olympic cdv, above.

Last Hurrah for the Cincinnati Red Stockings was originally published in Our Game on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

For what purpose do we send our sons to college, asks an unimpressed observer

I wrote a good deal about this milestone game back in 2012, at https://goo.gl/cv2Enr. The game was played under Massachusetts rules: no foul territory; plugging of baserunners between bases to record an out; one-out, all out; overhand tossing by the Thrower, who in the New York Game was called the Pitcher; and a different layout of the bases. Hints of professionalism were present even in this Edenic Paradise of Pittsfield, Massachusetts, where the game was played: “The contest lasted four hours and Amherst was victorious by a score of 73–32. For the greater part of this time Hyde, the Amherst pitcher, threw the ball over the plate with such speed and precision that it is not to be wondered at that the Williams players suspected that the town blacksmith had been hired for the game, perhaps the first of the many charges of professionalism that have been so numerous in amateur sport circles in recent years” (a comment from 1916).

Only recently, however, did I discover a more or less contemporary objection to the ball game and to the very idea of intercollegiate competition, in the September 2, 1859 issue of The Congregationalist (Boston), below.

We have before us a bulletin with the following title: “AMHERST EXPRESS. EXTRA. WILLIAMS AND AMHERST. BASE BALL AND CHESS! MUSCLE AND MIND!” We object equally to the occasion for this manifesto, and to its object, tone, and tendency. It was called forth by the victory gained over thirteen students of Williams College by the same number from Amherst, in a matched game of ball, played at Pittsfield, during term-time, and, also, by the victory of three Amherst students over their competitors from Williamstown, in a game of chess, played at the same time and place. The challenges had been given, in fact though not in form, “at the commencement of the term,” i.e. in May, though the games were not played until July, — “that both parties might have equal opportunity of practice.”

What portion of the intervening six weeks, or more, was devoted to “prac­tice,” and what to study, we are not told — an omis­sion which every reader can readily supply. Four days were taken out of the time allotted to study, by these thirty-two students, in which to play the games; one night (according to their own showing) was made hideous by the Amherst lads in exultations over their victory in the game of ball; the following day was, of course, worthless for study; another day was similarly wasted, by the whole body of students, in celebrating their victory in chess; and thus we have, supposing the number of students to be 250, what is equal to 500 days for one student lost in mere inglorious exultation, in addition to the 128 days (for one student) previously devoted to the games, not to mention the weeks which were chiefly, if not wholly, given up to preparation (“practice”) for this chivalrous contest.

Now all this transpires under the nominal sanction and approval of the Faculty. Without their consent, at least, the games could not have been played; but how cordially they approved of what they thought it expedient to allow, may be somewhat doubtful. As usual in such cases, the whole affair seems.to have been “privately” arranged between the students before obtaining the permission of their respective Authorities, after which, as too often occurs, the officers probably thought best not to raise a breeze in College by interposing their authority to prevent the pre-arranged meeting and contests. If this supposition is correct, and if, as appears, this whole affair was set on foot without the knowledge of the Faculty, it really seems to us that, from the moment it came to light, it should have been unflinchingly prohibited by them.

Our sons are sent to college to gain an education, according to a prescribed course of study, of which playing matched games of ball and chess form no part. That they should be allowed to devote a consid­erable portion of every day to recreation and gymnastic exercises, on college premises, under college rules, and without interrupting the daily routine of college study, we not only strongly desire, but have a right, should occasion require, to demand. But when they pre­sume to absent themselves from college, during term-time, and without our permission, for purposes which we as parents, or guardians, condemn; — when, dissatisfied with more than one-third of their entire col­lege life for rest and recreation, they take it upon themselves to say how large a portion of the re­mainder shall be similarly appropriated, where it shall be spent, and in what forms of diversion, — it seems to us time for college authority to be interposed, or, failing in this, for parental authority to assert its rights and issue its commands. As parents we delegate to college officers no right to grant such indulgences to our sons as conflict with their educational interests.

Custom (the custom of New England, not of Ger­many), the course of study prescribed in the cata­logues, and the codes of college law, determine, with sufficient precision, alike what the requirements and the indulgences of college shall be. That the former are lax enough, and the latter great enough, to satisfy any save a fast horse race of Yankees, or a beer-drinking generation of Germans, probably few pa­rents, at least will be disposed to question. Accordingly, we think college authorities will not find it easy to justify themselves, before the bar of an en­lightened Christian public, in anticipating, and virtually creating, public opinion on so grave a matter as this, and in allowing indulgences which are so directly at war with the usages of New England and with the educational interests of the institutions over which they preside, and for which there was no demand from any higher source than pleasure-seeking rather than knowledge-loving students. When the Christian public has duly considered the bearings of this innovation upon established usage, which has been thrust so unceremoniously upon them, and when public opinion demands the introduction into the college curriculum of matched games, between rival institutions, of ball, and chess, and the like, then will be time enough for those to whom these institutions are intrusted, to consider the expediency of yielding to that demand, and of appointing suitable instructors for the proposed new departments. And we apprehend there will be no difficulty in securing professors for these chairs. The only difficulty which we foresee will be in making a selection from the host of worthy candidates who will come from the billiard-rooms, the gambling-houses, and the tippling-shops of the land, from Maine to California.

We expressed, at the outset, our disapprobation of the “object, tone, and tendency” of the above-named bulletin, no less than of the occasion from which it sprung. Its object is exultation over a defeated an­tagonist; its tone that of self-gratulation at a result so unexpected and at victory so complete; its ten­dency, to excite an inglorious rivalry between the competing institutions, to embitter the feelings of the defeated party and of all who hoped for their success, and to exalt ball-players above scholars; and chess­men, or men of ivory, above men of brains.

For similar reasons (to say nothing of the vast ex­pense thus added to a sum total of collegiate expenditure already sufficiently burdensome to all except the rich), the boat-races which have recently taken place be­tween the rival clubs of different colleges, seem to us equally inconsistent with the object of a college life and equally deserving of public reprobation. When we wish our sons to engage in boat-racing, we will as­sign such portion as we think proper of their three-months-in-a-year vacation to this diversion. At pres­ent, we prefer that the other nine months shall be chiefly devoted to mental culture, — so much time, and no more, being daily set apart for physical exercise as is consistent with and promotive of, the great — we had almost said sole — object of a college life — the ed­ucation of the intellect and heart.

Amherst and Williams Play the First Intercollegiate Game of Baseball, 1859 was originally published in Our Game on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.