Thoreau remarked in Walden: “It is not worth the while to go round the world to count the cats in Zanzibar.”

I delivered this speech at a SABR regional meeting in Boston in 2006 as a stand-in for Bill James, who had to cancel but whose talk was read by Tom Tippett. [https://goo.gl/FRnBVW]. Still apt, I think.

My sabermetric achievements (Total Baseball, The Hidden Game of Baseball) lie behind me rather than ahead, and, echoing Paul Gallico’s Farewell to Sport, I think am now about ready to say, “Farewell to Stats.” For a whole generation of fans and fantasy players, stats have begun to outstrip story and that is a sad thing. Even the unverifiable balderdash that passed for fact or informed opinion in baseball circles not so long ago seems today wistfully enticing. Where is Bill Stern now that we really need him? Maybe Lincoln did not tell Doubleday with his dying breath to “keep baseball going; the country needs it.” So what — Lincoln did invent Thanksgiving as a national holiday in 1863 for similarly “restorative” reasons, to create around Plymouth Rock a myth of national origins … sound familiar? Like Albert Spalding and Abner Graves and the Mills Commission? Frankly, in today’s baseball writing I miss the wink and the nudge of a Barnum or the tall-tale bluster of a Davy Crockett; lying has left the sports page for the front page and both are worse off. The romance is out of the game now; nostalgia is simply a blunt weapon with which to land blows upon Barry Bonds, build retro ballparks, or sell vintage jerseys.

For this I could blame Bill James, Pete Palmer, and maybe myself a little too. The press has often termed me a sabermetrician and placed me in the company of my betters. In fact I never was a statistician; I just believed that in numbers one might uncover truths not visible to the naked eye, in the way that flying at night a pilot must trust the instrument panel rather than his senses. Even early on, what interested me more than fiddling with formulas or lobbying for Ron Santo to enter the Hall of Fame was the web of illusion that stats created for fans and players alike, evading the interesting questions of why we measure, what we think we are measuring, what we are truly measuring, what is left unmeasured and, most important, what the measurement means.

Cap Anson is said to have wished for his epitaph to read: “Here lies a man who batted .300” (in fact his tombstone reads: “He played the game”) — so to him a .300 batting average meant excellence. Today we know that everything is relative, including relativity, so we can’t responsibly say what a .300 batting average means without bringing in the now obvious deficiencies of that metric, as well as the league batting average, and the home park advantage, and the question of average skill levels over time. In The Hidden Game Pete and I used this example: “The National League batting average of .266 in 1902 does not mean the same thing as the American League batting average of .266 in 1977, any more than Willie Keeler’s .336 in 1902 means the same thing as Lyman Bostock’s .336 in 1977…. Keeler’s and Bostock’s Relative Batting Averages are identical, which signifies that each player exceeded his league’s performance to the same degree. But the question that is begged is ‘How do we measure average skill: What do the .266s of 1902 and 1977 mean?’”

Today I find those questions less gripping. To count the constituent parts of baseball is to run the gamut of the game’s charms from A to B. Not long ago someone thoughtfully provided a list of the all-time leaders in receiving Intentional Bases on Balls with no one on base. This put me in mind of Thoreau’s remark in Walden: “It is not worth the while to go round the world to count the cats in Zanzibar.” Fixate on the particular and you miss the sublime. And while we’re on a quoting jag, there’s Einstein’s “Not everything that counts can be counted and not everything that can be counted counts.” True, so true. Yet in an Abner Doubleday twist, there is no evidence that Einstein ever said this. The words were observed on a sign hanging in his office at Princeton and may first have been uttered by Bill Stern.

Statistics are something of a fetish. Like a shrunken head a stat is an encapsulation of a power once alive. It serves to recall and revivify the past, and sometimes to transform the future. When David Neft’s team that developed the landmark Macmillan Baseball Encyclopedia unearthed nineteenth-century RBIs and dead-ball ERAs, Roger Connor, Sam Thompson, and Addie Joss won hall of Fame plaques after years out in the cold because the areas of their accomplishment were not measured. Once saves began to be measured after 1960, relief pitchers gained prestige, were compensated differently, and eventually began to be used differently (with indifferent results, I might add) so as to produce more save opportunities for a designated closer.

What are the outcomes of sabermetrics on the field to date? As general managers and managers came to understand that outs and runs were the currency of the game, as they had been from the very start, they began to value on base percentage. Pitch count was not merely a way to preserve your own pitchers’ arms, it was also a weapon: by working the count a manager might force the hand of his opposing number and sooner get to the middle relievers, exposing the soft underbelly of nearly every staff. Today it is probable that we overvalue walks where formerly they had been undervalued, and we scorn risky baserunning when once it was the prime delight of players and fans. The charm of the grand old game is that it appears to be the same as it ever was, or at least the same as in McKinley’s day, but it has changed radically of course. In terms of strategy it is hardly about baserunning and fielding at all, though recent sabermetric work in these areas may alter the balance yet again.

This is all interesting stuff to me still. Generally speaking, though, in matters of baseball’s history as well as its statistics, what is objectively true is no longer as intriguing to me as what people may believe to be true, and why. I remain interested in statistics not as indices of merit but as artifacts of play to which story adheres. As the tangible — and, as opposed to narrative history, unmediated — remains of games contested long ago, records transform play into a common experience repeatable at fixed intervals … which is not a bad way to define a rite or ritual. “People preserve their thousand-year-old experiences in the world of play,” wrote philosopher Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy. And in the words of Michael Novak, “Believers in sport do not go to sports to be entertained; to plays and dramas, maybe, but not to sports. Sports are far more serious than the dramatic acts, much closer to primal symbols, metaphors, and acts, much more ancient and frightening.”

The old mysteries were visible in baseball’s earliest names, numbers, and practices, and it has seemed to me in recent years that to understand the action on the field, most of which we have elected to measure, we might profit from peeling back the layers of complexity and examining, with the same intensity we may devote to stats, some of the game’s most fundamental terms: say, base and ball and home and run; and such odd linguistic vestiges as box and score; and the blatant misnomers pitch and diamond. As all Americans came from somewhere else, so did these names, from other games and times and places.

Our starting point for such investigations is the basic word play, which derives from the Germanic verb plegan, which means “to pledge” and refers to that bête noire of baseball, the wager. In all games worth their salt, something of worth is placed at risk, whether it is treasure or honor. Without this pledge, victory and defeat are one and the same. My source for this useful bit is the classic study Homo Ludens (1938) by Swiss historian Johan Huizinga. The title of this work means “Man the Player,” and Lude is a root of all sorts of words signifying escape and evasion: elude, preclude, include, exclude, delude, etc. It should come as no surprise that the basic field games before bats and balls and other implements came into play involved chaotic running and chasing and capturing a flag, a tower, a prisoner. Running remained the primary attraction of early ball games, too, until the orderly game of cricket shifted the emphasis to the field and the bat. The name “Cricket” derived from early terms for the bat; other games of ball would similarly take their names from their prime implement or feature: hand ball, foot ball, trap ball, cat ball, base ball.

Cricket became the first organized bat and ball game played in North America. A match was held on April 29, 1751, by a company of Londoners against a company of New Yorkers; it was played for “a considerable Wager,” according to the New-York Post-Boy, with “those who got most Notches in two Hands, to be the Winners.” When today’s reporter notes that Greg Maddux has just notched his fifth win, by a score of 6–2, he unwittingly tips his cap to the archaic practice of scoring a wooden stick with a penknife for each run. In another pleasant archaism, if Maddux’s opponent was knocked “out of the box,” he was driven from an enclosure that had ceased to exist after 1892.

Cricket’s fifteenth-century name had been “Hondyn and Hondoute” (Hand in and Hand Out), signifying that there was then an In side and an Out side. Early baseball box scores registered only runs and outs which, whether made at the bat or on the bases, were recorded as Hands Lost or Hands Out. The vestigial prints of other games are all over the rise of baseball.

When baseball began it was primarily a game for runners and fielders rather than batsmen; the pitcher (who ceased to “pitch” by 1872 as the underarm toss began its inexorable drift toward overhand throwing) was an insignificant feeder of balls delivered for the batter’s convenience. The game of baseball took its name from its hallmark feature: safe havens where a runner could not be put by a ball thrown at his person, as was the custom in baseball prior to 1845. The base symbolized a bay or harbor and was a feature of ancient board games such as Pacheesi (we know it as Parcheesi thanks to Parker Brothers) long before it came into field games; the circuit of the base paths evoked the Return Myth of Odysseus and others. Originally “base” was a running game (absent bat and ball, those time-honored symbols of the male and female principles) that was well known when cricket was young. Spenser, in his “Faerie Queen,” alluded to it as follows: “So ran they all as they had been at bace, They being chased that did others chace.” The innovation of baseball was to combine the running of that old game with the batting of cat and the fielding of cricket.

Baseball has never been played on a diamond, which would have two acute angles and two obtuse ones; in fact it has been played in a circular pattern on a square that was turned on point. Town Ball games were played on irregular pentagonal schemes, with four bases plus a striker’s point, but the circular course of the base paths was evidenced in the original name for what came to be known as the Massachusetts Game: round ball. (The name did not refer gratuitously to the shape of the ball.)

What about that evocative name “Home”? Well, Ulysses returned home to Ithaca to complete his earthly circuit. The rest of us go to our eternal reward, returning to Our Maker, as I believe is indicated by baseball’s home. Some national variants of the game of Hop Scotch are illustrative. In England and America the end space is termed Home; in Germany it is called Paradise; in Austria it is the Temple; in France too the end space is Paradise or, with echoes for our national game, the Elysian Fields.

Baseball is a backward-looking game, in which every action on the field resonates against plays imprinted — in the mind’s eye, in the collective memory, and in the record books — long ago. The game came to the fore because it was adapted to the conditions of early national life; it changed as those conditions were altered. The taste of other days sustained a game marked by running and fielding; the taste of our day is for the contest of pitcher and hitter. It has been a long while since a home run generally involved running.

Baseball fans of earlier generations had fewer statistics at their disposal but a simpler game perhaps had no need of them. Our forebears’ very lack of stats may have made them more sociable and more cooperative enthusiasts than those of today, made possessive and isolated by fantasy baseball and constant numerical evaluation of their favorites. Ultimately, the statistical fragments that were once saved in scrapbooks, or the new measures devised by ingenious fans, become relics which remind us at every moment that our youth was a wonderful if remote time.

So, for me, “Farewell to Stats.” But maybe not to Sabermetrics, whose definition has been disputed ever since Bill James coined the term. I believe in what Bill described in 1981 as a hallmark of the approach — to present new evidence from original source material rather than simply shuffling the existing data to make one’s point. This seems to me to go beyond statistics to describe reasonably well the kind of work I do — though admittedly absent the metrics.

Apart from family, what now seems important to me is play, a more serious activity than work and one that reveals more about who we are or wish to be. And the work that seems most like play to me is rummaging around in history’s attic, often emerging into the light empty-handed only to discover what was in plain sight all along.

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

Harry Steinfeldt was the missing part of the famous infield memorialized in the title of David Rapp’s new book

Adapted from Tinker to Evers to Chance by David Rapp published by The University of Chicago Press. © 2018 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved.

Baseball history has always been rife with brain-teasing trivia questions, some of them meaningless, others loaded with significance. For more than a hundred years — at least since F. P. Adams penned his famous lines about a “trio of bearcubs” — one of the great barroom stumpers has been: Who was the fourth member of the Chicago Cubs’ Tinker-to-Evers-to-Chance infield?

The answer, while in one sense trivial, does come with a measure of historic and cultural impact.

In late 1905, Frank Chance, after taking over as interim manager from the ailing Frank Selee, saw a number of holes in his roster. A big one was at third base. He wanted a heavy hitter and run producer, an experienced big leaguer who could provide some wallop in the middle of the lineup. To get someone like that, Chance had no compunction about giving up a mainstay or two of the current squad. “We need pitchers, we must have a new third baseman, and a hitting outfielder before we can win the pennant,” he told confidants.

Chance looked down his roster for expendables. There was “Doc” Casey, the erstwhile dental school student and senior member of the squad, who had held down the third-base job for the previous three years. Casey had won the respect of his teammates — he was Selee’s choice over Chance as team captain the year before — but Chance knew that Doc was a journeyman at best. Chance also had inherited outfielder Billy Maloney, whom Selee had acquired a year before from Cincinnati. The speedy Maloney could be sensational performer at times — the “idol of the crowd” — legging out fourteen triples in 1905 and leading the league with fifty-nine stolen bases. But Chance considered him erratic.

As a first step, Chance told team owner C.W. Murphy to dangle both Casey and Maloney as trade bait. What followed was “one of the most spectacular deals ever recorded in baseball history,” according to Hugh Fullerton, the Chicago Tribune’s veteran baseball beat writer. Chance had set his sights on Jimmy Sheckard, an outfielder in Brooklyn who had a long track record as a run producer but had fallen afoul of club owners by jumping to the American League during Ban Johnson’s “war” of 1902. The subsequent Peace Treaty between the leagues sent him back to Brooklyn, but by then Sheckard was persona non grata with the brass of the Superbas.

Rumors of Sheckard’s discontent wended through the player network to Chance, who told Murphy to act fast. Murphy dutifully offered up Casey and Maloney, then tossed in another outfielder and a pitcher — plus $2,000 — for Sheckard. The deal “stunned Chicago followers of the game,” Fullerton said, but it instantly made Chance’s outfield first-rate. They formed a safety net that could chase down almost anything that managed to get past the infield gauntlet. Sheckard was known as “one of the surest, most deadly outfielders on fly balls that ever choked a near-triple to death by fleetness of foot and steadiness of eye and grip.”

Of course, Doc Casey’s departure had left a hole at third base, but there, too, Chance knew who he wanted. Word got around that Cincinnati was not that happy with its current occupant at third base. “Again, inside gossip directed Chance to a man while older managers, not closely in touch with players, listened to other stories,” observed Fullerton. Murphy must have been listening to those old hands, too, because he traveled twice to the Queen City to make the trade Chance wanted, though he came back empty-handed. “What third baseman shall we get?” an exasperated Murphy kept asking. The always-blunt Chance kept replying: “Steinfeldt.”

Harry M. Steinfeldt would soon take his place in the Cubs’ storied infield, where he held down third base for five dynastic years and became the answer to that age-old trivia question. The price was not small: Murphy and Chance had to give up Tornado Jake Weimer, arguably the team’s best pitcher over the previous three seasons, to obtain him. Murphy also had to sweeten the pot for the ever-restless Steinfeldt, who made noise about leaving baseball entirely. Yet Murphy’s investment produced immediate dividends.

In 1906, Steinfeldt would lead the league in hits (173) and runs batted in (83) and maintained a batting average of .327, second only to Honus Wagner. He also possessed a whiplike arm at third, leading the NL in fielding percentage in three of his five seasons in Chicago. “When it comes to a thrower whose method is a treat to the eye for its grace, speed and unerring airline flight, Harry Steinfeldt . . . is an accomplished actor,” said one admirer. “There is a beautiful harmonizing of lift and speed to his flings.”

Born in St. Louis on September 29, 1877, Harry M. Steinfeldt had moved at the age of four to Fort Worth, Texas, with his German-immigrant parents. His father, Henry, worked for the Anheuser-Busch brewery, which had sent him there from St. Louis to set up a distribution warehouse. Harry, second of five children, was a precocious athlete. At sixteen, Harry joined in the bicycle craze that was sweeping England and American cities. He must have been pretty good at it: He belonged to the League of American Wheelmen, participating in many of its local and national events.

“Craze” is no overstatement in describing the popularity of cycling in the mid-1890s. Almost as soon the chain-drive “safety bicycle” entered the market, people of all ages and skills learned to ride the increasingly affordable two-wheelers. In every American city, about four times as many people owned bicycles as horses. Bicycle races and riding exhibitions were among the most popular spectator sports in the country, according to urban historian Evan Friss. “Like horse racing, baseball and other sports, bicycle racing attracted a mass audience seeking to experience the thrill of speed and the excitement of competition.”

Steinfeldt’s skills as a “wheelman” earned him a national reputation and even got him his first job (as a bank messenger). But his wanderlust, paired with a typical adolescent rebellious streak, must have called. In the fall of 1894, still only sixteen, he joined a traveling minstrel show. The prime tool of this unusual trade wasn’t bat, ball, glove, or bicycle wrench. It was burnt cork.

Blackface minstrelsy — a musical-comedy genre in which white men made themselves up in demeaning caricatures of African American singers, dancers, and comedians — was the most ubiquitous form of entertainment in late nineteenth-century America. Some sixty years after the Christy Minstrels and “Jim Crow” (Thomas Rice) made their first stage appearances in the antebellum South, minstrel revues remained happily ensconced in several theaters in New York City, while a dozen or more touring companies roamed the nation. Suited up in outlandish costumes, their faces smeared black except for white lips and wide bugging eyes, minstrel entertainers “banged and sawed and rattled” through a lively and ritualized set of dance tunes and ditties such as “Jim Along Josey,” “Old Dan Tucker,” and “Coon, Coon, Coon,” interspersed with a rapid-fire banter of jokes told in broad, stereotypical dialect.

Minstrelsy is difficult to talk about — or even contemplate — today. Its vicious, mean-spirited caricatures of African-American mannerisms can’t be excused even by the mores of its day. Yet blackface song and dance was the nation’s first indigenous theatrical art form. (Everything else, from opera to classical music to theater, had been imported from Europe.) And it is hard to overstate its impact on all forms of American musical culture: minstrel legacies trace a path through turn-of-the century ragtime, vaudeville, burlesque and tap dance, musical theater, and improvisational jazz, all the way to rock-and-roll, rap, and hip-hop. “Simply condemning it all as an entertainment that pandered to White racism does not begin to account for its complexities, its confusion, its neuroses,” according to historian John Strausbaugh, author of Black Like You.

Harry Steinfeldt was one of an untold number of young men who found a perverse kind of refuge in the counterculture world of minstrel entertainment, much the way teenagers in a later age gravitated to “scandalous” rock’n’roll in the 1950s. He hooked up with Al G. Field’s Greater Minstrels, a national touring company that tramped its way through Texas every year in the 1890s. The proprietor and star performer, Alfred Griffith Hatfield, was one of the most prominent cork artists and impresarios of his day. “Merely to announce that the famous minstrel and his company were to appear at a given place was practically saying that the minstrel loving population would turn out en masse to greet them,” commented a historian in the early twentieth century.

Al G. Field intermixed the highly formulaic minstrel routines with never-before-seen musicians and novelty acts; he was one of the first to feature ragtime music pioneers like Harry Van Fossen, for instance. Field also became the first producer to create a separate traveling show of 125 African American actors, giving many black entertainers their first break in show business even if they, too, had to apply burnt-cork makeup and perform absurdist stereotypes of black people. White audiences loved Field’s theatrical touches. “Everything they do is original, their jokes are new and upon timely topics, while their singing and dancing and character are as artistic as it is possible for them to be,” a Fort Worth newspaper critic said in October 1892.

Steinfeldt was probably a cast member or understudy in a motley troupe that grew as large as “1/2 a hundred,” as Field’s advertisements boasted. It’s not certain what type of showbiz career he thought to pursue — a central role as vocalist, dancer, or comedian; a novelty act like gun-and-sword juggler or “apodal” (footless) contortionist; or a background role as choral singer of “good old fashioned negro melodies.” (Field also had a three-man acrobatic act featuring Jasper the educated mule.) It turns out, however, that something else caught Harry’s restless imagination as he made his way across Texas. At almost every stop he found a way to join an amateur team for a baseball game. Word must have gotten around about his dexterity and skill, because it wasn’t long before Steinfeldt was playing shortstop and second base for the Houston Mudcats of the Texas-Southern League.

He hopped around Houston, Fort Worth, and Galveston clubs for the next two seasons, playing any number of positions. Then came a promotion to Detroit in Ban Johnson’s Western League, where in one season Steinfeldt played well enough to earn a big league contract with Cincinnati the following year. Steinfeldt played super utility man to the Reds’ star-studded infield for a couple of years before cracking the starting lineup at third base. Manager Buck Ewing liked his defensive skills, especially his quick release: “The ball is hardly in his hands before he has it sailing through the air,” he beamed. Steinfeldt’s breakout season came in 1903, when he batted .312 and led the NL in doubles, with thirty-two. But injuries, a revolving door of managers, and his own displays of apathy soon dampened his production. He started to gain weight and lose his edge, and his disenchanted attitude suggested he was bored with baseball.

Frank Chance, however, remembered the untroubled, aggressive player he watched dazzle the crowds in California’s winter ball circuit, where Steinfeldt had gone in the off-season a few years back. Chance soon made Steinfeldt more than welcome in Chicago. Shortly after the Cubs announced the trade, Steinfeldt wrote to Murphy and Chance from his home in Marlin Springs, Texas, assuring them he had been working out all winter, would report to spring training at his old playing weight of 170 pounds, and was in “fine fettle.”

The Cubs of late 1905 and early 1906 finally started to gel, giving the 1905 champion New York Giants some fierce competition for the first time. Every Chicago player began to reevaluate his commitment and work ethic. “We were pointed toward the pennant, and we knew it,” recalled Johnny Evers. “This knowledge, instead of causing us to take our work easy, had the reverse effect. It made us work all the harder.”

Chance, Tinker, Evers, and Steinfeldt started coming to the ballpark early every game day, but not for the half hour of casual ball tossing that most teams put in. The foursome would practice elaborate plays over and over again for almost two hours, drilling a single routine for as long as six weeks before trying it in a game. They made a pact that the first to quit a morning workout had to treat the others to lunch or cigars. “Peerless Leader” Chance never initiated a break, of course, so Tinker and Evers colluded to run him ragged at first base with throws in the dirt or over his head. Chance still would not relent, and they got no succor from their new partner. “Strange as it may seem, Steinfeldt, who was the veteran of the quartet, refused to quit until someone else did,” Evers said.

Here the Chance combine developed its peerless mastery of the game. This was an era of deep outfields and baseballs battered and worn to the seams, which meant that a game-changing home run was as rare as a triple is today. To score a run — to win a ball game, no less — required constant tactical decision making from the first pitch to the last out. Every player in the Cubs’ lineup was expected to be proficient — and ready to execute — a sacrifice, suicide, or “bluff” bunt; a stolen base, a delayed steal, or a double steal; a hit and run, or a run and hit. At any moment in a game, Chance might signal for some new trick to advance a runner closer to home so that even a weak grounder might secure a tally. “It is a game of surprises, freaks and accidents,” according to Evers. The idea was to eliminate as much of the surprise as possible on your team’s end and create as much uncertainty as possible on the other’s.

Led by Chance, Evers, Tinker, and now Steinfeldt, the Cubs would go on to win 116 games in 1906, losing only 36, resulting in a mind-bending winning percentage of .763. (Only the Seattle Mariners of 2001 have since equaled that victory total, though they needed all 162 games of the expanded schedule.) Chicago won the pennant going away in 1906, inexplicably losing the World Championship series to the cross-town White Sox, then won NL pennants and World Championships in 1907 and 1908. Another pennant in 1910 gave them four pennants, two world’s championships and a record 530 victories in five years, more wins in that time span than any team in major league history.

The 1911 season was the beginning of a precipitous end to the great Cubs machine. The first clue that this campaign would be different came in March, when Frank Chance sold Harry Steinfeldt’s contract to St. Paul of the American Association. Chance believed he had better, younger replacements at third base, and he turned out to be right. Steinfeldt’s best days were behind him.

The Cubs’ show-stopping third baseman made a half-hearted attempt at a comeback in 1911 in St. Paul and then Boston, but in mid-July he came down with a mysterious illness, thought to be typhoid fever. Then in August he was hospitalized with a “complete nervous breakdown.” Over his wife’s objections, he tried another comeback but was eventually cut loose. He went home brokenhearted to Bellevue, Kentucky, and soon came down with an extended illness that turned out to be fatal.

Harry Steinfeldt, wheelman, showman, and third baseman extraordinaire, died on August 17, 1914, of a cerebral hemorrhage. He was thirty seven.

David Rapp has been a political journalist and publishing executive in Washington, DC, for more than thirty years. He is the former editor of Congressional Quarterly, as well as the author of How the U.S. Got into Agriculture — and Why It Can’t Get Out.

“I Don’t Know” Is on Third was originally published in Our Game on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

A question arises about baseball’s long lost first World Series trophy: should it be recreated?

Back in 2011, when I was named MLB’s official historian and this blog was new, I posted a three-part story titled “Baseball’s Lost Chalice,” which I introduced thus:

The strange story of Helen Dauvray and baseball’s first world’s championship trophy will be published at Our Game in three parts this week. Ballplayers and entertainment stars have always had a lot in common. Both expect and enjoy the limelight; both are separated from the rest of us by the adulation and money we pour on them. Sometimes in their separation from the rest of society they reach out to each other in matrimony: Rube Marquard and Blossom Seeley, Mike Donlin and Mabel Hite, Joe DiMaggio and Marilyn Monroe. In the 1880s John Montgomery Ward and Helen Dauvray had all the star power of any of them. Prior to their marriage Miss Dauvray had established an eponymous loving cup as the reward for winning the World Championship in 1887 and succeeding years. The Cup has been lost for so long that no one alive has seen it. Recent discoveries in the archives of the Gorham Manufacturing Company reveal much new detail about the cup; however, recent discoveries about its donor are even more interesting.

Today I would like simply to offer the only existing photographs of the Dauvray Cup, located in the archives of the Gorham Company by friend Samuel Hough. Over the weekend I received a query about the cup from another baseball friend, Jay Miller, who concluded our exchange by noting, “Has anyone thought about making a copy of the Cup from the pictures and donating it to the Hall of Fame?”

Hmmm, I thought. Might the recent advances in 3-D printing technology permit the inexpensive reproduction of the Dauvray Cup or, maybe better yet, a mold for its casting into various substances? The original article may be read at the links below, but below are the three surviving images of the Dauvray Cup.

P.S. Here’s a new wrinkle, via a tip from Richard Hershberger, who writes, “The last known (to me) sighting of the Dauvray Cup was in 1905, when [Arthur] Soden stated that it was in his possession and belonged to the Boston Club by virtue of their winning the pennant three years running, from 1891 to 1893.” I remain skeptical, as the whereabouts of the cup were unknown from 1894 to the present day, and neither Soden nor anyone else made further mention of it. But perhaps his statement may be regarded as a clue.

The links to the original story:

• Baseball’s Lost Chalice
• Baseball’s Lost Chalice, Part 2
• Baseball’s Lost Chalice, Part 3

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

A letter has come to light revealing that Boston NL tried to hire him

I have written frequently in this space about Zane Grey, the famous writer of Western stories, his baseball opus, and his personal baseball experience. (Links to the other stories may be found below.) I read The Redheaded Outfield as a boy and, all these years later, it is not possible to overestimate the role he and a handful of other writers had on crafting my love of the game.

Grey was a formidable player at the University of Pennsylvania, with minor-league clubs and, while he was studying dentistry, with the Orange Athletic Club of Orange, New Jersey. Most often he went by his given name of Pearl Grey. Very recently I came to the conclusion that he was the Newark player strolling to first base in the very first baseball film, the Edison Company’s 1898 “The Ball Game.” (For more information, including the film itself, see: https://goo.gl/9ipEyf.)

After setting up his dentistry practice in New York City in 1899, Grey continued to play on weekends for the powerhouse Orange Athletic Club, semipro outfit that played Sunday exhibitions against big-league clubs — like the Cardinals, Giants, Reds, and Senators — and barnstorming black clubs like the Cuban Giants and the Cuban X-Giants, frequently defeating them.

Grey’s teammate at Penn and with the Orange A.C. was Roy Thomas, who would go on to play center field with the Phillies for a dozen years, leading the National League in walks in seven of the eight years from 1900 through 1907. A singles hitter with little power, Thomas nonetheless was a sabermetric pioneer, finishing his career with an on-base percentage of .413, 28th all-time.

The Phils brought Thomas directly to the big club from the Orange A.C., where Grey continued on weekend duty while struggling to establish himself as a dentist and as an author. Was Grey good enough to have have played in the majors, as Thomas did and as his brother Reddy would for one game with Pittsburgh in 1903? I had not thought so, until the letter below, from Al Buckenberger, manager of the Boston Braves, came to my attention.

Though pictured above, I offer this transcription:

Syracuse, N.Y. Jan 13th, 1902

Mr. P.Z. Grey, New York City

Dear Sir

I am informed that you do not intend to play ball with the Orange AC the coming season. Could you be induced to play professional base ball?

I would like to hear from you and in case you would consent to play let me know your lowest terms.

Yours &c,

AC Buckenberger

There is no record of Grey’s reply but the key fact is that, well underway with his first book, Betty Zane, published in 1903, he declined an opportunity to play big-league ball with Boston in 1902.

• Zane Grey’s “The Young Pitcher,” an Odd Baseball Novel
• Zane Grey’s “The Short-Stop,” a Neglected Baseball Novel
• Zane Grey’s Redheaded Outfield
• Old Well-Well
• Old Well-Well: Zane Grey’s Story

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

Rain, snow, cold, and a “postponed” Fall Classic

Cold, damp — even snow — are an annual Spring dilemma for baseball owners and fans. To play or not to play, that is the question. A game played in Denver (Atlanta Braves vs. Colorado Rockies) on April 23, 2013 is believed to be the coldest game on record, at 23 degrees at first pitch (and 27 degrees when the game ended). But there once was a World-Series clinching game that was postponed because of awful weather that was never replayed. Read on.

Today’s fans, by and large, believe that the first World Series dates to 1903, when the Boston Pilgrims of the new American League upset the Pittsburgh Pirates, champions of the National League. Fussbudgets like me would not even call that the first World Series of the twentieth century, as it was played by agreement of the two league champion clubs’ owners, rather than through mandate of the leagues. That would explain how John McGraw, acting out of his hatred for Ban Johnson, the president of the American League who had banished him from the Baltimore Orioles in 1901, came to back out of a World Series matchup in 1904. (For the backstory, see: https://ourgame.mlblogs.com/the-house-that-mcgraw-built-2bf6f75aa8dc.) The World Series of 1905 was in truth the first championship World Series between the rival leagues.

But there was an earlier postseason championship series between rival leagues, before the American League was even a glimmer in Ban Johnson’s eye. It was played each year from 1884 through 1890, a year of three major leagues (National League, Players’ League, and the American Association), when at last it dribbled off into inconsequence.

My dear departed friend Fred Ivor-Campbell wrote stories for Total Baseball about each of the postseason contests from 1884 forward, including such little-recalled tourneys as that for the Temple Cup (1894–1897), the Chronicle-Telegraph Cup (1900), and the many City Series between clubs that had had fallen short of the league pennant. I will occasionally run his stories in this space, but today let me recount the tale of the only World Series that was postponed because of cold, with an intention to play the ultimate game the following spring.

By the time warm weather returned in 1891, however, the NL and AA were at each other’s throats, with the latter accusing the former of stealing its players while aiming to drive it out of business, as it had successfully done with the Players’ League. The final game of the 1890 world Series was never played, the AA folded its tent at the end of 1891, and the World Series was no more … for a good long while. Here’s Fred, a great early baseball expert whose name now adorns SABR’s annual Fred Ivor-Campbell Nineteenth Century Baseball Conference (“The Fred”), held every April in Cooperstown … in sometimes daunting weather conditions.

The Brooklyn Bridegrooms, AA pennant winners in 1889, switched to the NL and returned to World Series play as champions of their new league. Louisville, meanwhile, rose from a last-place finish in 1889 to replace Brooklyn at the top of the AA. The Series, though, seemed meaningless to many who believed that pennant-winning Boston of the outlaw Players’ League (which had drawn off many of the best NL and AA players) could beat both Louisville and Brooklyn if given the opportunity.

The first four games of the Series were played in Louisville before an ever decreasing number of spectators. The largest crowd — 5,600 — saw the Cyclones humiliated in the opener 9–0 as Brooklyn’s Adonis Terry stopped them on two singles. The Grooms won the second game, too, breaking a 2–2 tie with a pair of runs in the fourth and holding on for a 5–3 win.

Louisville played catch-up throughout Game Three and entered the last of the eighth still behind 7–4. But a walk, three hits, a sacrifice fly, and a passed ball brought to score to 7-all — where it remained when darkness ended the game. Only 1,050 spectators attended the final contest in Louisville, but they saw the first Louisville win. The Cyclones scored three runs in the first inning, but Brooklyn countered with three an inning later, and both teams scored single runs in the third. Louisville’s Red Ehret blanked the Grooms the rest of the way, but Brooklyn’s Tom Lovett yielded the Cyclones a winning run in the seventh when Tim Shinnick tripled and was sacrificed home.

Rain postponed the first game in Brooklyn for two days, but when it was played — on a cold, muddy day before a small crowd of 1,000 — the Grooms took the lead on Oyster Burns’ two-run homer in the first inning and held it all the way for their third win. As the weather grew colder, the crowds declined for the final two games. Louisville captured its second win by a 9–8 margin when a three-run Brooklyn rally in the eighth inning of Game Six stalled one run short of a tie. Only abut 300 diehards saw the Cyclones even the Series in the finale, 6–2 behind Red Ehret’s four-hitter. A tie-breaking eighth game seemed called for, but there was not enough interest in playing any further in the bitter cold. — Fred Ivor-Campbell

The Last 19th-Century World Series was originally published in Our Game on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

A rediscovery of sorts; my introduction to a 1984 reissue of baseball’s first history, originally published in 1888

I’ve been working this baseball beat for so long that I had forgotten that I wrote this. The thought process, or fugue reverie, that recalled it for me today is irretrievable, but fortunately I was able to locate my copy of the book, published in a limited edition of 500 copies by Camden House in 1984. This was before Total Baseball, before Ken Burns, before Baseball in the Garden of Eden. In fact what was to be my long romance with the early game had barely begun.

Why reissue this little book, nearly a century after its rather offhand publication? “Enlarged and republished from the Boston Herald,” the title page declares, by a firm located in the Herald Building; stiffly written by a twenty-eight-year-old correspondent of that newspaper, with a pronounced debt to the annual summaries by Henry Chadwick in the Beadle and DeWitt Guides; a paperbound throwaway pocked with typos and errors of fact — Sphere and Ash seems at best a curio of the second-hand book trade, amusing for its naive advertisements and illustrations but obviously a ringer in any list of baseball classics.

And yet … just as the book’s weaknesses are indicated on the title page, so are its strengths. Although Sphere and Ash is the title by which the book is known to baseball bibliographers, we see that History of Baseball is its proper name, and as such it is the game’s first. That a game only thirty years old as an organized sport should attract the scrutiny of a historian is surprise enough — imagine today a “History of Platform Tennis” — but even more interesting is the descriptive line “Notable Records by Primitive Clubs.”

Primitive! How rapidly the game had evolved, how distant its antiquity, how nostalgic the very essence of this national obsession on the rise — all attested to by the selection of that single word. Today we may sing the praises of a Mike Schmidt or a Tom Seaver, while reducing their stature by reference to the legendary Babe Ruth or Walter Johnson; in 1888 baseball savants might laud a Tim Keefe but reserve their idolatry for Jim Creighton, a Bunyanesque figure of the mists, now largely forgotten.

The past animates our national pastime, and elevates it. Sphere and Ash, the primitive history, sheds a singular light on that past and must be read by the student of the early game, not in preference to the later histories (Spalding, Spink, Seymour, Voigt) but as complement and counterpoint to them.

Of particular interest is the absence of a baseball creation myth, and the parallel absence of a creator: neither Abner Doubleday nor Alexander Cartwright gets a nod, and baseball’s derivation from rounders is unashamedly acknowledged. The Massachusetts Game, the version of baseball closest to rounders and, after 1860, the road not taken, is detailed nicely, as are the confusing substitution rules prior to 1893. No doubt the strongest component of Sphere and Ash, however, is the evolution of pitching rules, techniques, and conditioning methods. In this section the author tosses in tidbits which for his contemporaries may have been mere trifles, but for modern readers is pure gold.

On page 30 we learn that the term “Chicagoed,” meaning “shut out,” derives not from the ability of Chicago hurlers to blank their opponents, as is generally written, but from the ineptness of Chicago batters on a particular date, July 23, 1870.

On page 33 we see that the origin of the curve ball was a matter of dispute even in the 1880s, when all the claimants — Cummings, Goldsmith, Avery, Mann, et al. — were able to make their own cases.

On page 39 we learn that the average pitcher of the late 1880s threw 180 balls per game, half again as many as a starter of the 1980s, and that to condition a pitcher’s arm “hot water is good, as is also mild galvanism” (!).

On page 59 we read that the American Association, today regarded as the inferior of the National League during the 1880s, was actually its superior in interleague matches played in 1885–86. This is the kind of stuff that sets revisionists’ spines a-tingle.

What of the author himself, identified on the title page as J.C. Morse? His full name was Jacob Charles Morse, and he was born in Concord, New Hampshire on June 7, 1860. He entered Harvard College with the class of 1881 but was forced to leave in January of his senior year due to illness (he received his Bachelor’s degree out of course in 1906, eighteen years after graduating from Boston University Law School). Also in 1881, as a means of helping to put himself through college, he began to send freelance baseball reports to the Boston Herald, Globe, Post, Advertiser, and Courier; by 1885 he was on staff with the Herald, a post he held until 1907. “I naturally expected to die in the harness in that institution,” Morse later wrote, “but … changes in management bring changes in personnel; so it was a case of pull up your stakes and go it.”

Go it he did in the winter of ’07, launching Baseball Magazine, widely regarded still as the best periodical the sport has ever produced. In 1920 he shifted to the insurance field. A resident of Brookline, Massachusetts since the mid-1890s, Morse died there on April 12, 1937.

Jake Morse was the Boston correspondent for Sporting Life for two decades; the long-time secretary of the New England Baseball Association; a member of the Brookline Board of Trade; an active Democrat; and a member of, seemingly, every fraternal order this side of the Raccoon Lodge. But the accomplishment most intriguing to the present writer is a single agate line in the Manager Register of The Baseball Encyclopedia. This indicates that in the Union Association year of 1884, after Tim Murnane and Tom Furniss had managed the Boston team to a record of 12–23, Jacob Charles Morse — barely twenty-four and not yet in the steady employ of the Herald — took over! Not only did he finish the season at the helm, but under his guidance the Boston Unions won 46 games and lost only 28.

The man knew his baseball.

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

An odd harbinger of the Black Sox Scandal

The title of this story references the wonderful Astaire-Rogers film The Gay Divorcee (1934), but my inspiration for posting it comes from Paul Lukas — not the Hungarian actor but the baseball-uniform and sports-aesthetics writer. This morning he posted a great story at the Uni-Watch Research Project: “Saying It with Flowers” (https://goo.gl/fvXVG2), accompanied by many images of horseshoe floral tributes to ballplayers. The one shown above was especially familiar, as I had once written about the lithograph depicted with the horseshoe, which survives at the Baseball Hall of Fame.

The “Peerless Leader”? Wasn’t Frank Chance simply the guy on the receiving end of all those twin-killing tosses from Joe Tinker or Johnny Evers? Not exactly. He was a revered figure in baseball in his day, and his Hall of Fame stature is conveyed more by an artifact like this than a mere statistical evaluation or a passing mention in a Franklin P. Adams’s now threadbare ditty. (Once familiar to all fans, the poem now requires quotation:

These are the saddest of possible words:

“Tinker to Evers to Chance.”

Trio of Bear Cubs and fleeter than birds,

“Tinker to Evers to Chance.”

Ruthlessly pricking our gonfalon bubble,

Making a Giant hit into a double,

Words that are weighty with nothing but trouble:

“Tinker to Evers to Chance.”

As further gloss, let it be said that “a double” here means a double play, and that “our gonfalon bubble” is the Giants fans’ fantasy that, in 1908 when this poem was first printed in the New York Globe, a pennant would be theirs.

Frank Chance was attending college in California, planning to become a dentist, when Chicago White Stockings star Bill Lange spotted him playing in a summer league, and recommended the team sign him. Originally a catcher and fill-in outfielder, he became a star when he took over at first base in 1903. Two years later he became the Cubs’ manager, and under his leadership they captured National League flags in 1906, 1907, 1908, and 1910. As a player Chance was rugged, but leaning too close to the plate cost him frequent beanings, which led to hearing impairment and terrible headaches.

After a disagreement with the team’s owner, he was let go after the 1912 season. The New York Highlanders snatched him up. This remarkable lithograph, borne by players with “Tammany” on their jersey plackets, which officially welcomes Chance to “the greatest city in the United States,” has a list of names redolent with the history of the city and the nation. There are politicians from Teddy Roosevelt and William Gaynor to Dick Croker; Tammany Hall operatives and baseball magnates like James Gaffney, Charles Murphy, and Bill Devery. The list of entertainment giants reads like a clipping from Variety: George M. Cohan, Flo Ziegfeld, Al Jolson, Honey Boy Evans, David Belasco, DeWolf Hopper, and Harry Frazee (the man who sold Babe Ruth). John McGraw added his name, as did John Montgomery Ward and former world heavyweight champion Gentleman Jim Corbett — and there, among those names, some still famous and others only dimly remembered, is a name that fairly leaps to the inquiring eye: Arnold Rothstein.

How could this professional gambler, the evil genius who masterminded the fixing of the 1919 World Series, be so openly linked to men at the apex of celebrity? Because that’s the way the country was back then — politics, sports, theater, and gambling were inextricably intertwined. That was how the Peerless Leader came to be honored by the Peerless Swindler, and such was the soil from which the Black Sox Scandal sprouted.

Chance Is the Fool’s Name for Fate was originally published in Our Game on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

by John B. Holway

John Holway is one of my oldest friends in baseball, and not only because he is 88. He wrote the first book in English on Japanese baseball, Japan Is Big League in Thrills, in 1954. His Voices from the Great Black Baseball Leagues (1975), an oral history, remains a monument in the field. He has also researched intently and written frequently about Ted Williams, whom he saw strike two home runs in the 1946 All-Star Game. He and I collaborated on a book, The Pitcher, in 1987, which seems like only yesterday. Oh, I could go on … but it appears I have, here: https://sabr.org/research/henry-chadwick-award-john-b-holway.

John emailed me the other day to tell me a story I knew nothing about, even though it involved the great Joe DiMaggio. “I tripped onto the DiMaggio story,” John wrote, “doing my old Last .400 Hitter, which i’m now updating into a trilogy. Volume I, through 1941, will be out hopefully by his centenary in August. Here is my draft of the 1939 DiMaggio collapse. I’m still trying to figure out what went wrong.”

September 9, 1939. German troops marched into Warsaw. The U.S. announced an increase in the armed forces.

In New York Latin fans presented a gold watch to Washington’s Cuban outfielder, Roberto Estalella (.275). Many suspected Roberto had Negro blood; if so, then he integrated the game seven years before Jackie Robinson. I saw Estalella in 1945, and he did seem swarthy (maybe it was a heavy tan).

Red Ruffing was out with a virus, and John Drebinger of the Times noted that Joe DiMaggio had caught it as well, though it didn’t prevent him from cracking three hits against Washington’s Joe Haynes (8–12) to climb to .409. How would he have done if he was feeling good? Drebinger asked.

September 10. Republican Senator William Borah promised a filibuster against aid to the Allies, warning it would pull America into the war.

DiMaggio went 0-for-4 against Washington’s Pete Appleton (5–10) and Joe Krakauskas (11–17) in the first game of a twin bill. In the second game he faced knuckleballer Emil (Dutch) Leonard, who was 20–7 with a sixth-place team that won only 45 and lost 80 without him. Dutch also shut Joe out 0-for-4.

DiMaggio hit the ball hard, however. In his first at bat, the Herald-Trib wrote, he “almost tore umpire Art Summers’ arm off with a blazing foul.” He also drove a 467-foot fly for an out, and in the field he made a strong throw to nail a runner at home.

Still, he was 0-for-4 and left the field hitting .4005.

September 12–13. In New York, Cleveland’s Mel Harder shut Joe out for a third day, 0-for-5. That made 13 straight at bats without a hit. (Two years later Harder would be the last man to stop DiMaggio before he launched his 56-game streak.) Joe’s average fell another four points, to .396. Only one paper, the Herald Tribune, mentioned it — in the middle of graph five. Joe didn’t know it yet, but his dream of .400 was over.

The next day DiMag ran up against Feller, who was “throwing golf balls” on the way to his 21st win. He extended Joe’s hitless streak to 14 before Joe got two singles and picked up two points, to .398.

September 14. After Feller’s speed, Newsom of Detroit fed DiMaggio off-speed pitches and stopped him 0-for-4. Joe slipped to .393, beginning another free-fall, which would last for 11 more dry at bats.

And still the New York writers said nothing. Two years later, when Ted Williams’ .400 was slowly melting, day by day, the writers reported every painful out.

What had happened? Years later Joe would say the cold he had developed on the 9th had caused a painful eye twitch. Biographer Joseph Durso quoted him:

“Something was pretty wrong with my left eye. I could hardly see out of it. but Joe McCarthy didn’t believe in cheese championships, so he kept me playing every day. He knew the agony I was going through. I’ll never understand why he didn’t give me a couple of days off. But he didn’t.”

For three weeks?!

9/9 3-for-4 .409

9/10 0-for-4 .404

9/10 0-for-4 .4005

9/12 0-for-5 .396

9/13 2-for-4 .397

9/14 0-for-4 .393

9/15 0-for-3 .390

9/16 1-for-4 .388

Can we believe that McCarthy didn’t know that his greatest star — the brightest star in America — was in agony? If he did know, did he really make DiMag stay in the game and suffer? Why???!!! McCarthy was an alcoholic, who kept a brown bag with him on the end of the bench, where he sat alone while the coaches apparently ran the team. He was sometimes referred to as a “push button manager,” the closest anyone came to whispering the problem. Eleven years later he would be found literally in the gutter and was swiftly and quietly whisked home to Buffalo and oblivion. No one then, or now, uttered the word “alcoholism.”

I believe the New York press must have known and hushed it up, as they had for years covered up Babe Ruth’s many sexual adventures. For years they must have been a source of guffaws in press boxes around the American league. But nobody leaked a word to the fans.

Just as intriguing: Why didn’t any writer report Joe’s eye problem? Didn’t any of his teammates know and tell them?

The press didn’t even mention that Joe’s .400 was slipping farther away, day by day. What kind of reporters were they, to miss the best baseball story of the year? They either had to be the world’s worst baseball writers, or they were censoring a story that did not fit the myth they wanted to tell.

Two years later, Ted Williams’ .400 was slipping away, point by point, out by out, day by day, as the final day of the season rushed closer and closer. And the Boston papers kept their readers abreast of every at bat. If Ted had lost his .400, surely the New York writers would have told their readers.

Was the pressure of hitting .400 too much for Joe? I can’t believe this. DiMaggio was one of the great players of all time. He had “ice water in his veins,” as Tom Henrich put it.

But it’s hard to believe that a twitch could last 25 games. Was Joe caught in an old-fashioned slump? And no one even noticed!

DiMaggio had a second powerful enemy working against him — Yankee Stadium. Pete Palmer’s statistics in Total Baseball show that Joe was a .413-hitter that year — when he was free of the Stadium’s stifling Death Valley. He batted .350 at home. The park had obviously been designed for Ruth. Sure, Babe hit a few 500-footers. But how many of his 60 — or 714 — dropped into the Short Porch? Gotham’s PR corps does not tell us

Ruth and Gehrig reaped a fabulous gift. Joe paid for it. As a sophomore he had lashed 46 homers despite his 408-foot “power” alley, compared to Ruth’s 344; at the right-field foul pole it was a scandalously short (and low) 296.

If the fields had been switched, DiMag could probably have hit eight more, for 54, and Ruth might have hit seven less, for 53.

In 1932 Jimmie Foxx hit 58 against a 334-foot target in Philadelphia; in 1938 Hank Greenberg also blasted 58 into a 340-foot target in Detroit. But baseball history has been controlled by the New York writers, and they don’t mention that.

Why didn’t Joe hit to the opposite field? I don’t know if he ever hit even one into the tempting Porch. No one mentions that, either. Williams would receive a lot of scorn for not going the other way (even though he actually did, fairly often). DiMaggio almost never did. Yet not a word of criticism was ever directed at him.

And hardly a word was ever printed about Joe’s 1939 collapse, then or since.

Excerpted from Ted the Kid, to be published by Summer Game Books.

DiMaggio’s Mysterious Plunge was originally published in Our Game on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Faux Find of the Day; First in an Irregular Series

I came across this the other day and posted it to Twitter and Facebook, where one friend speculated that the batter had a stance like that of Joe Adcock, and another said that he knew this was a fake because Bartolo Colón would not have been depicted as a lefty. Yet another wag speculated that the batter must be waiting the pitcher out, so he could “walk like an Egyptian.” One gag led to another, and I thought, why not post this to Our Game? Indeed, why not do an occasional feature on baseball’s hype and hokum, frauds and fakes, baloney and bunk?

In response to my posting a mock baseball card of a royal player with the Memphis Sovereigns, one fellow pointed out that Jackie Robinson was born in Cairo (Georgia). Another expert mentioned that big-league pitcher John Healy was born in Cairo (Illiniois) and was forever thereafter called Egyptian Healy. I feel certain there is more in this line.

In point of fact, bat and ball games do go all the way back to Egypt and into prehistory. As I wrote in Baseball in the Garden of Eden:

A better reason for neither Cooperstown nor Pittsfield to celebrate the spontaneous birth of baseball in its backyard is that bat-and-ball games go back to the banks of the Nile nearly 4,500 years ago in the game seker-hemat, or “batting the ball.” In a wall relief at the shrine of Hathor, the goddess of love and joy, in Hatshepsut’s temple at Deir-el-Bahari, Thutmose III is seen holding a ball in one hand and a stick in the other. The hieroglyph reads: “Striking the ball for Hathor who is foremost in Thebes.” Another inscription above the king’s attending priests reads: “Catching it for him by the servants of the gods.” The date is c. 1460 B.C.E., but bat and ball games were played in Egypt a millennium before.

Bill Stern reported: “Thutmose III on his deathbed, to Hatshepsut: ‘Keep seker-hemat going; the country needs it.’”

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

How trading cards might populate a new hall of fame

Sport matters. So do the individuals or teams of high character and winning ways whose exploits may move multitudes to raise them to the level of heroes, and in the process stand a bit taller themselves. But in the cult of celebrity that grips us now, the routine activities of ordinary men are more amply analyzed than the greatest feats in all the world’s history of sport.

For sport to retain its power to inspire, we may now wish to squelch the noise of what any fan, upon a moment’s reflection, will agree doesn’t matter. There are halls of fame for baseball, football, basketball, hockey, and almost any other sport you can name … but until now none for the wide world of sport. Why, one might ask, do we need another? The quick A-to-Z quiz below may provide an answer: match the athlete, in each case a famed champion in his or her day, with sport and nationality; the guess is that you will fall far short of a perfect score. [Answers are provided at the end.]

How might the organizers of an as yet imaginary hall of fame unearth not only the athletes but even the sports that may one day be honored in its Valhalla? There are many sources, of course, but a surprisingly fruitful one has been the world’s trading cards, an infallible guide to who were the heroes of bygone days. The cards provide a veritable archaeological site for understanding sport and society, at least since the latter half of the nineteenth century.

The big four American team sports, plus tennis, golf, NASCAR, and other individual pursuits, have not always been the focus of this nation’s ardor, let alone the world’s. (We will set to one side for this column — Our Game is about baseball, after all — British cigarette cards celebrating stars of cricket, soccer, tennis, etc.) Only a century ago, when trading cards were given away with cigarettes rather than with candy or bubble gum — and never sold by themselves — football, hockey, golf, and tennis were barely represented and basketball not at all. Baseball was dominant, but card sets to then had featured champions of billiards, boxing, sharpshooting, pedestrianism (race walking), sculling, bowling, and horseracing.

Before the turn of the century, champion walker Edward Weston or sharpshooter Annie Oakley, jockey Isaac Murphy or oarsman Ned Hanlan were culture heroes of a greater magnitude than any baseball or football player. And boxer John L. Sullivan was the most famous man in North America in any field of endeavor. Collegiate football was becoming a national obsession by the late 1880s, but aside from an 1894 set of 36 players from Harvard, Yale, and Princeton, the only football player depicted in a card set was Captain Henry Beecher of Yale in the 1888 Goodwin Champions, a 50-card set containing only 8 baseball players.

Forty-five years later the Goudey Gum Company issued a 48-card “Sport Kings” set that spoke to the country’s changed tastes while honoring stars of the past, too. The checklist includes the first basketball cards ever (Nat Holman, Ed Wachter, Joe Lapchick, Eddie Burke).

It includes the first pro football cards (Red Grange and Jim Thorpe, although both were honored more for their amateur accomplishments) and the first U.S. issued hockey cards (Eddie Shore, Howie Morenz, Ace Bailey, Ching Johnson).

It includes swimmers Helene Madison, Johnny Weissmuller, and Duke Kahanamoku; skater Irving Jaffee and hurdler Babe Didrickson. There were tennis players, aviators, jockeys, cyclists, wrestlers, golfers, billiardists, skiers, even a speedboat racer and a dogsled champion.

If my imagines sports hall of fame has a compact model for its eventual composition, this card set is it. Today’s arena of sport stars seems impoverished by comparison. Think of how one might compose a 48-card set of today’s North American “sport kings” and queens … and then there are the sports the rest of the world plays!

Just for fun, let me do a brain drain of historic sport stars. Have I left out anyone? Of course, and I am counting on you to let me know.

Weightlifting
Milo of Krotona
John Davis
Naim Süleymanoglu
Pyrros Dimas
Leonid Zhabotinsky
Vasiliy Alekseyev

Wrestling
Frank Gotch
Strangler Lewis
Stanislaus Zbyszko
Vern Gagne
Antonina Rocca
Johnann Richtoff
Rulon Gardner
Aleksandr Karelin

Tennis and Racquets

Pierre Etchebaster
Sharif Khan

Track & Field (sprints, relays, javelin, shot, discus, etc.)
Dick Fosbury
Roger Bannister
Pierre de Coubertin
Emil Zatopek
Abbe Bikila

Qu Yunxia
Jim Thorpe

Skiing (Downhill, Cross Country, Jumping)
Toni Sailer
Franz Klammer
Jean-Claude Killy
Bill Koch
Bill Johnson
Phil Mahre
Alberto Tomba
Hermann Maier
Arthur Devlin
Bjorn Dahlie
Deborah Compagnoni
Ingemar Stenmark
Rosi Mittermaier
Katja Seizinger
Veikko Hakulinen
Matti Nykanen
Ulrich Wehling
Marc Girardelli
Kjetil André Aamodt
Annemarie Moser-Pröll
Ulrike Maier
Christl Cranz
Erika Hess

Cricket
W.G. Grace
Donald Bradman
Garfield Sobers
Ian Botham
Shane Warne
Jack Hobbs
John Wisden
John Lillywhite
Kumar Shri Ranjitsinhji
Viv Richards
Brian Lara

Mountaineering
Edward Whymper
Tenzing Norkay
Edmund Hillary
Galen Rowell
Reinhold Messner
George Mallory
Yvon Chouinard
Chris Bonington

Billiards (Carom, Pocket, Snooker, etc.)
Willie Mosconi
Irving Crane
Luther Lassiter
Alfredo DeOro
Willie Hoppe
Ralph Greenleaf
Jake Schaefer
Dudley Kavanagh
Michael Phelan
George Slosson
Maurice Daly
Jimmy Caras

Pedestrianism (Race Walking)

Dan O’Leary
Frank Hart
Edward Payson Weston
William Gale
Charles Rowell
Madame Ada Louise Anderson
James L. Curtis

Bicycle Racing
Alf Goullet
Miguel Indurain
Lance Armstrong
Eddy Merckx
Greg LeMond
Albert Shock
Charlie Miller
Reggie McNamara
Major Taylor

Aquatics (swimming, diving, water polo, surfing)
Greg Louganis
Johnny Weissmuller
Buster Crabbe
Gertrude Ederle
Mark Spitz
Rie Mastenbroek
Eleanora Sears
Helene Madison

Klaus Dibiasi
Fu Mingxia
Xiong Ni
Phil Boggs
Sammy Lee
Gao Min

Adolph Kiefer
Matthew Webb
Matt Biondi
Aleksandr Popov
Duke Kahanamoku
Murray Rose
Vladimir Salnikov
Roland Matthes
Pablo Morales
Dawn Fraser
Janet Evans
Ulrike Richter
Krisztina Egerszegi
Anne Ottenbrite

Archery
Robin Hood
Wada Daihachi
William H. Thompson
Lewis W. Maxson
Russ Hoogerhyde
Janina Kurkowska
Hans Deutgen
Rick McKinney

Extreme Sports (skateboard, motocross, etc.)
Tony Hawk
Dave Mirra
Fabiola da Silva
Travis Pastrana
Andy Macdonald
Aleisha Cline

Auto Racing (Indy, Nascar, Formula 1, Drag)
Barney Oldfield
Mario Andretti
A.J. Foyt
Emerson Fittipaldi
Bobby Allison
Al Unser
Jeff Gordon
Richard Petty
Jacques Villeneuve
Stirling Moss
Michael Schumacher
Jackie Stewart
Niki Lauda
Dale Earnhardt
Bill Elliott
Eddie Rickenbacker
Juan-Manuel Fangio
Alain Prost
Don Garlits

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

Bringing the baby back home, all grown up

On July 16, 1874, the Philadelphia Athletics and the Boston Red Stockings of the pioneer National Association of Base Ball Players set sail for England to spread the gospel of baseball. The midseason tour pulled the teams out of league play for nearly two months.

The All England XI cricketers from Great Britain had been a sensation in 1859 when they crossed the Atlantic, and a return tour was planned for 1862, but our Civil War put that on hold. At that time there had been frequent mention in the press of our “national games,” reflecting the equal stature of cricket and baseball. By War’s end, baseball alone was described as the national pastime.

Harry Wright, leader of the Bostons, wished to return the favor of the 1859 tour (and those less popular visits of 1868 and 1872). His father had been a cricket professional in England and in America; Harry and his brother George—both ensconced in the Baseball Hall of Fame—were prominent cricketers before they ever tried their hands at baseball. They thought they would show off our new improved game to the Mother Country, but upon their arrival sporting fans wanted them to play cricket, turning up their noses at baseball. The Americans won all their cricket matches but only by playing 18 men against the home country’s 11. They played 14 dates in England, at some sites displaying their skills in both cricket and baseball. The middle seven of these were played in London, where Major League Baseball now proposes to return in 2019.

The plan to bring our new game to England was largely a failure. The baseballists were informed that their game was simply rounders, made duller by the dominant role of the pitcher. A correspondent signing as “Grandmother” wrote to the London Times on August 11, 1874:

Sir — — Some American athletes are trying to introduce to us their game of base ball, as if it were a novelty: whereas the fact is that it is an ancient English game, long ago discarded in favor of cricket….

Baseball had indeed been born in England and was long played under that name, as a rural pastime with quite different rules, such as hitting the ball with one’s hand rather than a bat. Women and girls played it along with men and boys, as a picnic recreation, from perhaps as early as 1690. As “English Baseball” split off from its rural cousin, rounders—a game played with a bat, and bases that were run clockwise—the old game of baseball was left to the fair sex, who continued to play it until late in the nineteenth century.

Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey, a novel written in 1798 but published posthumously twenty years later, is today well known in baseball-history circles for this passage:

Mrs. Morland was a very good woman, and wished to see her children everything they ought to be; but her time was so much occupied in lying-in and teaching the little ones, that her elder daughters were inevitably left to shift for themselves; and it was not very wonderful that Catherine, who had nothing heroic about her, should prefer cricket, base ball, riding on horseback, and running about the country at the age of fourteen, to books — or at least books of information….

Yet before Abner Doubleday was affirmed as baseball’s father in a nationwide celebration in 1939, few Americans knew that English boys and girls had played a game called baseball, whatever its rules may have been. Few knew the Austen passage, and fewer still knew of John Newbery’s A Little Pretty Pocket-Book, published in London in 1744 — which offers a woodcut showing boys playing baseball and a rhymed description of the game.

BASE-BALL.

The Ball once struck off,

Away flies the Boy

To the next destin’d Post,

And then Home with Joy.

MORAL

Thus Britons, for Lucre,

Fly over the Main,

But, with Pleasure transported,

Return back again.

That baseball is an odyssey in which a protagonist braves the perils between bases before ultimately coming home, like Ulysses, is today a familiar trope; it is delightful to note it in this first printed mention of the game. Newbery’s charming alphabet book was published in pirated editions in America, too, as early as 1762 and again in 1787, by Isaiah Thomas. (In the American edition the word “Britons” in the second stanza is replaced by “seamen.”) The bases in the depicted game are wooden posts, not sandbags, though either may be understood as safe havens from being put out. There is no bat.

Magnanimously, we had granted the Brits their primacy in cricket; some American cosmopolites might have gone as far as to acknowledge a playing-fields link between their national game and ours — perhaps, as the early sportswriter Henry Chadwick claimed, through rounders — but baseball, well, that was our game.

Not so. When scholar Robert Henderson revealed the Doubleday legend to be made of whole cloth, baseball writer John Kieran wrote in the New York Times:

Oh, Abner of the Doubledays in far-off fields Elysian,

Your claim to fame is called a foul by later-day decision.

Some prying archeologists have gone and found some traces

Of baseball footprints ages old in sundry English places.

Dryly, Kieran proposed that “in view of the enjoyment which we in this country derive from baseball, it would be a sporting gesture to let the English inventors know that we are very much obliged to them.”

American professional baseball returned to England as the last stop in the World Tour of 1888–1889, which had begun in the Sandwich Islands (Hawaii), then progressed to Australia, Ceylon (Sri Lanka), and Egypt, actually playing a formal game before the Great Pyramid. After stops at Naples, Florence, and Rome, the world tourists spent ten days in Paris and another ten in London.

By this time British men who had continued to play the game of rounders had formed associations in Wales, Scotland, and England. In Liverpool, a weekly rounders newspaper reported on the dozens of matches (or fixtures) that were contested each week. In the 1890s rounders devotees created confusion for all those who today study the game by changing the name of their game and forming the London Base Ball Association. Meanwhile the ancient and honorable game of “English Baseball,” which had become an exclusively female pastime, had pretty much disappeared.

American baseball was played in London during a couple of early twentieth-century tours, but the game had taken so slight a hold that when World War I broke out it was left to Canadians to instruct English soldiers how to play (the U.S. didn’t enter the conflict until April 1917). In the fall of 1917, a series for the championship of the Canadian forces overseas was played in England. One hundred and one teams took part, with several minor league and semipro players dotting the rosters. Servicemen’s baseball was alive and well in Europe in both 1917 and 1918. An Anglo-American League was formed, composed of regular teams of American and Canadian soldiers, and was organized in London by W.E. Booker and former big leaguer Arlie Latham. The league played a regular weekend schedule in London, the English provinces, and Scotland. Every team had four or five professional players. A benefit game between American Army and Navy teams in London, on July 4, 1918, drew more than forty thousand spectators, including the King.

What became of baseball in England? The pastime formerly known as rounders is now more familiarly known as Welsh Baseball and endures as an organized sport in both Cardiff and Liverpool. English Baseball, the ancient game that in the 18th century gave birth to America’s national pastime, died out.

Major League Baseball has yet to take root, but perhaps, as Sherlock Holmes said to Watson, “The game is afoot.” The sleuth’s creator, Arthur Conan Doyle, wrote to the the Times of London nearly a century ago (October 25, 1924):

Sir, — As one who has sampled most British sports, may I say a word upon baseball? It seems to me that in those Press comments which I have been able to see too much stress is laid upon what may appear to us to be a weakness or a comic aspect in the game and not nearly enough upon its real claim to our attention…. If it were taken up by our different Association teams as a summer pastime I believe it would sweep the country as it has done America. At the same time it would no more interfere with cricket than lawn tennis has done….

Next at Our Game, “The Great Baseball Rivalry (Yanks and Red Sox, of course).

Today’s press release announcing the games between the Red Sox and Yankees here:

The Boston Red Sox and the New York Yankees will play an historic two-game series in London in 2019, marking the sport’s first games ever played in Europe, in the MLB London Series, Major League Baseball (MLB), the Major League Baseball Players Association (MLBPA) and the Mayor of London jointly announced today.

The 2019 series will be played on June 29–30 at London Stadium, the site of the 2012 Olympic Games, which will take on a baseball configuration for the event. The estimated capacity of London Stadium for the series will be 55,000. The United Kingdom will follow other international venues that have hosted regular season Major League games, joining Mexico, Japan, Puerto Rico and Australia. The parties have agreed to a two-year deal that will include another series in London in 2020, with participating teams to be announced, and other initiatives that will aim to establish a footprint in the city.

The announcement of a two-year commitment to play games in London was made today in the capital by Baseball Commissioner Robert D. Manfred, Jr.; Tim Slavin, Chief of Business Affairs and Senior Counsel, Business for the MLBPA; the Mayor of London, Sadiq Khan; Boston Red Sox Principal Owner John W. Henry; and New York Yankees Managing General Partner/Co-Chairperson Hal Steinbrenner and General Partner/Vice Chairperson Jennifer Steinbrenner Swindal.

Commissioner Manfred said: “Major League Baseball is excited to be bringing one of the most storied rivalries in sports to the passionate fans of London. In our ongoing efforts to grow baseball, there is nothing as impactful as bringing live games and our talented players to fans. This is our most significant endeavor ever in Europe and we look forward to showcasing Major League Baseball in one of the world’s great cities.”

Tony Clark, Executive Director of the MLBPA, said: “Some of the most talented and dynamic players in the world will be playing in these games. They are excited about the chance to meet new fans, and showcase the game they love. They are aware they’ll be a part of history, but they also know these games count. So fans can expect intense competition during what will surely be a great few days in London.”

The Mayor of London, Sadiq Khan, said: “I am absolutely delighted that we have secured this historic agreement for Major League Baseball to come to London in 2019 and 2020. All the hard work has paid off. There is no better way to start the London Series and the first Major League Baseball fixture in Europe than a clash between two heavyweights of international sport — the New York Yankees and the Boston Red Sox. This is a major coup demonstrating, once again, that London is the sporting capital of the world and I am excited about a new partnership with MLB and the long term future of this sport in our great city.”

Boston Red Sox Principal Owner John W. Henry said: “For several years the Red Sox and Yankees have discussed playing in London as the first-ever Major League Baseball regular season game in Europe. It’s also the first time the Red Sox and Yankees have played one another outside of New York or Boston. There were significant challenges that had to be overcome. We could not be happier that Commissioner Manfred has been able to make this a reality. This series will surely be the most significant international event to date for Major League ball. I can’t wait to hear someone shout ‘play ball’ at London Stadium.”

New York Yankees Managing General Partner Hal Steinbrenner said: “To have the opportunity to participate in this historic baseball endeavor and showcase our game in London is something our entire organization is thrilled to be a part of. Bringing these storied teams together for British fans — who have such a profound appreciation for sports at the highest level — only adds to the unique allure of one of the world’s greatest sporting rivalries. We expect an exciting and intense pair of games and appreciate the significance of representing our sport in such a meaningful way.”

Graham Gilmore, CEO of London Stadium 185, said: “As a venue, we are immensely proud to be hosting MLB’s London Series at London Stadium in 2019. London Stadium has a track record of successfully delivering major global events, moving from Premier League Football and both international and domestic showpiece rugby fixtures to hosting some of the biggest names in music. We look forward to welcoming MLB, teams and fans to London Stadium for the first year of what we hope to be a fruitful, long term partnership.”

Fans can stay up to date on all news regarding the 2019 MLB London Series by following @MLBLondonSeries on Instagram and Facebook and can pre-register for MLB London Series tickets at:

mlb.com/london-series

https://atmlb.com/2rylJUz

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

The Boston Red Sox and the New York Yankees

For a very long time the Yankees and Red Sox were not bitter rivals at all: when one team was great, the other was not, and no one perceived Boston’s decades-long World Series drought as “The Curse of the Bambino” until long after his death. In fact, that richly sardonic term was not coined until 1990, by Boston writer Dan Shaughnessy, to convey the enduring misery of Red Sox fans who had not seen a championship club since 1918. That “curse” was finally broken in 2004, when Boston came back from a 3–0 deficit to take the final four games of the American League Championship Series from the Yankees, then rolled on to an easy World Championship. They have won two additional titles since.

The “Curse” manifested itself in Boston losses to other clubs, too (particularly the Fall Classics of 1946, 1967, 1975, and 1986, each an agonizing seventh-game defeat). But the matter at hand is The Great Rivalry of Boston and New York, cities which started with differing notions of culture and commerce at the very birth of the nation. The long simmering animosity wove its way into baseball after 1903, when the New York Yankees franchise began; Boston, a charter franchise in the new American League, was in its third season of play.

The Red Sox were the top team in the American League’s first two decades, winning all five World Series in which they appeared: 1903, 1912, 1915, 1916, and 1918. They might well have taken another in 1904, when they again took the pennant, but the National League Giants refused to play them (or any other American league team). New York’s American League entry was called the Highlanders, thus dubbed because they played at Hilltop Park along the Hudson River. In 1913, when they became tenants of the Giants at the Polo Grounds, they went by the name of Yankees, with no more success: they won no World Series between 1903 and 1920. In fact, they had never even appeared in one.

When Boston owner Harry Frazee agreed to sell his star pitcher and burgeoning slugger Babe Ruth to the Yankees after the 1919 campaign, things changed. In the years running up to 2003, while the Red Sox were winning no championships, the Yankees captured a whopping 26, with successive dynasties led by such stars as Ruth, Lou Gehrig, Joe DiMaggio, Mickey Mantle, and Derek Jeter (they added one more for good measure in 2009).

Since the inception of the wild card system and an added Division Series, the American League East rivals have squared off in the League Championship Series three times, with the Yankees winning in 1999 and 2003 and the Sox winning in 2004. In addition, the teams met in the last regular-season series of a season to decide the pennant in 1949, the first of Casey Stengel’s ten flags in 12 years (1949–1960). The Yanks and Bosox also tied for first in 1978, forcing a memorable one-game playoff, which New York won.

But let’s drift back now to the very beginnings of The Great Baseball Rivalry, before the Curse of the Bambino … indeed, before the Babe made his debut with Boston in 1914.

***

After a third-place finish in 1902, the Boston Pilgrims, as they were first known, ran away from the rest of the league in 1903 to take their first pennant by 14–1/2 games over Philadelphia. Pitcher Cy Young led the league in victories; Buck Freeman took titles in home runs, total bases, and RBIs; and second-year outfielder Patsy Dougherty finished first in hits and runs scored. In the first modern World Series, Boston overcame Pittsburgh’s favored Pirates, thereby confirming in the public mind the upstart league’s claim to big-time status.

Boston repeated as pennant winners in 1904, but by a much narrower margin, after a struggle with New York that wasn’t settled until the next-to-last day of the season. New York had chased Boston through midsummer, catching them in August and trading first place back and forth into October. But after spitballer Jack Chesbro defeated Boston 3–2 on October 7 (it was his forty-first win, a twentieth-century major league record), to give New York a half-game lead, the Pilgrims came back to win the next two. In the fourth game of the series, with Chesbro again pitching and the score tied 2–2 in the top of the ninth, a wild pitch over the New York catcher’s head let in Boston’s pennant-clinching run.

Neither club would win a flag until 1912, when the Red Sox took the lead in early June and were never headed. In what may still be the greatest World Series ever played, they edged John McGraw’s Giants and Christy Mathewson in extra innings of the deciding game, in which they trailed going into the bottom of the tenth. Smoky Joe Wood, who gone 34–5 during the regular season, won three more against the Giants.

Three years later, with a staff that included rookie Babe Ruth, the Sox captured their fourth pennant. After a first-game loss to the Phillies in the World Series, they recovered to sweep the next four by one run apiece.

Joe Wood’s ailing arm finally gave out, and Tris Speaker was traded to Cleveland at the start of the 1916 season following a salary dispute. But with Ruth winning 23 games to lead the team, the Sox won again and waltzed over Brooklyn in the Series.

That December, New York theatrical entrepreneurs Hugh Ward and Harry Frazee bought the club. For a while the future looked bright. After a second-place finish in 1917, the Sox edged Cleveland for their fifth World Series victory. But Frazee’s theater losses put him in a financial bind and gradually forced him to sell off the best of his players — mostly to the Yankees, who had plenty of money, and an office just a short hop from Frazee’s New York theater. Although Ruth startled the baseball world with a record 29 home runs in 1919, the Red Sox slid to sixth place, commencing a fifteen-year sojourn in the second division. In the eleven years from 1922 through 1932, while Ruth’s Yankees dominated the American League and the national headlines, the Sox emerged from last place only twice. In 1932 they reached their nadir, losing 111 games and finishing 64 games out of first.

***

Yanks’ owner Jacob Ruppert had hired Ed Barrow away from Boston to become his general manager. While managing the Red Sox, Barrow had been the one to convert Ruth from a great pitcher to a great outfielder. His December 1920 trade with Boston, following the Ruth heist of the previous year, gave the Yankees pitcher Waite Hoyt and catcher Wally Schang; they were followed in short order by pitchers “Bullet Joe” Bush and “Sad Sam” Jones, and infielders Everett Scott and Joe Dugan. With Frazee’s fire-sale tactics, New York was enriched and Boston’s curse seemed well deserved.

Beginning in 1923, after October losses to the Giants in the two prior World Series, the Yankees at last put everything together. After sharing the Polo Grounds since 1913, they were at home in brand-new Yankee Stadium just across the Harlem River in the Bronx. With the addition of yet another pitcher from the Red Sox — Herb Pennock — and a .393 year from Ruth, they took the lead from the start and built it over the summer to a 16-game margin by the end. For the third straight year, the Yankees faced the Giants in the World Series; this time they beat them, in six games, for their first world championship.

As mentioned above, the Red Sox languished in the league’s nether region throughout the decade. But in 1933, young, wealthy Tom Yawkey bought the club and promptly began what would be a lifetime effort to restore Boston to its former glory. His first efforts to buy success — with such established stars as Lefty Grove, Jimmie Foxx, and Joe Croni — pulled the club out of the cellar but failed to lift it into pennant contention. But as general manager Eddie

Collins began turning up young players to join the veterans, the Sox fortunes rose. The emergence between 1938 and 1942 of players like Bobby Doerr, Ted Williams, and pitcher Tex Hughson brought Boston a level of success not seen since 1918. In four of those five years they finished second to the Yankees, achieving in 1942 their highest winning percentage since 1915.

The loss of most of these newcomers to military service in World War II delayed further progress. But with the arrival of rookie pitching sensation Boo Ferriss in 1945, and the acquisition of slugging first baseman Rudy York that winter, the club was prepared for its returning war veterans to join in bringing Boston its greatest season since 1912. With 104 victories, the 1946 Sox won their long-delayed pennant, but fell in the World Series to the St. Louis Cardinals by one run in the final game.

The Yankees topped the Red Sox in close pennant races in the final years of the Forties, but in 1951 Boston collapsed at season’s end to finish third, 11 games back. They came no closer for the next fifteen years, finishing with eight consecutive losing seasons from 1959 through 1966, when they suffered their second successive ninth-place finish in a league now expanded to ten teams.

Though New York topped the American League one year in two between 1921 and 1962, their world title in that year was to be their last until the Steinbrenner era fifteen years later. After Series losses in 1963 and 1964 the club, which had gone forty years without a losing season, dropped to sixth place in 1965; in 1966 the Yankees fell to a last-place tenth, their first cellar finish in more than half a century. Sitting one place above them in the standings were the Red Sox.

In 1967 Boston awakened. A ten-game win streak in mid-July shot them out of mediocrity into the midst of a four-team race for the pennant that was not settled until the final day, leaving the Sox on top. Carl Yastrzemski, who had replaced Ted Williams in left field seven years earlier, replaced him now in the fans’ awe as he clinched the Triple Crown with a game-winning home run and six other hits in the final two must-win games. But the Sox lost the World Series in seven games, once again to the Cardinals.

In a Fall Classic recalled fondly by all baseball fans, that of 1975, the Red Sox won Game 6 on Carlton Fisk’s twelfth-inning homer, but lost Game 7 to Cincinnati the next day, 4–3. The following season marked a return to the World Series for New York, but they too fell to the Reds.

Meanwhile in New York, Steinbrenner’s Yankees had engineered a series of shrewd trades, offered big contracts to free agents, and created a round robin of managerial changes to become competitive again. Billy Martin in 1976, his first full season as manager, led the renewed club to a runaway division title. Though swept by Cincinnati’s Big Red Machine, the Yankees came back the next year to edge Baltimore and Boston. Reggie Jackson, signed as a free agent the previous autumn, turned the club’s power trio of Chris Chambliss, Graig Nettles, and Thurman Munson into a quartet as the Yankees recorded their first hundred-victory season in fourteen years. This time New York won the World Series in six games over Los Angeles, and Jackson became “Mr. October” with five home runs — three of them on first pitches in successive at bats in the final game.

In 1978, the Great Baseball Rivalry really gathered steam. After blowing a large late-August lead to fall 3–1/2 games behind New York in mid-September, Boston won its final eight scheduled games to tie the Yankees. But in the playoff, Yankee shortstop Bucky Dent’s three-run pop-fly homer over Fenway’s cozy left field wall proved Boston’s ruin. The Sox rallied in the eighth to draw within a run, but with two out and a man on third in the ninth, Yastrzemski popped up and the season was history.

In 1986, after an amazing comeback over the California Angels from a 3–1 deficit in the LCS, the Red Sox were one pitch away from a six-game World Series win over the New York Mets. But they lost the game, and in the finale — once again — the Series.

By this time Steinbrenner’s constant roster manipulation and managerial rotation (Billy Martin alone was hired and fired five times) at last set in motion a steady drop in Yankee fortunes. While the team remained in the thick of a tight 1988 divisional race until three season-ending losses set them back, their won-lost record showed a third straight season of decline. In 1989 the Yankees sank to their worst finish in twenty-two years and in 1990 they dropped to the floor of the AL East with the club’s worst record since 1913.

Then came a revival of the glory years for New York, with four World Series in five years from 1996 through 2000, and two other World Series appearances in 2001 and 2003. In the latter season Aaron Boone, current manager of the Yankees, broke Boston’s heart with an eleventh-inning homer in the final game of the League Championship Series, capping a late-inning comeback that seemed to extend The Curse of the Bambino to the breaking point. And after the first three games of the next year’s ALCS, which New York took from Boston, all seemed lost forever.

And then the clouds broke. The Sox won the next four games to vanquish their dreaded rivals, and swept the St. Louis Cardinals — who had vanquished them in 1946 and in 1967 — in the World Series. If there had ever been a curse, it was emphatically reversed with another Series sweep three years later (over the Colorado Rockies) and a six-game victory over the Cards in 2013.

Last night, the Yankees defeated the Red Sox 3–2, giving them 1182 wins against 983 losses. By that standard, not much of a rivalry … but folks in Beantown and in Gotham know better. Looking toward this year’s postseason, Boston and New York seem destined to clash once again.

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

Recalling Louise Kaufman

By John B. Holway

In 1981, 41 years after my first, boyhood look at Williams in 1940 and 24 after my first interview with him in ’57, I drove into the palm-studded driveway of Ted’s re­treat on the Florida Keys.

Ted’s companion, Louise Kaufman, a merry Barbara Bush look-alike, was puttering around, putting the house in order.

They had just returned from a summer of fishing in Canada and she apologized that he had just left to do some fishing in Jamaica, but she invited me in and listened to my proposal.

Framed pictures of fishermen hung on the walls. (“You wouldn’t know I was a baseball player,” he later remarked.) A picture window looked out on mangrove islands in the Gulf.

The refrigerator door held a cartoon of a handyman who had put his foot through the seat of a wicker chair. Apparently the game’s greatest precision hitter was a klutz around the house.

Kaufman listened with interest to my idea for a book on the 1941 season, until we were interrupted by the phone. In a few minutes she returned, shaking her head maternally. It was Ted calling from the airport to say he had forgotten his passport. She sighed like a mother whose child has lost a mitten in kindergarten.

How sorry she was that I hadn’t arrived the day before. The Yankees-Dodgers World Series was on TV, and since she cared almost nothing about baseball, she had retired early. Poor Ted had been forced to watch the game with no one to talk to. If only I’d been there, she said, how glad he would have been to have some company.

Ted’s three wives had been, respectively, Dorothy Lamour (Doris), Princess Grace of Monaco (Lee), and Jackie Kennedy (Dolores).

Louise was June Allison, the perky starlet who played the girl next door. She was the mystery woman in Ted’s life. Hardly anything has been written about her.

A fresh, outdoorsie gal, she could catch bigger marlins then he could — and won first prize in a tournament for doing so. She was also seven years older than him.

Florida fishing guide Jimmy Albright introduced them. He told authors Jim Prime and Bill Nowlin: “Louise had four children, two girls and two boys. I had known Lou for quite a while, and they had a little tournament going, which Ted and I fished, and I introduced them. “She was a real good fisherman, and the only woman he ever loved.”

And she fell head over heels for him. Every time Ted married someone else, she fled to Europe to mend her broken heart.

When I met her, she was sweet, gray-haired, and grandmotherly. When I returned to the house after departing to do some diving, Ted drove up, still dabbing sweat from a tennis workout. “You the fella that’s been doin’ all the writin’?” he asked.

Some fishing “captains” followed us inside and hogged the conversation until Ted nodded that it was time to start the interview and they left.

“Now,” he said amiably, turning to me “what can I do for you?”

Ted and Louise were obviously very fond of each other. He called her “Sweetie,” and during a break in the interview, she asked with a twinkle if I’d like to see their bedroom. Of course, as a good reporter, I followed her upstairs. The one memory I retain is a signed picture of Boston Cardinal Cushing on the wall.

Her children didn’t share her fondness for her famous friend. Teen-age son Rob remembered him as always boasting: He could fry omelets better than anyone — he could do anything better then anyone.

But I noticed that if Ted started to bloviate on some subject, she pursed her lips and scolded, “Oh, just because you can hit a baseball doesn’t mean you know everything!” and he quickly toned down.

“Louise was a salty old New Englander,” recalled Dick Bosman with a smile; he pitched for Williams on the Senators. “They traded barbs pretty good. He’d rip her, and she’d rip right back. She didn’t take any guff.”

One evening Ted, Louise, and I went out for a seafood dinner, and one by one the other guests came over to ask Ted’s opinion on this or that hitter. They would return north to tell their friends, “I was talking to Ted Williams down in Florida, and he told me…”

He answered each one amiably, and we eventually were left alone to finish our meal. Suddenly Ted’s mood changed sharply, and the notorious terrible-tempered Ted erupted. Diners’ heads swung around. Louise and I recoiled. I still don’t know what triggered it. It was scary — at 300 pounds, he could have crushed each of us with one hand.

“Sometimes,” she snapped tartly, “I wish I’d never met Ted Williams!”

It worked. The squall passed as quickly as it had come, and we finished our meal pleasantly. I don’t think he even remembered the episode.

Author David Pietrusza observed an almost identical outburst, a sudden storm that broke in the middle of a conversation in a restaurant. Williams’ amanuensis, John Underwood, also reported a vesuvian eruption at a hotel breakfast table.

Could Ted’s notorious mood swings have been caused by a food allergy? I asked my family doctor, who said, indeed, it is possible. This is a line of inquiry that should be explored.

Louise Kaufman died in 1993. It may have been an aneurysm, Bosman thinks. “She went into the hospital, and in a day or two she was gone. I know it hurt him deeply.” His daughter Bobbi Jo said Ted broke down and wept.

John B. Holway is the author of the Ted Williams trilogy. Volume I, Ted the Kid, will be published in August by Summer Game Books.

The Mystery Woman in Ted’s Life was originally published in Our Game on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

A comprehensive look at “the unchanging game,” in several parts

Bill Felber wrote this dazzling essay for Total Baseball back nearly thirty years ago, and Gary Gillette updated it for a later edition of that estimable encyclopedia, now gathering dust on my shelf beside my high-school slide rule. I thought to update this, with aid from the authors, still my friends after all these years, but then thought it better to present it as something of a rather large time capsule.

Those of you who think of launch angle as the latest, hippest thing in today’s game may enjoy this, from the Caldwell (Kansas) Advance of May 28, 1885:

In 1906, at the arguable heights of their careers, the Hall of Fame-bound trio of Joe Tinker, Johnny Evers, and Frank Chance completed approximately 50 double plays. In 2000, the primary players in the last-place Tampa Bay Devil Rays infield — Fred McGriff at first base, Miguel Cairo and Bobby Smith at second, and Kevin Stocker and Felix Martinez at short­stop — turned roughly twice that number. May we infer that the finest middle infield of a bygone era would be rejected as unfit for duty on a perfectly nondescript mod­ern team?

For the five-year period between 1921 and 1925, Rogers Hornsby batted better than .400. In the past 60 seasons, not a single major league hitter has reached that level of excellence as much as once, let alone for half a decade. May we conclude that, were he in his prime today, Hornsby would shame Tony Gwynn into anonymity?

The answers to those questions are, of course, two resounding calls of “no.”

Baseball is not played in a time capsule, and neither its record book nor its archives should be read as if it were. The game played on the artificial turf of Veterans Stadium that you watch today on television holds the same lure as the contest your grandfather took a surrey to see at Chi­cago’s old West Side Park. Teams contest for the same end, using fundamentally the same objects in a format described basically by the same rules. However, technologi­cal, sociological, strategic, and cultural forces have over decades refined those elements, so that today’s perform­ances cannot easily be accurately measured relative to yesterday’s. Nor can judgment be precisely made as to the superiority of either, save subjectively in the mind’s eye.

Baseball today is different from the game of the early 20th century in many ways, just as contemporary Ameri­can culture is different from the horse-and-buggy era. Imagine paying a quarter for admission to the ballpark, another quarter for access to the grandstand, and a third quarter for a seat. Imagine games played before audiences of a few hundred, maybe a thousand, fans. Imagine visit­ing teams arriving in town on trains, bunking two to a bed, then caravaning to the ballyard in a grand parade through the streets — though never at night and never, ever on Sunday. Now imagine baseball as the only sport of widespread popularity. No football to speak of, no bas­ketball, no hockey; no golf, no tennis, no track of conse­quence. Moreover, horse racing was only for the elite, and boxing only for the disreputable. There was such a time in America, and it was only a century ago.

In many ways, the game of baseball has changed pre­cisely because America itself has changed. Whether all that change has been for the good may be argued. One might contend, for instance, that a laudable part of Amer­icana died out when the practice of uniformed players publicly trolleying to the game (as a means of stirring fan attention) was halted in the first decade of the 20th cen­tury. However, most, if not all, aspects of baseball’s growth alongside society were inevitable. The 50-cent admission charge established by the National League in 1876 held for many years, but so did the rather unsavory practice of treating players as peons, to the point of doub­ling up sleeping arrangements. Philadelphia Athletics catcher Ossie Schreckengost once actually had it written into his contract that teammate (and bunkmate) Rube Waddell would be barred from eating animal crackers in bed because the crumbs irritated the catcher. Players to­day sleep in luxury hotels, and most do not even share rooms, much less beds. As the cost of living and the cost of operating a franchise have both increased strikingly, so have the size of the grandstand and the cost of a general admission ticket, the latter by a factor of 15 or 20.

In any era and at any price, a great championship battle has always held the American populace in thrall. Tens of millions of fans watched on their living room televisions in October 2000 as the Yankees and Mets waged their crosstown World Series struggle long into the night. Those fans studied every decisive play from a half dozen angles on instant replay as they second-guessed manage­rial moves and controversial umpiring decisions. Was that excitement any greater, measure for measure, than the grip in which the cities of Boston and Baltimore were held during the final days of the race for the 1897 Na­tional League pennant?

There was neither television nor radio then, but that did not stay the enthusiasm of hundreds of thousands of root­ers nationwide as the pulsating battle for supremacy wound to a close. The principals were the two most domi­nant sporting teams of their generation: The Boston Beaneaters and Baltimore Orioles had divided the previ­ous six pennants. Now, with less than a week remaining in the 1897 season, they were locked in a virtual tie for first, each having won better than seven of every 10 games played and fated by the schedule to meet for three conclusive games in Baltimore.

So all encompassing was interest in the games that Associated Press telegraphers dispatched play-by-play accounts to every major subscribing newspaper east of the Rockies. More than three dozen correspondents — an unheard-of number for the era — covered the games. Twenty more telegraphers tapped out accounts to cities where fans had gathered in theaters or outside newspaper offices to follow the events on chalkboards. In Boston, fan interest was so great that the game reports received triple the front-page space accorded the activities of President William McKinley, who was in Boston at the same time. Throngs numbering in the thousands massed daily along Washington Street, Boston’s Newspaper Row, to watch mechanical re-creations, which can be considered a dis­tant precursor to graphical coverage of the World Series on the World Wide Web. There was a published report of 4,000 fans jamming Boston’s Music Hall to watch a similar simulation. The games at Baltimore’s Union Grounds drew as many as 25,000 spectators, more than twice the previous record attendance for that facility!

The excitement of a great pennant race is a constant; only the modes of sensing that excitement change. Con­sider only a few of the more obvious changes: The player pool has changed, albeit at times tardily, to reflect the nation’s ethnic populations. When that pool expanded to encompass Southerners, Irish, Jews, Latins, or African Americans, it did so in reaction to fundamental changes such as the gradual dying out of post-Civil War prejudice, the assimilation of immigrant populations, and the even­tual willingness of white society to acknowledge blacks as equals.

Technology has worked on the grand old game in many ways. Basic improvements in the construction of the ball and glove have dramatically changed the play on the field. The field itself has changed in ways as grandiose and obvious as the abandonment of the unfenced pasture in favor of the comparative luxury of the wooden park. Intimate brick and steel stadiums of the early 20th cen­tury were followed half a century later by huge, imper­sonal concrete multipurpose facilities that are now being retired by atavistic retro ballparks evoking the golden years of the game.

Sociological alterations, as exemplified by population shifts from city to suburb and by the replacement of the trolley in favor of the automobile, resulted in the aban­donment of many inner-city ballparks after World War II. At the turn of the millennium, ironically, high-tech new downtown ballparks are viewed by many cities as key components in reviving aging sections of their urban cores.

Changes in national attitudes have been mirrored in the game on the field. America was a prim and proper coun­try in 1908, and its national game was a prim and proper one, heavy on the sacrifice bunt and very short on the long ball. Americans were a comparatively profligate bunch in the late 1920s, winning and losing with abandon on Wall Street, and these restless capitalists adopted base­ball heroes like Babe Ruth and Hack Wilson, who hit ’em far during the day and swigged ’em long into the night. The difference of only two decades is strikingly under­scored in a baseball statistic that also speaks volumes about off-field attitudes: for the five years between 1906 and 1910, the Chicago White Sox hit a total of only 27 home runs. Ruth hit more than that by himself in every season save one between 1919 and 1933.

Baseball’s labor-management relations have also gen­erally mirrored national patterns. The present major leagues can trace their ancestry back to the 1870s, an age when even the legality of organized labor was questioned.

The motivation behind the organizers of the National League was to take control of the game that had been essentially run by players’ cooperatives. The 1890s, the era of some of the most violent union-management con­flicts (e.g., the Haymarket riot, the Pullman strike), also witnessed the last direct player challenge to the authority of ownership, the Brotherhood War, which produced the Players League. Unionization very gradually gained favor, although both nationally and in baseball that pro­cess took decades. True player free agency in the National Pastime, as with worker rights in other businesses, often arrived only under the aegis of the courts.

Finally, as the educational level of America itself has changed, the strategies of baseball have evolved. The dominant function of today’s late-inning reliever could hardly have been envisioned by the game’s greatest minds as little as three decades ago. The stolen base, the home run, and the sacrifice have all come and gone as strategic coups (and, in some cases, have come back again). It is as judgmental to speculate on whether the game of today is better than the game of 1907 as it is to posit whether Joe Tinker was a better shortstop than Nomar Garciaparra.

No one would contend that baseball has been, or is today, any more than a general mirror of its times. Neither can it seriously be suggested that the National Pastime has failed to reflect many of the historical trends that have occurred during its existence. For purposes of this discus­sion, it is vital to recognize both of those realities. Para­doxically, only by appreciating the game’s evolution can one truly begin to sense the marvelous continuum represented therein.

So, by what context does one measure Hornsby’s feats of the 1920s relative to Gwynn’s of the 1980s and 1990s? By the context of the technological, strategic, societal, and cultural changes that wrought both of them. Could Joe Tinker play shortstop for the Cubs of today? For that matter, could Ozzie Smith have adapted to the scrub fields, primitive travel methods, incompetent training aides, and all-but-useless equipment of Tinker’s day?

These questions cannot be answered with finality. But without considering the many changing aspects of the game, attempts to even provide an answer become frivo­lous. What follows is an effort to examine some of the major causes of change and to provide context to a dis­cussion of the evolving nature of baseball. It is a sport has possessed for more than a century only one enduring and vital characteristic: it has, from the outset, been Amer­ica’s National Pastime.

Second part — Equipment — tomorrow.

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

A comprehensive look at “the unchanging game,” in several parts

Bill Felber wrote this dazzling essay for Total Baseball back nearly thirty years ago, and Gary Gillette updated it for a later edition of that estimable encyclopedia, now gathering dust on my shelf beside my high-school slide rule. This part, on the game’s equipment, continues from https://ourgame.mlblogs.com/the-changing-game-3b3a5325e128.

The bat, the ball, and the glove are baseball’s utensils. Virtually every child old enough to root, root, root for the home team owns at least one of each. Their omnipresence serves as immutable evidence of the game’s penetration into American culture. Yet today’s equipment is as changed from its predecessors of generations ago as is baseball itself. Even the seemingly simple functions of each have been redefined, in part a cause and in part an effect of the changing game.

Only a few of those changes are reflected in the rulebook; to most the book has proven adaptable. Examination of the adjustments made to the game’s basic tools illuminates the changes that baseball itself has made.

For obvious reasons, rulemakers have always felt the need to define how the ball shall be made. Curiously, that definition has changed very little over more than a cen­tury. Notice how similar are the two definitions that fol­low, the first from an 1861 convention of the National Association of Base Ball Players, and the second taken from the Official Baseball Rules of 2000:

1861 — The ball must weigh not less than five and one-­half, nor more than five and three-fourths ounces avoir­dupois. It must measure not less than nine and one-half, nor more than nine and three fourths inches in circumfer­ence. It must be composed of India rubber and yarn, covered with leather.

2000 — The ball shall be a sphere formed by yarn wound around a small core of cork, rubber or similar material, covered with two stripes of white horsehide or cowhide, tightly stitched together. It shall weigh not less than five nor more than five and one quarter ounces avoirdupois and measure not less than nine nor more than nine and one quarter inches in circumference.

How greatly has the ball changed in 139 years? It is about 5 percent smaller, about 9 percent lighter. Rather than an India rubber center, it may have — and in professional ball does have — a cork center. The stitching must be tight, though precisely how tight is not defined. And that’s it. In every other respect, the ball put in play in the amateur games of 1861 would pass muster by modern rules.

That is not to say that the baseball of Civil War Days and the Rawlings Official model of today are virtually identical. Today’s ball is far more resilient and travels greater distances. This is due to several factors.

Most obviously the modern baseball undergoes far less wear and tear. For the first half century of professional play, it was customary for a game ball — whether mushy, discolored, or lopsided — to be kept in play until it was irretrievably lost. The key word here is irretrievably. In the 19th century, if a ball was hit into the stands, the ushers collected the ball so that play could continue. If hit out of sight, it was searched for — for as long as five minutes! Then and only then might the host team be required to furnish a second ball. The idea of going through dozens of balls per game, as is the modern cus­tom, would have seemed frivolously wasteful to Great­ Grandpa.

The original policy moderated somewhat with the passing years, but it was not until 1920 that league offi­cials stipulated the use of only clean and new baseballs. This was mandated to enhance offense as well as out of concern for player safety: worn and discolored balls fre­quently were hard to control or even see, as the tragic beaning death of Ray Chapman demonstrated. Those di­rectives lent a new measure of consistency to the game, so that the ball a batter swung at in the bottom of the ninth was not different from the one used in the first-pitch ceremonies.

The only rule change of significance affecting the ball came in 1910, and it authorized the use of a cushioned cork center as an alternative to the rubber-centered ball that had been in vogue until that time. The cork-centered ball was found to be more lively, an especially desirable trait considering the depressed (and, to the baseball-going public, depressing) league batting averages. The cork­-centered ball was introduced in time for the 1910 World Series between the Philadelphia Athletics and Chicago Cubs; as a result, the two clubs batted .272, which was about 20 points higher than the regular season league average. For the 1911 regular season, both leagues used the cork-centered ball: National League averages rose by only four points; however, in the American League, the climb was a heady 30 points and the league leader, De­troit’s Ty Cobb, hit a stunning .420. A total of 21 Ameri­can League regulars bettered .300 that season; only eight had done so the year before. In the National League, Chicago’s Frank Schulte hit 21 home runs. Schulte had tied for the home run title in 1910 with 10.

All other changes in the makeup of the ball itself — tighter winding of the yarn, introduction of different and supposedly better kinds of yarn, raised or depressed stitches — have been products of technology, not of the rulemakers. About 1920, as batting averages soared and Babe Ruth began to crash home runs in unheard-of profu­sion, there was controversy over the substitution of Aus­tralian wool for the generic type in making baseball yarn. Surely, fans speculated, this new wool must be the reason behind the livelier ball. In fact, the explanation probably had more to do with improved methods of winding the wool than with the wool itself.

The same rulebook that has licensed virtually no change in the parameters of the baseball itself has brooked only minor adjustment with the bat, and then, generally, only by way of greater specificity. Again, com­pare the rules governing play in 1861 with the slightly more elaborate section from the modern rulebook:

1861 — The bat must be round and must not exceed two and one half inches in diameter in the thickest part. It must be made of wood, and may be of any length to suit the striker.

2000 — The bat shall be a smooth, rounded stick not more than two and three quarter inches in diameter at the thickest part and not more than 42 inches in length. The bat shall be one piece of solid wood, or formed from a block of wood consisting of two or more pieces of wood bonded together with an adhesive in such way that the grain direction in all pieces is essentially parallel to the length of the bat. Any such laminated bat shall contain only wood or adhesive.

The modern rule also contains an allowance for a small cupping of up to one inch at the bat’s end, and for use of a grip-improving substance on the bat handle. But again, the stipulated differences of almost a century and a half of development are comparatively minimal.

There is a length limit where once there was none; however, at least in practice, the limit is functionally irrelevant. In today’s major leagues, it is virtually un­heard-of for a bat to exceed 36 inches in length, much less 42. The modern bat has gained one-quarter of an inch in girth over its ancestor, and it need no longer necessarily be of a single piece of wood, though no such laminated bats have been used in big-league play to date [except for a trial by Babe Ruth when he first came to the Yankees — jt].

Changes in the bat have tended to develop stylistically, more so than with the ball, generally under the influence of the batters themselves. Bats, of course, always have been highly personalized objects. With such a broad al­lowance by the rules (no weight limit, no functional length limit) hitters have tended to individualize their sticks within widely recognized norms.

Many hitters before 1920 coveted heavy “wagon-­tongue” models with thick barrels capable of driving the ball over the infield, even at the expense of bat speed. Cap Anson, legendary star of the Chicago White Stockings, used just such a bat, reputedly weighing in at a manly three pounds and then some. In the 1920s Babe Ruth menaced opposing pitchers with a 48-ounce bat, though Ruth saw to it that the bat handle was tapered to accom­modate his smaller-than-normal hands.

Heinie Groh, third baseman of the Cincinnati Reds and New York Giants, was no slugger of Ruthian proportion. Yet Groh’s innovative “bottle” bat, with its narrow handle expanding precipitously at the hitting area to a broad surface, not only served as a personal trademark but also helped him to a .292 lifetime average and a starting role on four pennant winners.

The modern bat bears no resemblance to any of those models. It is sleeker, usually no more than 35 inches in length and no heavier than 33 ounces. The reason is simple: batting instructors, who once looked upon mass as the key factor behind a mighty poke, now focus on bat speed instead. The faster a batter can swing a bat through the strike zone, the greater the force applied to the ball. And the greater the force applied, the farther the ball travels. Presto, light bats generating greater bat speed generating more home runs.

As for gloves . . . well, in the game’s early days, they did not exist: Players were expected to catch the ball barehanded. For a time, they received something of an aid in that effort by a rule recording an out if a ball was caught on the first bounce. That made things a little easier.

The use of gloves was never formally barred, as were, for instance, black players; it simply was looked upon as sort of sissified. There is no clear record of who first conceived the notion of fielding with a glove. Al Spalding wrote that the first to don a glove was an 1875 player for the National Associa­tion’s St. Louis team named Charlie Waitt. In a game that year, Waitt donned a street-dress leather glove on his fielding hand. Waitt, reportedly, was ridiculed league­wide. Despite that attitude, as more prominent players adopted Waitt’s concept, the notion gradually came to be accepted.

Two points should be made about the use of early-day gloves. First, their function was utterly different than it is today. The first gloves, lacking webbing and lacing, merely provided protection for the hands when fielding the ball. Today’s larger, better-padded, webbed, laced and pocketed gloves might more appropriately be described as fielding devices, because it is the glove, not the fielder’s hands, that does much of the actual fielding work.

Second, as verification of the first point, players of the 19th century often wore gloves on both hands. For the throwing hand, they would simply snip the glove at the fingers for dexterity. Those photographs that remain of players from that era, especially the ones portraying field­ing sequences, confirm that tendency.

It was not until 1895 that stipulations concerning gloves were included in the rules. Those limited the size of gloves to 10 ounces and 14 inches in circumference for all players except catchers and first basemen, who were permitted to use any size glove. Today’s rulebook, by contrast, takes a page and a half to specify dimensions, materials, lacings, and webbings for gloves. There are 13 different size limitations on the standard fielder’s glove, ranging from palm width to the length of each separate finger. The transition from the glove as protection to the glove as a tightly defined fielding aid came gradually but inexorably.

The first advance was development of a pocket, an indentation in the palm of the hand where the ball was most easily and most naturally caught. As with the origi­nation of the glove itself, there is no firm and fast date for the pocket’s appearance: it simply happened, though it did not happen immediately.

To the contrary, for several years after the introduction of the glove, fielders adopted a sort of “reverse pocket” when they would excise the leather from the palm area and leave it bare, presumably for better a touch or feel. In all probability, the pocket was not invented by glove makers, but by players themselves, taking advantage of the natural stretching the glove’s leather underwent with use. Today this is called “breaking a glove in.” Today, however, pockets are made in the manufacturing process.

Credit commonly is given to a pitcher, spitballer Bill Doak of the St. Louis Cardinals, for advancing glove technology from the primordial state. In 1920 Doak ap­proached a glove manufacturer with a plan for a new personalized glove. Many players liked personalized glove models, but Doak’s was different. It envisioned a preformed pocket, not one that would be fashioned through constant wear. And it included a square of rein­forced webbing between the thumb and finger sections as an additional aid to fielding. Previously, the fingers sim­ply had been tied together, if they were not allowed to act independently. Doak’s model remained popular for al­most 30 years. Every subsequent advance in glove design, whether it be the hinged heel, short- or long-fingered design, or advanced webbing, can be traced to a concept originated by Doak.

In the 1930s rulemakers mandated the use of only leather in the making of gloves — the first change in glove rules since the initial size and weight limitations were set in 1895. In 1939, acting in response to Hank Greenberg’s introduction of an oversized mitt with a netted webbing, they outlawed the use of netting, limited webbing to four inches from thumb to palm (the present rule is four and one-half inches), and restricted the size of first basemen’s gloves as well. Weight restrictions were dropped in 1950, and size limitations further defined.

For many years, no limitation was placed on the size of the catcher’s mitt; after all, the larger the catcher’s mitt, the harder it was for a catcher to dig the ball out of the glove and make a throw. In 1960, however, Baltimore manager Paul Richards knew that there was something worse than having catchers who could not evict the ball from an oversized mitt — that was having catchers who could not catch the ball at all.

The manager’s problem was that his most effective pitcher was Hoyt Wilhelm, and Wilhelm’s most effective pitch was a knuckleball that proved as difficult to catch as it was to hit. As Baltimore catchers soared to the top of league in passed balls, Richards devised a catcher’s mitt of nearly 50 inches in circumference — perhaps twice the standard size. If Baltimore catchers could not throw out base stealers with the new mitt, they could at least have a fighting chance at preventing Wilhelm’s pitches from rolling to the backstop. Shortly after the appearance of Baltimore’s oversized mitt, the rule was amended to set a 38-inch circumference and 15.5-inch diameter limit on catchers’ gloves as well.

Even after catchers’ gloves were restricted in size, however, questions remained about enforcement of the 1950 size limits. So, in 1972 the rules committee drafted the present 13-point measuring system. Fortunately, there is no record of a game ever being halted while a manager challenged the legality of a fielder’s glove on all 13 points.

Third Part — Playing Fields — tomorrow.

The Changing Game, Part 2 was originally published in Our Game on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

A comprehensive look at “the unchanging game,” in several parts

Bill Felber wrote this dazzling essay for Total Baseball back nearly thirty years ago, and Gary Gillette updated it for a later edition of that estimable encyclopedia, now gathering dust on my shelf beside my high-school slide rule. This part, on the game’s playing fields, continues from https://ourgame.mlblogs.com/the-changing-game-part-2-47af7522d5cc.

Charley “Old Hoss” Radbourn was a pitcher of consider­able note in the National League of the 1880s, and a hitter of no special renown. In 1882 he won 31 games for Providence while hitting only one home run. But this story isn’t about any of his 31 victories, nor even about his home run — it’s about playing conditions.

On August 17, 1882, Radbourn was playing right field (as he occasionally did when not pitching) against De­troit. The Providence field was not unlike most baseball fields of the day: it was, in the literal sense, a field. There was little groundskeeping and often no outfield barriers; even if there were, well-heeled fans could simply pull their carriages onto the playing surface and watch from there.

On this particular date, John Ward of Providence and Stump Weidman of Detroit allowed no runs to cross home over 17 innings. When Radbourn advanced to the plate with one out in the 18th, the sky was growing dark. In his then-brief big league career, Hoss had never hit a home run. He was not alone in that distinction, for four-base hits were a rare sight. (That season’s league leader, George Wood of Detroit, hit only seven; the league record was nine.) But Radbourn lashed at Weidman’s pitch and sent it scurrying past Wood in left field. As some wit­nesses reported, the ball rolled close to the leg of an especially spirited black horse hitched to a wagon.

Wood raced to the spot and reached for the ball. He was prevented by, of all things, the horse’s hind hoof, which swished through the air and barely missed conking him. Wood reached again; again the horse kicked. Radbourn, meanwhile, raced past second. Desperately, Wood grabbed for a handful of grass, hopeful of appeasing the critter. That did not work. Finally, Ed Hanlon obtained a stick, reached in and swatted the ball clear of danger. It was too late; as Hanlon prepared to throw, Radbourn was being carried from the field in triumph.

The mere concept of what constitutes a major league ballpark has evolved through at least five distinct trans­formations, each markedly different from its predecessor and each spurred by changes both in the game’s strategy and in the nation’s sociology. The conditions surrounding Charley Radbourn’s home run in Providence in 1882 may seem bizarre to us. No more bizarre, perhaps, than artifi­cial turf will seem three generations hence.

The parks in the first few decades of professional ball were simple open spaces with ruts worn by the players marking the baselines. At games that attracted large crowds, the fans circling the field often defined the play­ing area. In 1871 the National Association club in Rock­ford, Illinois, played on a field called by ballpark expert Phil Lowry “the strangest in major league history.” The aptly-named Forest City club had a field in which trees virtually lined the baselines, so players chasing popups took their chances. Third base was on a hill, home plate in a depression, and the outfield framed by a gutter draining an adjacent horseracing track.

For several reasons, there were few of the niceties we presently associate with a ballpark. Not the least of these was that, since the game itself was new, club owners often lacked the capital necessary to develop the grounds be­yond a rudimentary level. A grandstand might hold about 1,500 customers if it was expansive, but usually it held fewer. It was desirable, but by no means certain, that the playing ground be level and free of gravel, though horse droppings might literally pockmark areas of play.

Except in Rockford, trees were not much of a hazard but, even at the best of diamonds, infields were poorly sculpted and ill-cared for. There were rarely such things as a scoreboard or dugout and, where outfield fences existed — first used at Brooklyn’s Union Grounds — they might be as close as 180 feet from home plate or as distant as 500 feet at all points. Some fields like Brooklyn’s doubled over the winter as skating rinks, when they were deliberately flooded.

Gradually, ballfields assumed a more standardized and slightly more familiar appearance. By the mid-1880s, most playing fields were at least semi-enclosed. Still, however, distances to the fences commonly were dictated as much by topography as any other consideration. When built in 1883, Chicago’s Lake Front Park was considered the archetypal modern facility, seating almost 10,000. Yet its cramped site near the lake permitted only a 180-foot carry to left field, and only 300 feet to dead center! Such a field would be considered inadequate for 15-year-olds today. In contrast, at Boston’s spacious Huntington Ave­nue Grounds a few years later, the barrier in left field was a comfortable 440 feet from home plate; it was a very long 635 feet to the fence in center. For part of the 1896 season, Robison Field in St. Louis did not even have a fence entirely circling the grounds. At one point that year, it was possible to hit a ball in-play through a gap in the barrier in right field; if so, the ball could roll unimpeded for more than 600 feet . . . to a lake.

If there was a single, overriding concern about ballparks in the game’s first few decades, it was the dan­ger of fire. Because wood was the common building material, facilities were susceptible to that danger, and it intruded on the game more than once, sometimes with dire results. Baltimore’s Union Park was damaged by fire in 1894, while a blaze destroyed Boston’s South End Grounds in the third inning of a game between the Orioles and Beaneaters that same season. A game was halted by fire at Chicago’s West Side Park; several years earlier a contest actually had continued at the nearby 23rd Street Grounds while fire consumed the grandstand. Brooklyn’s Washington Park fell to flames in 1889; New York’s Polo Grounds was virtually destroyed in 1911.

With all of its inherent and obvious disadvantages, the wooden ballpark may seem to have been an anachronism as early as 1910; furthermore, its role in the development of the game may seem to have been quite fleeting. Was it really anachronistic? Yes. Was its role fleeting? No. The era of wood, from the opening of Brooklyn’s Union Grounds in 1862 until the closing of the last wooden grandstand at Philadelphia’s Baker Bowl in 1938, en­compasses three quarters of a century and better than half the lifespan of the professional game to date.

The demise of the wooden park was occasioned by a number of factors, fire hazard being not the least of them. Some wooden parks were deemed to be particularly dan­gerous. In 1903 hundreds of fans fell (and 12 died) when a wooden rail gave way at Baker Bowl in Philadelphia. In 1907 and again in 1908, the building inspector for the city of Cincinnati submitted a detailed bill of particulars on the hazards at the Palace of the Fans. Cracked girders, decayed supports, unsafe flooring, and a defective bleacher platform were only some of the problems. Con­struction problems were documented in St. Louis and other cities as well. Nonetheless, the gradually widening acceptance of baseball as an important cultural event also played a part in the transition to more permanent structures.

The average attendance climbed from 100,000 per franchise in 1890 to 365,000 in 1905. Larger, stronger, and more durable venues were needed and, because of the game’s growing popularity, club owners were able to provide such facilities. Motivation for the owners also came from the fact that, as new parks were constructed, they could increase the numbers of more costly box seats, thus increasing potential revenues. Sound familiar?

Concrete and steel thus became the materials of choice. In 1909 Philadelphia Athletics owner Benjamin Shibe conceived and executed plans for a baseball plant upon a former brickyard at the corner of 21st and Lehigh north of Center City. The facility would be easily accessible from the city’s center by trolley line and would supplant old, wooden Columbia Park, which had the added disad­vantage of being located near several breweries, thus sub­jecting patrons to the constant odor of barley and yeast.

Shibe Park would not only smell better: it would be the grandest facility of its type ever conceived. A French Renaissance-style dome at the home plate entrance gave the stadium a distinctive, almost church-like, appearance. The concrete grandstand and bleachers followed the first and third base foul lines, seating 20,000. A huge scoreboard was installed in left field. The facility’s price tag was a breathtaking half million dollars, yet the open­ing of Shibe Park set a standard that was soon widely matched.

In Pittsburgh Barney Dreyfuss already had begun con­struction of a replacement for old Exposition Park, the riverfront facility that had been in use since 1890. Named Forbes Field, the new ballpark opened June 30 near Schenley Park, and it included elevators, lighting in the grandstand, telephones, and even maids in the ladies rooms. Dreyfuss also conceived of providing access to the upper levels of the triple-decked grandstand by means of ramps rather than stairs, a practice in effect today. The larger capacity of Forbes paid almost immediate divi­dends when the Pirates celebrated the new home’s inau­gural season by winning a world championship.

If there is one hallmark of the concrete and steel stadi­ums raised in a dozen different cities between the years 1909 and 1923, it is their individuality. When Charles Comiskey developed plans for his new concrete and steel structure at 35th and Shields in Chicago in 1910, he asked his own star, pitcher Ed Walsh, to take a hand in the work. It may not be surprising, then, that Comiskey Park, both at its opening and for decades afterward, was considered one of the most tasking layouts for hitters. The original Comiskey featured 363-foot foul lines, 382-foot power alleys, and a center field of 420 feet (that, year by year, was enlarged to 455 feet). Particularly in the Dead Ball Era, the center field fence may as well not have existed at all.

In Brooklyn’s 22,000 seat Ebbets Field, which opened in 1913, the original carry to the barrier in left was 419 feet, though a street limited the distance to the fence in right field to a mere 301. (Construction of bleachers in the 1930s brought the left field wall within a more managea­ble distance.)

The most unusual design of all the old parks was New York’s bathtub-shaped Polo Grounds, which replaced the wooden facility of the same name after it was damaged by fire in 1911. The “new” Polo Grounds featured foul poles only about 260 feet distant from the plate, coupled with a cavernous center field that arced to distances of nearly 500 feet.

With a few exceptions, these classic-era parks served their host teams well for generations. Nevertheless, grad­ually at first in the 1940s and 1950s, then increasingly so in the 1960s, interior wear and exterior conditions ren­dered most unsatisfactory in the eyes of their tenants. Those conditions varied, but they can be summarized as follows:

Access: The classic-era parks had been dependent on trolley, subway, or bus lines to deliver fans to their gates. By the 1950s, though, America was a motorized nation, and club owners felt the need for expansive parking lots as well as proximity to modern freeways. Brooklyn club owner Walter O’Malley moved his team to Los Angeles when the city failed to deliver on his demands for such a new facility. The Giants, beset at the Polo Grounds by many of the same problems, fled the same year to San Francisco.

Size: When most of the so-called classic era parks were constructed, crowds of 30,000 were considered excep­tional. By the mid-1960s, increased costs as well as in­creasing attendance made such limited capacity a serious operating problem for many clubs. Neither Forbes Field in Pittsburgh, Shibe Park in Philadelphia nor Crosley Field in Cincinnati was capable of seating much more than 35,000; when new and larger multipurpose stadiums were built in those cities, the clubs gladly moved into them.

Cost: Without exception, classic-era parks had been constructed using private capital. By the 1960s, the cost of developing the kind of 50,000-seat stadium required by a major league team was more than the club owner was able to afford or willing to spend. Fortunately, local gov­ernments, which had come to view teams as community assets, proved willing in many cases to finance or subsi­dize the construction. This happened as early as the 1930s in Cleveland, and again in 1954 when the city of Balti­more captured the Browns from St. Louis. Since Dodger Stadium opened in Los Angeles in 1962, more than three dozen new ballparks have opened for major league use, have been extensively renovated, or are currently under construction. Of the billions of dollars spent on these parks, only the renovation of Pro Player Stadium in Miami and the construction of Pacific Bell Park in San Francisco were not government-financed. (Even the Gi­ants’ new palace, however, was subsidized by government aid in land acquisition and infrastructure development.) Oftentimes, that public involvement has taken place as one part of a larger urban-development effort, with the new park situated on once-blighted or undeveloped land near the city core and forming the centerpiece of a mas­sive redevelopment project. This was the case earlier in cities like St. Louis as well as more recently in Baltimore, Cleveland, and Denver.

Concurrent with that last trend, a new and significant factor has emerged. In the past, ballparks were forced by the exigency of private construction to conform to their surrounding, thus imbuing each park inevitably with an individual flavor. Public involvement, however, elimi­nated that limitation. Since the opening of Dodger Sta­dium, Shea Stadium, and the Astrodome in the 1960s, surroundings were altered to conform to the design of the park, rather than the opposite. Freed from the constric­tions of neighborhood geography, architects gave their parks a symmetry bordering on sameness in an effort to maximize utility. The result was the virtually indistin­guishable trio of much-scorned 1970s “superstadiums”: Riverfront in Cincinnati, Three Rivers in Pittsburgh, and Veterans in Philadelphia — and each seemed best suited for the football teams in those towns, despite the success of the local baseball clubs in the years after these stadi­ums opened.

In truth, neither stadium designers nor club owners fell headlong into the new age of the anonymous modern multipurpose facility. In fact, the modern era of generic ballparks started with a two-decade transitional period during which these factors were gradually assimilated into the classic motif.

Cleveland’s Municipal Stadium provided the introduc­tion to this transitional period. Constructed in 1932 by the city, it was vast (potentially holding more than 80,000, it was built in a failed bid to secure the summer Olympics), virtually symmetrical, yet situated close in the central city on the lakefront. Evidence that the symbiotic relationship between a private ballclub and a public stadium had not yet taken hold is that, for 15 years after Municipal Sta­dium was built, the Indians occupied it only in fits and starts. Unless a large crowd was expected, Cleveland generally played its weekend games at Municipal, main­taining staid old League Park (smaller and cheaper to operate) as their weekday habitat. Not until 1947 did the Indians become full-time tenants of what became deri­sively known as the “Mistake by the Lake.”

For the first time in 1953, then again in 1954 and 1955, public facilities were developed with the specific aim of attracting major league teams. It worked in all three cases: luring the Braves from Boston to Milwaukee, the Browns from St. Louis to Baltimore, and the Athletics from Philadelphia to Kansas City. The moves were un­precedented in the previous half-century, yet sensible in that all three teams left cities which had proved incapable or unwilling of supporting two clubs (the perennial losing records of these three teams certainly didn’t help). The stadiums in Milwaukee and Baltimore were constructed from scratch; in Kansas City, Municipal Stadium, which had served for many years as a minor league facility, was extensively renovated. None of these three parks aban­doned the city for the open country, but none was reliant on mass transit, either.

The era of the modern public superstadium ironically probably dated from the opening of the last private sta­dium, Dodger Stadium in Los Angeles in 1962. Yet the species’ zenith was achieved in 1965, when the Harris County Domed Stadium, dubbed the Astrodome, opened in Houston. The $35.5 million project broke so many traditional rules of stadium design that it literally changed the way the game was played — and not just in Houston.

The first and most obvious change, of course, was the roof that covered the facility. Baseball had come indoors; no more would rain, wind, or other weather be a factor in a game’s outcome. Beyond that, it changed the surface on which the game could be played. When the dome’s trans­lucent roof panels were painted to give the fielders a chance to follow flyballs, the lack of sunlight killed the grass, and artificial turf had to be installed. “AstroTurf,” as it came to be called, was faster and more durable than grass but also was harder on the players’ legs, so it re­quired substantial changes in strategy.

Swifter, agile fielders replaced their slow-footed but hard-hitting predecessors. Speed, whether for basesteal­ing or cutting off base hits in the outfield gaps, supplanted brawn in the new game played on artificial turf, whether inside or outside. Within a span of little more than a decade, artificial turf became the most copied aspect of any single new ballpark built in America since the owners of the Union Grounds in Brooklyn fenced their lot. Not only did it not wear out, not only was it easier to maintain, not only did it minimize rainouts, but it also withstood far better the strain of multipurpose use for events such as football games and musical concerts. Municipalities in­stalled the plastic stuff in most stadiums built for use by more than one team, and its widespread adoption in the NL greatly changed the character of play in the Senior Circuit.

The city of St. Louis originally built new Busch Sta­dium in 1966 with a grass surface, then replaced it with turf after a few years. So faddish had artificial turf be­come that, in 1970 when Kansas City officials developed plans for separate and individually designed football and baseball stadiums, they still installed artificial turf on the baseball field.

Thanks to the willingness of local government to subsi­dize new, baseball-only ballparks in the 1990s, however, baseball has seen a reversal of this trend toward artificial surfaces. Every new ballpark opened since 1989 — save Tropicana Field in Tampa Bay, which quickly abandoned its traditional rug and installed a new artificial turf with simulated grass — has featured grass. Moreover, three ex­isting parks joined the flight from AstroTurf and its derivatives since 1995, as Kauffman Stadium in Kansas City, Busch Stadium in St. Louis, and Cinergy Field in Cincin­nati have reinstalled grass fields.

The design of indoor stadiums, which started the era of artificial turf, has been dramatically altered by the debut of the high-tech ballpark with a movable roof. Of the six enclosed venues, SkyDome in Toronto, BankOne Ballpark in Phoenix, and Safeco Field in Seattle all fea­ture retractable covers, with only SkyDome, the oldest of the retractable stadiums, retaining artificial turf. Miller Park in Milwaukee, which will open in 2001, also will boast a movable roof and a grass field.

The superstadium boom of the 1960s and 1970s pro­duced a series of parks that shared most, if not all, of the following characteristics: they altered the landscape to conform to the “ideal” of a park, rather than vice versa; they were built on large open areas that included acres of parking; they were symmetrical and predictable in de­sign; they were proximate to interstate highways; they were built from the ground up to be multipurpose venues; they eliminated structural pillars, but in doing so sacri­ficed proximity of upper deck seats to the playing field; and they used artificial surfaces.

The multipurpose stadium, which a few decades ago appeared to be a fixture of the modern game, is now universally viewed as a dinosaur awaiting its doom. While only two facilities that opened after Dodger Sta­dium in the 1960s, 1970s, or 1980s were exclusively reserved for baseball (Arlington Stadium and Royals/ Kauffman Stadium), every new ballpark opened since 1990 has been baseball-only. Three others (Shea, Busch, and Anaheim/Edison International) have reverted to base­ball-only status after their football tenants fled for greener pastures.

The stunning success of Baltimore’s Oriole Park at Camden Yards revolutionized baseball park design as well as greatly influencing stadium and arena design in other sports. Making its debut on Opening Day 1992, the retro brick-and-steel ballpark in the shadow of an old railroad warehouse in downtown Baltimore wowed fans, players, writers, broadcasters, and politicians alike. Though Camden Yards opened only one year after the new Comiskey Park in Chicago, the difference in design between these two parks was half a century apart — even though the same architectural firm designed both. Comis­key Park was a traditional modern stadium, a drab con­crete structure with blue seats, clean sight lines, and no character. Camden Yards was nothing like that.

The exterior of Baltimore’s new jewel featured an arched brick facade that evoked memories of long-gone Ebbets Field. Like the famous Brooklyn park, it was built within the context of its urban environment, not built on top of an expansive concrete plain surrounded by an asphalt sea of parking lots. The color scheme of the new park, where structural steel girders were left exposed and painted green like the seats, was chosen in deliberate contrast to dominant blues, reds, and concrete grays of existing modern stadiums. Though not really constrained by dense urban geography like the ballparks of the classic era, Camden Yards also boasted asymmetrical dimen­sions in the outfield and quirky features in the outfield wall, another homage to the past. The striking differences between Camden Yards and all the other ballparks it made instantly obsolete didn’t stop with the park’s ap­pearance, however.

Equally important in earning the park universal ac­claim was its attention to the needs of the fans. Like historic Wrigley Field, Fenway Park, and Tiger Stadium, the seats in Camden Yards were closer to the field than those in multipurpose stadiums. The ballpark featured a spectacular view of the downtown Baltimore skyline through an open center field, giving the interior an airy character totally unlike the claustrophobic feeling engen­dered by the enclosed superstadiums, whose 360-degree, multi-tiered construction completely surrounded the field. Broad concourses, expanded concessions, plentiful restrooms, and a dozen other thoughtful touches pam­pered the patrons as well as thrilled management, which saw a huge increase in discretionary spending by its satis­fied customers.

Perhaps the most significant moneymaking component of Baltimore’s new park was the space devoted to the large number of luxury suites. Leased by corporations and wealthy individuals by the season at unheard-of prices for baseball, these suites provided a lucrative new stream of revenue for the Orioles’ ownership — a revenue source that all other team owners soon wanted to tap. The popularity of the new park also guaranteed sellouts for most games, allowing the Orioles to raise ticket prices early and often and reap unforeseen windfall profits.

Proving that cloning is the sincerest form of flattery, other owners rushed to persuade their local politicians that they, too, needed such a moneymaking machine if they were going to survive and compete in baseball’s brave new world. Derivative new ballparks quickly arose in downtown Cleveland and in suburban Arlington, Texas. When these also proved instantly successful, the escalation of the arms race was unstoppable, and the economic balance of the game was forever altered.

What can be said today, and what could always be said, is that in baseball, more so than in any other sport, the term “home field advantage” should be taken literally. Baseball clubs spend far more time trying to tailor their teams to the home field than in any other team sport. This is true, paradoxically, despite the fact that the home-field advantage in major league baseball, where only 53 to 54 percent of games are won by the home team, is far smaller than in football, basketball, or hockey, where the home team wins approximately 60 percent of the time.

Part 4 — Spring Training and Pitching — tomorrow.

The Changing Game, Part 3 was originally published in Our Game on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

A comprehensive look at “the unchanging game,” in several parts

Bill Felber wrote this dazzling essay for Total Baseball back nearly thirty years ago, and Gary Gillette updated it for a later edition of that estimable encyclopedia, now gathering dust on my shelf beside my high-school slide rule. This part, on spring training and then pitching, continues from https://ourgame.mlblogs.com/the-changing-game-part-3-9a7c129150a4.

The precise origin of spring training, that marvelously contrived ritual that today amounts to a six-week paid vacation in the sun for athletes, media, and club officials, is unknown. With few exceptions, early-day ballplayers trained privately at home. It is known that in 1870 the Chicago White Stockings organized a trip to New Orle­ans, but that may have been mere barnstorming rather than preparation for the coming season. The generally accepted beginning of spring training is 1886, when the White Stockings and Philadelphia Phillies traveled to Lit­tle Rock and Charleston, respectively.

The standard regimen of spring training has varied greatly from decade to decade. Today, for instance, little actual training is done in the spring, since players are expected to report in shape. Instead, the emphasis is on narrowing a roster of 40 players (plus many other spring training invitees) to the requisite 25 by Opening Day. Modern spring training amounts to an extended adver­tisement for the season to come, with a bit of tryout camp thrown in for effect.

That was not always the case. Players in the 19th and early 20th century commonly received salaries of a few hundred or a few thousand dollars, supplementing their salaries with off-season jobs, many of questionable value to their athletic careers. These players literally required a period of a month or so to work back into shape before the start of the season. In the early 1900s the New York Giants trained in the little Texas town of Marlin, and their training was, by the strictest definition, training.

Each day began and ended with what amounted to a two-mile forced march along the railroad tracks from the hotel to the park. The routine consisted of batting and fielding practice, along with drills on the fundamentals of play. If there was a scrimmage, it usually was an intras­quad effort, or perhaps a game against a local team or minor league club. In 1906 the 16 major league teams trained in 10 different states as far north as Illinois. The notion of grouping in Florida and Arizona to make exhi­bition games between them more convenient would not gain full currency for the better part of another decade. In 1911 the Yankees set up their spring camp in Bermuda.

At most early camps, players oversaw their own condi­tioning since, as a rule, teams employed only a manager and a single coach — if that. Teams now have coaches they employ just for spring training and will occasionally even attach a coach to a player who is making a position change. Complexes are usually used to house minor league teams when spring training is over; the municipal­ities, which see spring training as a major source of tour­ism dollars, often pay for construction of these complexes.

Pitching

How prized is the pitcher? Consider that of the nine positions, candidates for eight are winnowed principally by their skill with the bat. Middle infielders can progress through the professional ranks on the strength of superior range, outfielders may prosper by dint of speed, or catch­ers thanks to a God-given arm. Fundamentally, however, not even an Ozzie Smith or an Ivan Rodriguez can be­come a regular professional player until they establish at least a minimal offensive ability. The only exception is the pitcher.

Pitchers always have been the exception, even before the designated hitter rule legislated many of them out of that terra incognita known as the batter’s box. In any analysis of Ty Cobb’s value as a player, the first thing that comes up is his lifetime .366 batting average, yet no one would think of discussing Sandy Koufax’s value to the Dodgers in terms of his .097 batting average.

In fact, the pitcher is the one and only player whose defensive contribution is so vital that the ability to hit is considered irrelevant — as is his fielding skill. Red Ruf­fing, the fine righthander for the New York Yankees of the 1930s and 1940s, compiled one of the best batting records of any pitcher in the past three quarters of a century, including a .268 career average. But when he was voted into the Hall of Fame in 1967, it was on the strength of a 273–225 record, 3.80 earned run average, and on his status as the leading moundsman for seven pennant winners.

Pitching has been the staple of most successful big league franchises since batters lost the right to call for the type of pitch they liked. Connie Mack is variously quoted as having called it anywhere from 70 to 90 percent of the game. The precise figure is not important: What is impor­tant is that Mr. Mack’s axiom remains generally accepted today, though logical analysis of baseball shows that pitching and fielding together comprise 50 percent of the game.

Yet, despite the constancy of the importance placed on quality pitching, both pitching styles and the rules gov­erning pitching have undergone more major changes than any other aspect of on-field play. This change has been so great that the best pitchers of today have virtually nothing in common with the best pitchers of a century ago. Fur­thermore, pitchers today bear strikingly little resemblance to their predecessors of as little as three decades earlier.

Much of this evolution took place during the game’s formative years, and came via efforts by the rule makers to settle on the proper balance of batting to pitching. In the early years of professional ball in the 1860s and 1870s, pitching bore more similarity to the style em­ployed today in fast-pitch softball than in baseball. The ball was delivered underhand and without a wrist snap from a box set at a distance of 45 feet from the plate, although pitchers fudged so much that, by 1872, wrist movement was legalized. Legalization of the wrist snap quickly spawned the development of various “trick” pitches, notably the curveball, commonly credited to Wil­liam “Candy” Cummings, a much-traveled moundsman of that era who compiled a 124–72 record in the only six seasons he played as a top-level professional. Whether Cummings or any of several other pitchers of his era first perfected the art of making a ball curve, Candy generally got the credit (being elected to the Hall of Fame in 1939 for that accomplishment).

Nineteenth-century pitchers worked under virtually ever-changing conditions. For instance, the pitcher’s “box” was moved back to 50 feet from home plate after 1880, then eliminated in 1893 in favor of a “rubber” placed at 60 feet, 6 inches. The underhand delivery re­quirement gradually was modified to allow what in effect was a sidearm pitch in 1883, and a full overhand delivery the following year. Rules governing the ball-and-strike count — at one time nine balls were required to give the batter a walk — changed frequently until they were stabi­lized at four and three, respectively, in 1889. At various times, pitchers were required to deliver a high or low pitch, as requested by the batter; windups were banned, then permitted again; the size of the “box” was altered almost routinely before being consigned to extinction.

It would be difficult to generalize as to whether all of those changes helped or hurt pitchers. Certainly, batting averages tended to improve as the distance between the mound and plate increased. Yet the underhand pitching style, physically much easier on the arm, enabled most teams to play an entire schedule with only one or two pitchers. And the best of them attained results that would be unthinkable today.

By way of illustration, compare the statistics of Provi­dence’s Old Hoss Radbourn compiled in 1884 with the record of the last pitcher to win 30 or more games, De­troit’s Denny McLain, in 1968, and of the pitcher with the best statistics in 2000, Boston’s Pedro Martinez.

Radbourn’s numbers seem even more impressive when it is noted that his Providence team played only a 112­-game schedule. Of course, the comparisons are fair only as illustration of how greatly the pitching environment — the rules, conditions, and strategies — changed between 1884, 1968, and the present.

At least as dynamic a force as the rulebook in the evolution of the modern pitcher has been the development of pitching strategy, notably new pitches. For while the broad regulations under which pitchers work today are not vastly different from 1893, the arsenal of pitches that have come into vogue — and occasionally passed from it — has ranged widely and sometimes wildly.

Cummings’s introduction of the curveball marked the first major deviation toward finesse from what had funda­mentally been a power pitcher’s game to up that time. Other innovators included Phonney Martin, who threw a drop or slowball, and Al Spalding and Tim Keefe, mas­ters of the change-of-pace. However, such bolder experi­mentation was limited to a handful of hurlers.

While pitchers of the latter part of the 19th century occasionally dabbled in “outshoots” or “rises,” the best built their reputations with speed. “Cyclone” Young in Cleveland and Amos Rusie, New York’s “Hoosier Thun­derbolt,” were the best — and in all likelihood — the fastest of them. Young won 27 games for Cleveland in 1891, his first full season, and then accumulated 511 victories over a remarkable 22-year career. The magnificence of Cy Young’s record is best illustrated by the fact that the all­time runner-up, Washington’s Walter Johnson, trails by almost a hundred wins. Young’s 2,799 strikeouts — a re­cord when he retired — further testify to his velocity. As for Rusie, he won 36 games in 1894 and led the league in strikeouts five times between 1890 and 1895. He also led five times in walks, initiating the popular linkage between hard throwers and control trouble.

By the mid-1890s, earned run averages rose as a reac­tion to the shift of the mound back to 60 feet, 6 inches. The legendary Baltimore Orioles of Wee Willie Keeler had batted .343 as a team in 1894, yet did not even lead the league — Philadelphia did, at .350! In response, pitch­ers began to experiment more readily with changes of speed as well as with the ball itself. Chicago’s Clark Griffith scraped the ball against his spikes and discovered that the scuffs added to the break of his curve, making him a 20-game winner for six consecutive seasons. Phila­delphia’s Al Orth, a “one-pitch wonder,” mastered the art of changing speeds and won 203 games in 15 years.

Equally as significant as changes in the approach to pitching was the increase in the numbers of pitchers needed. In 1876 Chicago’s Albert Spalding had been able to pitch in all but five of his team’s 66 games. By the early 1880s, the top teams were using two pitchers. Within another decade — as the increased pitching distance, longer playing schedules, and more tiresome overhand motion became accepted — staffs of fewer than four to five were uncommon. The Detroit team of the 1884 Na­tional League utilized perhaps the first pitching “staff” per se, with four hurlers (Frank Meinke, Stump Weidman, Charley Getzien, and Dupee Shaw) each working between 147 and 289 innings. Detroit’s strategy did not count for much as the club finished last but, within a decade, Baltimore rode what amounted to a four-to-six-­pitcher rotation to the league championship. That staff’s ace, Sadie McMahon, pitched only about one-quarter of the total number of innings worked by the sextet. In 1876, the eight National League teams basically employed a total of 13 pitchers; by 1886, that number was 24; by 1896, for 12 teams, it was 51.

By the turn of the century, the popularization of two theretofore lightly used pitches helped reestablish the pitcher as the game’s dominant player. Christy Mathew­son, a fresh-faced college graduate from Bucknell, brought to the New York Giants a pitch he called the “fadeaway,” actually a reworked version of something known in the 1880s as an “outshoot.” Today, Matty’s legendary fadeaway would be called a screwball, though the popularity of that pitch has declined in recent years.

The pitch acts like a reverse curve: when thrown by a righthanded pitcher, it breaks toward a righthanded bat­ter. Mathewson might very well have become a great pitcher even without the fadeaway, but with it he won 373 games, four times winning 30 or more, and five times helping the Giants to pennants. So difficult was the pitch to throw and control that no other major league pitcher of the era could master it.

The other dominant pitch of the first part of the 20th century was the spitball, advocated principally by two men, Jack Chesbro and Ed Walsh.

Chesbro came to the major leagues with Pittsburgh in 1899 and, by 1901, had incorporated the spitball into his routine. He became a 20-game winner throwing the wet one; it would not be illegal to doctor a baseball with a foreign substance for two more decades. Chesbro won 28 games with the pennant-winning Pirates in 1902, so greatly increasing his value that he became one of a cadre of “free agents” who were recruited to the fledgling American League during the three-year interleague war. With the New York Highlanders of the young league in 1904, Chesbro’s spitball took him to a 20th-century re­cord 41 victories, although it also set up one of the most ironic finishes to any pennant race. Because of its wild break, the spitball was one of the least predictable of pitches, yet Chesbro had walked only 88 batters that season, fewer than two every nine innings. His control of the devious delivery was impeccable.

On the final weekend of that season, Boston and New York — virtually tied for first — engaged in a five-game series, with the winner of that series becoming the cham­pion. Chesbro’s 41st victory came in the series opener, but Boston claimed the ensuing two. In the climactic fourth game, the opening contest of a last-day doubleheader, Chesbro held a 2–2 tie entering the ninth. An infield hit, a sacrifice and a groundout moved Bos­ton’s pennant winning run to third base. The great pitcher had been masterful to that point, walking just one and striking out five. However, in that most pivotal of situa­tions, a Chesbro spitball bounced in the dirt and skipped toward the backstop, a wild pitch that cost New York a pennant.

Walsh, like Chesbro, perfected control of the elusive spitter and parlayed that to remarkable feats. A moundsman of modest ability prior to employing the pitch in 1906, he won 17 games that season, 24 the next, and an astonishing 40 the year after that. Irony played a central role in Walsh’s career as well, for perhaps his best performance in that 40-win season of 1908 came in de­feat. At the climax of a three-team race involving Cleve­land, Detroit, and Chicago, Walsh’s White Sox came to Cleveland needing a victory to remain in contention. Walsh pitched a four-hitter and struck out 15 batters, but Cleveland’s Addie Joss achieved a rare perfect game and won 1–0. The only run scored on a passed ball.

Other so-called “freak” pitches came into vogue during that era as well. Pitchers altered balls not only with spit or spikes, but also with emery paper, paraffin, mud, slippery elm, and who knows what else. But the ranks of pitchers who relied on tampering for their success still constituted a minority. Most, like Washington’s Walter Johnson, con­tinued to rely on the basic fastball. Of course, most pitch­ers did not have a fastball the caliber of Walter Johnson’s to rely on.

And on that basis, pitchers and batters lived in happy coexistence for about a decade, pausing only to occasion­ally admire the ascendancy of a new star like Philadel­phia’s Grover Cleveland Alexander. Master both of the fastball and curve, Alexander emerged in 1911 as a rookie 28-game winner and, by 1915, he was leading the Phillies to the National League pennant on the strength of a 31-victory season. With Philadelphia and later with the Chicago Cubs, he led the league in victories six times between 1911 and 1920, becoming generally acknowl­edged as the pre-eminent pitcher of the latter half of what is commonly called baseball’s Dead Ball Era.

Alexander, along with Walter Johnson, continued to pitch in form beyond 1920, but that was not true of major league pitchers as a whole. A series of factors, some mechanical, some societal, reshaped the game again fol­lowing World War I and, in most instances, it was pitchers who suffered in the reshaping.

The catalyst for much of that reshaping, ironically, was a former pitcher — and a very good one. As a 20-year-old rookie in 1915, Babe Ruth won 18 games to help the Boston Red Sox to the world championship. By the fol­lowing season, Ruth, a 23-game winner who added an­other victory in the World Series, was coming to be recognized as Boston’s ace. He led the American League in earned run average (1.75), starts (41), and shutouts (9), and paced it in complete games (35) the following season as well.

By 1918, however, Ruth the pitcher was recognized as less of a hero than Ruth the slugger. He pitched in 20 games that season, winning 13 of them, but started nearly three times as often in the outfield, a response both to his hitting and to the box-office value of the fans’ clamoring to see him hit. Although by no means an everyday player, the Babe tied for the league lead in home runs that season with a modest 11. More significantly, he drew crowds, both at Fenway Park and on the road. So in 1919, Boston manager Ed Barrow converted him almost exclusively to the outfield. Ruth’s response was to break the all-time record for home runs — with 29 — and to lead the league in runs, runs batted in, and slugging as well. Traded to New York in 1920, Ruth almost immediately became the most celebrated player in the game’s history. He slugged a then-unthinkable 54 home runs, breaking existing records for runs, RBIs, bases on balls, and slugging percentage. To the public, Ruth was “the Sultan of Swat,” “the Bazoo of Bang,” “the Infant Swatigy,” and “the Colossus of Clout.”

Batting averages and home run production rose league-wide as other players strove to imitate him. Amer­ican League batters, who hit .248 with 136 home runs in 1917, raised those figures to .292 and 477 by 1921. In the National League, the increases for the same period were from .249 and 202 to .289 and 460. Part of that 150 to 200 percent increase in the home run count could be attrib­uted to the banning — enforced gradually as of 1920 — of the spitball and other so-called “doctored” pitches, part to improved craftsmanship on the part of the baseball mak­ers, and part to the directive by league officials to replace soiled, scuffed balls with cleaner, whiter ones. But in large measure, the change was simply a strategic one: batters swung harder and tried to drive the ball farther than ever before. Once a poke-and-run contest, baseball had become — thanks in good measure to Ruth — a slug­ger’s game. There is no question that the fans loved it: American League attendance soared from 1.7 million in 1918 (albeit in a season shortened by the owners because of World War I) to more than 5 million in 1920.

Unfortunately for pitchers, they proved less than capa­ble of adapting to the new and more thrilling style. The rule change barring use of the spitball, emery ball, shine ball, and other similar pitches removed a potential weapon from all arsenals, save those of 17 men who were exempted from the ban. These 17 were permitted to con­tinue throwing the pitch, which did not actually die out until the last of them, Burleigh Grimes, retired in 1934. Effective new pitches were not developed to fill the void, though a few toyed with a knuckleball. In the late 1920s George Blaeholder, a nondescript pitcher the St. Louis Browns, devised a pitch that eventually came to be known as the slider, but for years was derided by many as just a “nickel curve.” For the most part, though, pitchers relied on the fastball, curve, and a very occasional changeup. With pitchers as with batters, raw power replaced guile and cunning as their chief weapon.

The result was predictable: for the better part of two decades, batting averages, home runs, and earned run averages soared. National League ERA skyrocketed from 3.13 in 1920 to 4.97 in 1930; in the American League, ERA increased from 3.79 in 1920 to 4.65 in 1930. Na­tional League home runs more than tripled, but strikeouts increased by only 6 percent. The differences in the Amer­ican League were less dramatic, but still quite large. Pitchers reasserted their competitiveness somewhat in the 1930s, though by then bat-happy baseball society had been conditioned to view a 4.00 ERA as good.

The period between 1920 and 1960 produced some exceptional pitchers, but few changes in pitching style. In the mid-1930s, a rookie righthander in Detroit named Eldon Auker bothered batters with an underhanded deliv­ery reminiscent of the style of the 1870s. Auker’s so­-called submarine pitch was necessitated by an arm injury that made it difficult for him to throw overhand. He won 130 games in a 10-year career, pitching on two pennant winners and one world champion. His style would be resurrected in the modern era by relievers like Ted Aber­nathy, Kent Tekulve, Dan Quisenberry, and Gene Garber. In the National League, the New York Giants’ Carl Hub­bell also reached back in time for a cudgel. Hubbell resurrected Mathewson’s fadeaway, renaming it the screwball, and mystified opponents sufficiently to record five straight 20-win seasons between 1933 and 1937, leading the Giants to three pennants.

A more conventional, and more overpowering, form belonged to Lefty Grove, who pitched for 17 years for the Philadelphia Athletics and the Boston Red Sox. Grove’s trademarks were a fastball that many have called the swiftest ever and a surly disposition. Four times a league leader in victories and nine times the ERA king, Grove was the only pitcher to win 300 games in the hot-hitting 1920s and 1930s, an achievement often cited by those who point to him as the best pitcher ever. His career ERA of 3.06 is more than one full run lower than the league average for the years (1925–1941) that he pitched.

Pitching rules, which had remained virtually un­touched since 1920, underwent several adjustments be­tween 1950 and 1969. The strike zone was tightened in 1950: the new upper limit being the armpit instead of the top of the shoulder (with the lower limit at bottom of the knees staying the same). After a decade of unprecedented home run hitting in the 1950s, both home runs and scor­ing increased in 1961–62, so the old strike zone was brought back in an attempt to help the beleaguered moundsmen. The result was in the intended direction, but of a magnitude unforeseen and undesired by everyone except pitchers: scoring plunged dramatically from 1963 through 1968. American League pitchers posted a post­1920 low ERA of 2.98 in 1968 as Denny McLain won 31 games and only one AL batter (Carl Yastrzemski, at .301) could top .300. In the National League, two hard-throw­ing righthanders who gave enemy hitters no quarter en­tranced fans: Bob Gibson posted an unbelievable 1.12 ERA while Don Drysdale set a then all-time record with 58 consecutive scoreless innings. Fully 21 percent of 1968 games resulted in shutouts. Rule makers quickly responded to that offensive nadir by lowering the mound several inches and restoring the strike zone to its 1950–1962 dimensions. Scoring and home runs climbed, aided further in the American League in 1973 when the designated hitter was introduced.

It would be overly simple and wrong to merely to point to the rule book as the fulcrum for all variations in pitch­ing performance in the past five decades. Certainly, an­other very significant factor in the second half of the 20th century was the development of relief pitching. Beyond that, pitchers perfected pitches they had only toyed with before. The knuckleball was not new — it had been thrown since the early part of the century and, in the 1940s, the Washington Senators employed a foursome of flutterbal­ling starters. No pitcher employed the erratic butterfly pitch as effectively, however, as the trio of Hoyt Wilhelm, Phil Niekro — both of whom rode the knuckler to the Hall of Fame — and Phil’s younger brother, Joe Niekro. Wilhelm pitched in a then-unprecedented 1,070 games over 21 years and established what at the time was the all-­time record for saves, 227. Phil Niekro won 318 games and, in tandem with Joe (who won 221), in 1987 set the record for most victories by members of one family.

A sort of variation on the knuckleball, also developed years before but resurrected recently, was the forkball or “split-fingered fastball.” Credit for its development gen­erally is given to 1940s New York Yankees pitcher Ernie Bonham, but the first famous exponent was Elroy Face, a relief pitcher for the Pittsburgh Pirates of the 1950s and 1960s. In 1959 Face compiled a sensational 18–1 record with 10 saves by the simple expedient of jamming the ball between his index and middle fingers before releasing it. This unusual grip caused the ball to have very little spin and gave it an unexpected dip as it crossed home plate; it also made it a devastating change-of-pace pitch. Face, who saved 20 games in 1958 and 24 in the Pirates’ world championship year of 1960, is generally credited with ushering in the era of the modern relief ace or closer.

In the late 1970s another star reliever, Bruce Sutter of the Chicago Cubs, reinvented the same pitch with the help of his minor league pitching coach Fred Martin, though Sutter called it his “split-fingered fastball.” Sutter saved 37 games for the fifth-place Cubs in 1979, and earned the Cy Young Award. In Sutter’s wake, entire pitching staffs began learning what was quickly dubbed the “splitter.” Roger Craig became a one-man traveling demonstration of the newly popular pitch’s success. As Detroit pitching coach, he taught it to the Tigers staff in the early 1980s, and they responded by winning the world championship in 1984. Then Craig taught it to journey­man Houston righthander Mike Scott, and he blossomed into an 18-game winner capable of recording over 300 strikeouts while leading the Astros to a divisional flag in 1986. Craig returned to managing in San Francisco, where his staff of split-finger throwers helped the Giants win the NL West title in 1987.

The most widely used new pitch, however, was the one invented by Blaeholder 50 years before — the slider. Act­ing much like a fastball but with a sharp, late break, the slider supplemented and frequently supplanted the slower and bigger-breaking curveball in the repertoire of most big-league hurlers. Perhaps the pitch’s most famous prac­titioner was Steve Carlton, who used it to become the second winningest lefthander of all time, behind only Warren Spahn. So disarming was Carlton’s nasty slider that he became the first pitcher to win four Cy Young Awards; he also staged a dramatic contest in the mid­-1980s with fastballer Nolan Ryan to see who would be­come the first pitcher in history to record 4,000 strikeouts.

If the evolution of pitching suggests anything, how­ever, it is that no one style, no single delivery, no trick pitch, and no simple rules change can remain perpetually dominant. In the 1960s no two pitchers could have been more stylistically different than Juan Marichal, the high­kicking ace of the San Francisco Giants, and Sandy Koufax, the stylish lefthander of the Los Angeles Dodg­ers. Marichal employed seemingly every move, every trick, every pitch ever devised by professional pitchers. He threw the fastball, the curveball, the slider, the changeup, and the screwball; he delivered them over­handed, three-quartered, or sidearmed whenever he chose, to the great consternation of most opposing hitters. Koufax relied on a fastball, a stunning curve, and (during his peak years after 1960) exemplary control. Yet in 1963, for instance, each won 25 games, each appeared among the league leaders in winning percentage, earned run average, strikeouts, complete games, and innings pitched. Between 1963 and 1966, Marichal averaged better than 23 victories; Koufax, 24.

One of the most frequently debated questions in base­ball is whether modern pitchers throw harder than their predecessors. It is, of course, very difficult to answer that question. To the degree that today’s pitchers are bigger and stronger than ever, to the degree that improved train­ing and conditioning programs encourage greater speed, it is logical to assume that the fastest modern hurlers must be swifter than Cy Young or Walter Johnson or Lefty Grove. Consensus picks as to the hardest-throwing start­ing pitchers of the past two decades would probably be Nolan Ryan and Randy Johnson. Ryan’s fastball was clocked in his prime on radar guns at about 100 miles per hour; Johnson has been routinely clocked at 100 or even higher in the late 1990s. (It is true that several relief pitchers — Rob Dibble, Roberto Hernandez, Mark Wohlers, Robb Nen, Troy Percival, and Billy Wagner — to name some of the more prominent — have been clocked as regularly throwing in the high 90s or around 100 miles per hour in recent years. However, it is like comparing apples and mangoes to talk about peak velocity for a pitcher that routinely pitches only one inning as con­trasted with a starting pitcher.)

One of the biggest problems in discussing pitch veloc­ity is changing standards. Prior to the advent of sports radar guns in the 1970s, various measures were used in an attempt to accurately time pitches. Some of the early radar guns used in the 1970s and 1980s sampled the speed of the pitch only a few times between the pitcher’s release and when the ball crossed the plate. Because the pitch slows down more the farther it travels from the pitcher’s hand — it can be traveling be as much as 10 m.p.h. slower at the plate than when released by the pitcher — the point at which the radar gun actually “clocked” the pitch could easily make a difference of multiple miles per hour. Therefore, earlier radar guns were best used to average the velocity of many pitches, not to give a definitive reading on one pitch. Newer, digital-technology radar guns can sample the speed of a pitch hundreds of times in the split-second it takes to travel from the mound to home plate, making individual pitch readings much more accurate. There is a four-mile­-per-hour difference between some of the old radar guns (which showed average big-league fastballs at 85–86 m.p.h.) and the current guns (which show average veloc­ity at 89–90 m.p.h.). The effect of this difference is that a pitcher clocked at 100 miles per hour in the late 1990s would probably have been measured as throwing in the mid-to-high 90s with some of the old guns. The best that can be said is that changing measurement standards and changing technology over the decades, plus the lack of controlled tests and systematic records, make all of these discussions about peak velocity exercises in approxima­tion, not precision.

Old-timers, of course, did not have the advantage, or disadvantage, of pitching to radar guns, so assessments of their speed are necessarily cruder. “Rapid Robert” Feller’s fastball, for instance, once was clocked against a speeding motorcycle. The finding? About 100 miles per hour. The eyewitness testimony of old-timers varies. Many picked Walter Johnson, but Johnson himself picked Smoky Joe Wood. Billy Herman selected Van Lingle Mungo. Contemporaries like Wes Ferrell said Lefty Grove was faster than Feller, but numerous sportswriters sided with Feller as the fastest ever. Connie Mack, who played and managed across six decades, opted for Amos Rusie, the old-time “Hoosier Thunderbolt.” Mack’s opin­ion, however, could easily have been influenced by nos­talgia: he batted against Rusie. Nolan Ryan was generally considered the fastest pitcher in the 1980s but, for a time, it was not universally presumed that he was the fastest on the Houston Astros! Until his crippling stroke, J.R. Rich­ard was conceded that title by at least some that saw both.

Part 5 — Strategy to 1920 and Night Ball — tomorrow

The Changing Game, Part 4 was originally published in Our Game on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

A comprehensive look at “the unchanging game,” in several parts

Bill Felber wrote this dazzling essay for Total Baseball back nearly thirty years ago, and Gary Gillette updated it for a later edition of that estimable encyclopedia, now gathering dust on my shelf beside my high-school slide rule. This part, on night ball and strategy after 1920, continues from https://ourgame.mlblogs.com/the-changing-game-part-4-9d2f151d6970.

Baseball was invented before electric lights, so it origi­nally was a game played largely in the afternoons. Thus, extra-inning affairs or late-starting games sometimes were called on account of darkness when the opposing nines had failed to complete their contest before twilight faded. That presented a distinct problem, as the decision about when to call a game on account of darkness af­fected the outcome. Hall of Famer Gabby Hartnett’s fabled “Home run in the gloamin’” in 1938, which helped lead the Cubs to the pennant, is probably the most famous example. Hartnett was player–manager of Chicago, which was locked in a tight race with Pittsburgh in late September. In the second game of a three-game series, the Cubs tied the game at 5–5 in the bottom of the eighth as the light faded. The umpires decided to let play con­tinue for one more inning before calling the game; the Bucs failed to score in the top of the ninth. Hartnett, 37 at the time, led off the home half of the inning, hitting a homer on an 0–2 curveball off Pirates reliever Mace Brown to put the Cubs into first place for good.

Of course, most working people couldn’t afford to take an afternoon off to attend a weekday ballgame, leading to a high proportion of businessmen — yes, they were mostly men — among the relatively sparse crowds (by today’s standards) of the early 20th century. Games played on weekends and holidays consequently drew much larger attendance.

By the early 1930s, however, major league games played under artificial lighting was nearing fruition. That the concept was feasible there could be no doubt: a base­ball game had been played at night way back in 1880, only two years after the introduction of electric light, and the Des Moines, Iowa, club of the Western League in­stalled lights in 1930. The idea, which caught on in a Depression era of dwindling attendance, was to stave off financial collapse by increasing weekday attendance.

Cincinnati executive Larry MacPhail finally advanced the notion of staging big-league games around the normal working fan’s hours. MacPhail had good reason to lobby for the change; his Cincinnati franchise had drawn an anemic 206,000 fans in 1934, not even enough to offset expenses. MacPhail and club owner Powel Crosley peti­tioned the National League for the right to play seven 1935 games at night; the league reluctantly agreed, taking note of the extenuating circumstance of the depressed attendance in the Queen City.

The first of those games, played May 24, pitted Cincin­nati against Philadelphia, and skeptics were moved to silence when it attracted an audience of better than 20,000 to what proved to be a 2–1 Reds victory. By 1941 night ball was an accepted fact in the majority of major league parks and, by shortly after the war’s end, only Wrigley Field in Chicago still lacked lighting. Today, most major league games as well as virtually all minor league games are played under the lights. Even the tradi­tional Cubs finally capitulated to the reality of night base­ball in 1988 when lights were installed at Wrigley Field, despite vigorous opposition from traditionalists as well as neighborhood residents. (Without lights, the Cubs faced the prospect of removal of any postseason home games to another ballpark.)

Attendance figures partially reflect the reason: prior to the advent of night baseball, it was considered excep­tional if a ballclub drew a half million fans for the season, and the entire National League schedule of 1933 attracted only about 3.1 million fans. In the 1960s, attendance of 1 million was considered a good year at the gate for most clubs. Today, the Cleveland Indians continue a six-year tradition of selling every seat at Jacobs Field before the season starts, while several clubs can anticipate drawing 3 million fans each season. Major League Baseball re­corded a historic first in 1986 when all 26 ballclubs drew at least 1 million fans. The following season was the first in which MLB clubs averaged 2 million in home attend­ance. Seasonal attendance of less than seven figures is now considered a disgrace.

Scheduling a handful of weekday baseball games in the sunshine is still good business, as the popular “business­persons’ specials” attest, though most weekday afternoon games are mandated by the travel considerations of the modern schedule. Nevertheless, it is clear that night base­ball is the normal paradigm of the national game today. Day games are a pleasant diversion, but the difference between when the game was played before 1935 and afterward is literally a difference of night and day.

Strategy After 1920

The reasons behind the switch that occurred about 1920 from a one-run strategy based on high batting average, the sacrifice, and stolen base to one focusing on power hitting are numerous and complex. Changes in rules, park design, equipment, and fan interest all played a part. The impact of those factors on the changed game is under­scored in the dramatically altered statistics of the game in the 1920s and later. The numbers of runs being scored provides the clearest contrast.

Prior to the season of 1920, the major league record for runs scored in a twentieth-century season by an individual was 147, set by Ty Cobb in 1911. The highest annual total since the establish­ment of the 16-team, 154-game schedule, set in 1912, was 11,165 runs (both AL and NL, not counting the Federal League). But in 1920, New York’s Babe Ruth easily broke Cobb’s individual record by scoring 158. He broke it again in 1921 with 177, establishing the standard that still exists. In all, Cobb’s former record was broken 13 times in the American League alone between 1920 and 1940. Meanwhile, total runs rose to 11,935 in 1921, then broke through the 12,000 barrier the following year to 12,059. It was broken again in 1925 (12,592), again in 1929 (12,747), and again in 1930 (13,695). And that record stood for more than three decades, until it was surpassed in 1962, by which time each major league had added two teams and eight more games to the playing schedule.

Power records similarly surged. Tris Speaker’s Dead Ball Era record for doubles — 53, set in 1912 — fell to Speaker himself in 1923 (59), and was surpassed in eight more seasons during the 1920s and 1930s; in 1936 alone five players matched or bettered that pre-1920 record. The pre-1920 record for home runs — Ruth’s 29 in 1919 — bears no comparison, of course, with subsequent achievements. It had been raised three times by Ruth himself almost annually through 1933, and was bettered in every single Ameri­can League season until the war year of 1944, when New York’s Nick Etten led the league with only 22. League slugging percentage, which ranged between .310 and .340 during the Dead Ball Era, jumped by an average of more than 20 points in both leagues in 1920 alone, and by 30 more points the following year. The increase in the American League alone was nearly 14 percent between 1919 and 1921. Slugging soared to .421 by 1930 in the American League, and to .448 in the National.

With the increase in power came a concurrent accept­ance of the intentional or semi-intentional base on balls as occasionally strategically prudent. Managers, operating on the theory that discretion might be the better part of valor, instructed or allowed pitchers to “work around” certain hitters like Ruth who were capable of doing far more damage with a home run than a walk. Previously, when pitchers looked on a walk as pariah, the Chicago Cubs’ Jimmy Sheckard held the record by drawing 147 of them in 1911. That lasted only as long as it took Ruth to be walked 148 times in 1920. The Babe raised that stand­ard to 170 in 1923. The league record of 4,282 walks issued in the National League in 1911 lasted until 1925, when American League pitchers walked 4,315 batters. The record was hiked biennially to 4,402, 4,611, 4,855 and 4,924 in the same league between 1932 and 1938.

Finally, in the 1920s and 1930s, the usage of relief pitchers first gained true prominence. In 1919 the St. Louis Cardinals’ Oscar Tuero became the first relief pitcher to lead the league in appearances; he pitched in 45 games, 28 out of the bullpen. The achievement drew little notice, primarily because his team finished seventh. But in 1923 the pennant-winning Giants’ Claude Jonnard and Rosy Ryan tied for the league lead in appearances, each with 45. Ryan started 15 games that season, Jonnard just one. The following season Firpo Marberry of the AL champion Washington Senators led the league with 50 appearances, only 15 of them starts. Marberry repeated as most-called upon in 1925 with 55 appearances, all in relief, in another pennant-winning year. Marberry’s role was by no means yet established; he would lead the league three more times in appearances, twice as a re­liever, once as a starter. Nevertheless, the idea of a spe­cialist in quality relief pitching for first-rank teams had at last begun to gain acceptance.

When the 1927 New York Yankees blitzed the Ameri­can League to win 110 games, their most frequently called upon pitcher was rookie Wilcy Moore, who won 19 games despite starting only 12. Moore pitched 38 times out of the bullpen. In 1901 National League pitchers had completed 976 games, representing nearly 90 percent of the schedule. By 1919 that figure had fallen to about 60 percent. In 1922, for the first time in history, National League pitchers completed fewer than half of all their starts. By 1930 the mark had fallen to 43 percent, and it held at roughly that level through the 1930s and 1940s.

As the perceived importance of the complete game waned, a temporary strategic miasma settled in. Manag­ers, less unwilling to turn to the bullpen, still had not developed effective strategies for its use. That began to change in the early 1940s when Leo Durocher developed the notion of a bullpen “ace.” The Brooklyn manager used his late-inning stopper both to give his team a chance to retake the lead as well as to try to hold the lead of a tiring starter through the final innings. For the first time, a manager appeared not to expect his starter to finish — or, at least, not to mind it if he didn’t. Dodger starters completed only 66 games in 1941 — one of the lowest totals ever by a pennant winner — and only 67 more the following season, while Durocher used hard-throwing Hugh Casey to win 14 games and save 20 those two years.

Others emulated Durocher’s strategic development. Boston’s Joe Cronin won the 1946 American League pennant, thanks in good measure to the relief pitching of Bob Klinger, who appeared 27 times in relief and saved a league-high nine games. The New York Yankees’ Joe Page won 21 games and saved 33 in virtually exclusive bullpen action in 1947–1948. Slowly, the old concept of relievers merely as failed starters was eroding. As late as 1946 more than half the major league mound staffs were led in appearances by a starter, and it was still possible for Cleveland’s Bob Feller to lead the league in that category. The trend was plain, however: in 1947, relievers led in appearances on 10 of the 16 staffs. By 1952, the figure was 13 of 16. In 1950 a relief pitcher, Jim Konstanty of the Phillies, won the Most Valuable Player Award by pitching in a then-record 74 games, saving 22 of them and leading his team to the National League pennant.

Joe Black won 15 games and saved 15 more for the pennant winning 1952 Dodgers. In 1954 Cleveland man­ager Al Lopez deployed a relief tandem of lefthander Don Mossi and righty Ray Narleski, who appeared in 82 games between them, saving 20. The major league save record, which had stood at 22 since being set by Marberry in 1926, was elevated to 27 by Page in 1949. Boston’s Ellis Kinder matched that in 1953, and New York’s Luis Arroyo topped it in 1961. Prior to 1949, only Marberry in all of baseball history had saved 20 games in a year. Between 1949 and 1961, 10 pitchers did it. All of this should be understood in the context that the concept of a “save” was unknown in the first half of the century, and the save was not adopted as an official statistic until 1969.

Player platooning, a dormant strategy after the early 1920s, was revived in the late 1940s, principally by Casey Stengel. A platoon player himself under John McGraw with the 1920s Giants, Stengel alternated lefthanded hit­ting third basemen Bobby Brown and righty Billy John­son in his first two years as Yankees manager. In 1951 Gil McDougald supplanted Johnson as the righthanded half of the platoon as the Yankees won the world champion­ship all three years. By 1955 Stengel had expanded his platoon system, alternating righthanded Bill Skowron with lefty Joe Collins at first base, and subbing right­handed Elston Howard for Irv Noren occasionally in the outfield. Howard and utility man Tony Kubek both were platooned at several positions in 1957 and 1958. Again, successful managers took their cues from Stengel. Fred Haney’s use of the first base platoon of Joe Adcock and Frank Torre helped the Braves to the 1958 pennant.

The only manager to beat out Stengel for the AL pen­nant between 1949 and 1960, Al Lopez (who also man­aged Cleveland in 1954), used a platoon system to do so with the White Sox in 1959. Lopez alternated righty Bubba Phillips and lefty Billy Goodman at third base, and righty Jim McAnany and lefty Jim Rivera in right field. In 1960 Pittsburgh manager Danny Murtaugh often alternated at three positions: Hal Smith or Smoky Burgess at catcher, Dick Stuart or Rocky Nelson at first, and Gino Cimoli or Bill Virdon in center. But for Fred Hutchin­son’s use of platoons at three positions in 1961 (Jerry Zimmerman and John Edwards at catcher, Elio Chacon and Don Blasingame at second, Wally Post and Jerry Lynch in left), Cincinnati very possibly might not have held off the Dodgers to win by four games. By the mid-­1960s, most teams were platooning at least one position.

The other significant change in strategy to evolve dur­ing the 1950s and early 1960s was a growing acceptance of the strikeout as an acceptable price to pay for home run power. In retrospect, that acceptance can clearly be seen as a delayed reaction, for home run totals had begun to mount sharply in 1953. For the past two decades, major league batters had averaged between 1,300 and 1,700 home runs; in 1953, they hit 2,076, a record 1,197 of them coming in the National League alone. That repre­sented a 22 percent increase over the previous season. From 1953 through 1960, the record was raised only about 10 percent and, in fact, the raw numbers of home runs flattened and occasionally declined between 1956, the peak season for home runs in the decade, and 1960.

Strikeouts rose sharply during this period. In 1953 major league batters struck out 10,220 times; by 1960 that had risen steadily to more than 12,800, a climb of more than 25 percent. The strikeout explosion continued unabated through the 1960s, whether home runs rose (as they did in 1961 and 1962) or fell. In fact, between 1961 and 1966, home run totals remained virtually level in the major leagues, despite the addition of two expansion teams. But strikeouts rose by more than 25 percent over the same period. The increase (part of which was attribu­table to strategic concessions and part to the enlarged strike zone), showed itself in the individual strikeout totals as well. Until 1956 the record for most strikeouts in a season was Vince DiMaggio’s 134, set in 1938. Wash­ington’s Jim Lemon broke it that season with 138. In 1961 Detroit’s Jake Wood broke it again, fanning 141 times. Harmon Killebrew of Minnesota raised the mark to 142 the following season; then Dave Nicholson of the Chicago White Sox increased it to 175 in 1963.

San Francisco’s Bobby Bonds whiffed 187 times in 1969, then followed with 189 strikeouts in 1970, setting the all-time record that endured into the twentieth century despite the homer­-happy and K-happy decade of the 1990s. [Mark Reynolds, with 223, blew by that mark in 2009. — jt] The rate of strikeouts dipped in the 1970s due to the smaller strike zone of 1969 and the designated hitter, then jumped in the 1980s. Batters’ willingness to swing for the fences, of course, has only increased , and strike­outs per game are now higher than ever. Long gone is the ingrained prejudice against striking out, as contemporary hitters have increasingly focused on taking more pitches — and, therefore, walking more often — as well as hitting for power.

The game in the 1970s and 1980s featured several other changes: the regeneration of the running game, the implementation of the designated hitter, and the further specification of the role of the relief pitcher.

Stealing bases, as well as aggressive baserunning in general, were reinvigorated in the 1960s as runs became scarcer. It was in the 1970s and 1980s, however, that baserunning reached its post-1920 height of importance. Changing playing conditions, notably the wide use of artificial surfaces, certainly played a large part, as did the talent infusion from Latin America. Many of the new players who entered the major league ranks could run well and play defense well, but not hit with power. Mana­gerial acumen certainly had something to do with it: Whitey Herzog and others found it easier to succeed in large ballparks by emphasizing speed over power. This two-way versatility and greater athleticism gave the Royals, Cardinals, and other similar teams both an impor­tant baserunning threat and a critical defensive boost, especially in the large outfields of the modern superstadia. The resurrection of speed also essentially banished the lumbering, one-dimensional slugger to the American League and those good hitters’ parks remaining in the NL.

If the reasons behind the stolen base’s surge are com­plex, affixing the date of its arrival as a mainstream strata­gem is less so. It clearly came from Venezuela by way of Chicago in the person of Luis Aparicio in 1956. Prior to Aparicio, there had not been a genuine basestealing threat — a player capable of swiping 50 or more bases in a season — in more than a decade. Moreover, the efforts of the comparative handful of fellows who had great speed in the decade prior to that (e.g., George Case in Washing­ton and Snuffy Stirnweiss in New York) got lost in the glare of the home run. Stolen bases plummeted from more than one per team per game in the first two decades of the century to half that in the 1920s, then continued to decline to a low point of less than one every three games for the typical team in the 1950s!

Aparicio’s debut sounded the call to speed. As a rookie he led the American League in steals in 1956. His total of 21 was certainly nothing special, even for the sluggish 1950s, but the notion of a baserunner as a weapon had not yet caught on. The following season Aparicio won the stolen base title again, this time with 28 before stealing an eye-opening and crowd-pleasing 56 in 1959 (Willie Mays, the National League champion, stole 27). Aparicio would go on to win the stolen base crown in nine succes­sive seasons, topping 40 steals in four of the next five years.

By 1959 Aparicio was no longer the whole story. Sto­len base totals had turned upward virtually league-wide. National Leaguers stole 439 bases that season, their high­est total in nearly a decade. In 1960 Los Angeles short­stop Maury Wills joined Aparicio at the 50-steal plateau, then in 1962 Wills was successful 104 times, breaking Cobb’s record of 96 that had stood since 1915. The Dodgers as a team stole 198 bases, the most by any major league club since 1918.

Baserunners became a critical part of most pennant winners in the National League. Wills was a key factor in the Dodgers’ NL championships in 1963, 1965 and 1966. St. Louis obtained Lou Brock in midseason 1964 and promptly took off from mediocrity to the world champi­onship as he stole 33 bases for the Cards. Brock helped St. Louis to another World Series title in 1967, and the Cards came within one game of repeating as world cham­pions in 1968.

By 1966 stolen bases were up almost 50 percent from the depressed levels of the 1950s, and the rate of thefts in the 1970s more than doubled the slow-footed ’50s. As was the case in the Dead Ball Era, every team had its “rabbit.” In 1974 Brock broke Wills’s single-season re­cord by stealing 118 bases. In 1976 Chuck Tanner’s Oak­land A’s stole 341 bases, falling just six steals short of the all-time record established in 1911. Bill North stole 75 that season, Bert Campaneris 54, and Don Baylor 52, as nine different Oakland players stole 20 or more. Yet the A’s finished second behind Kansas City, which stole “only” 218.

In the last two decades, stolen bases records were al­most rewritten routinely. In 1992 Rickey Henderson, who set the all-time single-season mark with 130 in Oakland in 1982, broke Brock’s modern career mark of 938 in 1991, then became the first player to steal more than 1,000 bases in a career. Henderson stole 100 or more three times in the 1980s, a feat matched by St. Louis’ swift Vince Coleman. What’s more, the list of the top 10 basestealers of all-time in terms of success percentage includes eight players from the 1980s and 1990s.

The era of the designated hitter certainly has its strate­gic implications, but all of the game’s deep thinkers of the ages couldn’t have devised a way to use it had not rulemakers seen fit in 1973 to legalize it on a league­-option basis. The premise of the DH is as simple as the realization that most pitchers are miserable batters. The rule allows one player to pinch hit repeatedly for the pitcher without requiring the pitcher’s removal from the game.

The two major leagues split over the DH when it was adopted, and they have remained divided ever since. After the American League blazed the trail, the rule was also adopted by virtually every other college and professional league. It became part of the World Series after a compro­mise between the two major leagues, used from 1976 through 1985 in alternating years. Since 1986 the DH has been employed in games played in the home ballpark of the American League champion. That compromise has also been in effect for interleague games since their in­ception in 1997.

The designated hitter rule was adopted by the Ameri­can League as an effort to increase offensive production and also spur fan interest. This radical move was made because AL scoring had fallen to a low of 3.41 in 1968; after a rebound in 1969–70, it then slumped again to only 3.47 in 1972. National League scoring had fallen in the same way in the 1960s, but was almost half a run higher in 1972.

Concern about lower scoring among American League ownership was greatly heightened by the large gap in attendance between the two leagues at the time: from 1969 through 1972, the Senior Circuit outdrew its younger rival by 36 percent. Some of this had to do with the new ballparks being occupied by NL teams; neverthe­less, it is clear that the large attendance deficit spurred AL owners to action. Apparently, the move worked as a way of drumming up more business; the AL had essentially achieved parity with the NL in per-team attendance by the early 1980s and eventually surpassed the NL in 1989.

The change also accomplished its goal of injecting more offense into the AL game. In 1973 the league scor­ing average jumped up 23 percent, one of the most dra­matic one-season shifts in the game’s history. Other statistics reflected the change as well: the league batting average rose from .239 to .259 as teams scored 29 percent more runs and hit 32 percent more home runs.

Most American League teams at first used the DH posi­tion as a refuge for older (and frequently slower) power hitters who are no longer capable of playing daily in the field but who are still effective offensively. In that sense, the very first DH, the New York Yankees’ Ron Blomberg, was an accurate precursor: Blomberg batted .293 over eight major league seasons but never carried a big-league reputation at either first base or left field. Blomberg’s legacy has proved remarkably consistent in the quarter century-plus of the DH era.

Except for the common practice of using the DH to help players who are hobbled by minor injuries, or the similar stratagem of using an occasional game at DH as a semi-rest for regulars, most designated hitters have been defensive liabilities with power bats. Teams will some­times use high-average hitters as regular DHs (usually they must have plus speed as well), but most often a lack of real power at DH indicates lack of a better choice, not a deliberate strategy. The best DHs, epitomized by Seat­tle’s Edgar Martinez, would certainly play regularly de­spite their glove if the DH rule were repealed. However, many great DHs, especially those who can no longer physically play the field due to leg or knee injuries (e.g., Chili Davis and Harold Baines), would have had to retire years earlier if not for the DH rule.

Since the inception of the DH, the American League can be fairly characterized as a power-based offensive league, the National League as a league based on pitching and speed. Starting in 1973 the American League has seen more runs per game, more home runs per game, and higher batting and slugging averages than the National for almost every single season. Only in 1974 has the NL scored more runs; only in 1973 has it hit more home runs; only in 1976 did it outslug the AL by a tiny margin. While the difference between the leagues has waxed and waned somewhat, as one would expect due to random variation as well as shifting talent levels between the leagues, the gap was generally larger in the 1980s and 1990s than in the 1970s. (In the first 10 years of the DH, the AL out­scored the NL by an average of 0.21 runs per game. The next 10 seasons saw that margin increase more than 80 percent to 0.38 runs per game.) These facts suggest AL teams took a few years to optimize DH strategy as well as to reorient their rosters to the new reality.

The principal points of debate concerning the effects of the DH on baseball strategy have been twofold. First, whether it inappropriately undermines one of baseball’s appealing tenets, that all participants be complete athletes. Second, whether it diminishes in-game strategic moves by manag­ers. Detractors argue that, logically, the DH must nega­tively impact on strategy by removing one of the questions a manager must repeatedly consider during the course of a game: whether to pinch hit for a reasonably effective pitcher when behind or tied. The fewer decisions the manager must make, the reasoning goes, the more muted become baseball’s strategic nuances. As strategy dulls, so does the game according to this viewpoint.

Others argue, also logically, that the DH actually en­hances strategy. The crux of this counterargument is that managers traditionally were forced into a series of very obvious pinch-hit/relief-pitcher moves that were almost always dictated by game circumstance. If the circum­stance compels such a move, then it is not an option at all and both brilliant and ordinary managers would make the same choice. A reasonably competent DH, by con­trast, should give managers some discretion in the deci­sion whether to bunt, steal, swing away, or hit and run. Most importantly, a manager must decide whether to remove his pitcher based on his estimate of how well he’s likely to continue to pitch, not simply that he is due to bat in an obvious pinch-hitting situation.

The use of the bullpen as a strategic factor has progressed constantly from Luis Arroyo’s days in New York until the present. Again, clear evidence is found in the record book. Arroyo’s 29 saves were surpassed in 1965 when Ted Abernathy of the Chicago Cubs saved 31. Kansas City’s Jack Aker broke the record again the fol­lowing season with 32. That record lasted only until 1970, when Cincinnati’s Wayne Granger saved 35 games. The Reds’ Clay Carroll raised the record to 37 in 1972, and Detroit’s John Hiller saved 38 in 1973. In 1983 Kan­sas City’s Dan Quisenberry saved 46.

Since then, five pitchers have saved more than 50 games in one season, including Bobby Thigpen, whose 57 saves in 1990 established a record. Discount­ing the strike year of 1981, Arroyo’s remarkable 29 saves in 1961 would have led the major leagues in no season since 1976.

The primary role of the bullpen has changed from rescuing incompetent starters to a carefully worked-out and often rigid-strategy for victory. Modern relievers have much more clearly defined jobs. Today’s ideal bull­pen contains at least one lefthander whose primary job is to retire only lefthanded batters, plus a righthander who is especially tough on righty hitters, plus one or two setup pitchers (as well as a “long man” to pitch the middle in­nings when necessary), and a closer. The closer’s task has been narrowed greatly so that it now is rarely more than recording the final three outs of the game if his team has a one-to-three run lead.

Specialized setup pitchers evolved from the group of undifferentiated middle relievers in the late 1980s. Their job is to bridge the gap in the seventh and eighth innings of close games between the starter or middle reliever and the closer. Only in emergencies are pitchers used in roles that differ from their specialties. Many setup pitchers who distinguish themselves graduate to the premier role of closer; indeed, most closers now serve a de facto apprenticeship of one or more years as setup pitchers in the majors. Other setup pitchers are veterans whose stuff is good enough to be trusted in that secondary role, but not good enough to be trusted by contemporary managers with the job of racking up the save. Many sinker–slider pitchers and breaking-ball pitchers have become good setup relievers, but few pitchers without plus fastballs have been allowed to pitch in the ninth when the game is on the line.

With these changes have come additional recognition for the very best relievers. In 1974 Mike Marshall of the Los Angeles Dodgers became the first relief pitcher to win the Cy Young Award; his credentials included 15 victories, but also a league-leading 21 saves and an incredible record-setting 106 games. Three years later, New York’s Sparky Lyle would win the AL award with 13 wins and 26 saves. By 1979 a reliever’s victory total had become extraneous: Bruce Sutter was recognized as the National League’s top pitcher that season despite win­ning just six games because he saved 37. Rollie Fingers did the same thing for Milwaukee in 1981, winning just six but saving 28; he was named both Cy Young Award winner and league MVP in the drastically strike-short­ened season. Willie Hernandez won the 1984 Cy Young Award as well as the MVP for Detroit on the basis of only nine victories, but 32 saves.

Finale, Part 6 — Modern Strategy — tomorrow

The Changing Game, Part 5 was originally published in Our Game on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

A comprehensive look at “the unchanging game,” in several parts

Bill Felber wrote this dazzling essay for Total Baseball back nearly thirty years ago, and Gary Gillette updated it for a later edition of that estimable encyclopedia, now gathering dust on my shelf beside my high-school slide rule. This final part, on modern strategy, continues from https://ourgame.mlblogs.com/the-changing-game-part-5-ab8106124a65

The decade of the 1990s saw many wrenching changes in baseball, both on and off the field. Aside from the con­stant drumbeat of argument over economic issues, the biggest story of the final decade of the 20th century — a century of prosperity, stability, and popularity for base­ball that is unparalleled among major team sports — was unquestionably the explosion of offense. In particular, the unprecedented barrage of home runs launched by major league hitters generated a huge amount of controversy, to the point where the owners were actively discussing mak­ing significant rules changes to help their shell-shocked pitchers.

On the mound, two major strategic changes helped to define the character of the 1990s. One, an increase in the size of pitching staffs, was a reaction to the dramatic increase in scoring. The other, the near-universal adop­tion of the Tony La Russa-style bullpen and its rigidly defined roles, was the climax of a long-running trend in relief strategy.

As scoring increased, the search by teams for pitchers who could stem the tide became almost frantic. Scouts were dispatched around the world to scour other countries for pitching talent, and many young pitchers — as well as a few veterans — came to North American from the Domin­ican Republic, Venezuela, Japan, Korea, Cuba, and else­where to play professional baseball. Young pitchers who were hit hard in their first few outings were quickly sent back to the minors. Veteran lefthanded pitchers found they had more professional lives than black cats. Typical pitching staffs ballooned from the previous nine pitchers in the American League and 10 in the National (due to the lack of the designated hitter, NL clubs pinch hit for their hurlers more often) to 11, and sometimes an even dozen.

More pitchers, each pitching fewer innings, trudged to the mound to face increasingly powerful lineups where virtu­ally every hitter could hit a mistake over the fence. Part of the reason for the procession of new pitchers was the decrease in workload among ace relievers and the specialization in the bullpen. Oakland’s Dennis Ecker­sley attained the same double honor of Cy Young and MVP in 1992 as had Hernandez in 1984 and Fingers in 1981. The big difference between the three, however, was not in how many saves they compiled, but in how much each worked. Eckersley pitched just 80 innings and won just seven games while saving 51. Eight years earlier, Hernandez pitched 140-1/3 innings while winning nine and saving 33. In strike-shortened 1981, Fingers had logged 78 innings while posting six wins and 28 saves in his team’s 109 games; pro-rated to a full season, his 78 innings would equal 116.

By the time of Eckersley’s ascendancy as the game’s premier reliever, the narrowly defined role of one-inning closer — a pitcher who appeared only in the ninth inning and only to protect a three-run or smaller lead — had been adopted to a point of stridency. Managers almost never went to their best relievers except in ninth-inning or extra-­inning “save situations,” even if the game might hang in the balance in an earlier inning. This managerial reluctance to use the best pitcher in the bullpen until the game was already won was in stark contrast to earlier decades. The great ace relievers of the 1970s and 1980s — fear­some pitchers like Goose Gossage, Bruce Sutter, Rollie Fingers, Mike Marshall, and Sparky Lyle — could expect the bullpen phone to ring anytime after the sixth inning if the game was hanging in the balance. Moreover, they were expected to finish the game no matter what inning they entered. Great relievers prior to the 1990s didn’t often enter the game when their team was behind, but it wasn’t unheard of, either. They certainly weren’t auto­matically held in reserve when the game was tied in the late innings, watching as their lesser bullpen compatriots tried to hold the line till their team took the lead. They frequently faced their first batter of the game with runners in scoring position, instead of almost always sauntering in from the bullpen with the bases empty.

Paradoxically, although the styles managers have em­ployed to wrap up victories have changed over the last five decades — and although the salaries paid to relief pitchers have changed even more — the results have not. Major league teams today blow late-inning leads at al­most the same frequency they did decades ago, when there was no such thing as a closer or setup man, when bullpens were commonly refuges for failed starters, and when managers signaled for relief help only at the mo­ment of absolute peril.

That assertion will probably surprise a generation of fans brought up on the theories of Tony La Russa. His widely praised and highly-structured bullpens — a lefty specialist, a righty specialist, and a setup pitcher, all setting the stage for the closer who starts the ninth inning any time his team leads by three runs or less — became the model for virtually every major league team in the 1990s. A major league manager is now frequently second­-guessed if he doesn’t pull a starting pitcher after seven innings, even if he may be pitching a shutout.

A detailed study of every game played in the major leagues during seasons in which managers employed dis­tinctly different bullpen usage patterns (originally pub­lished in the fourth edition of Total Baseball) defies widely held perceptions. In terms of victories — and win­ning or losing is what matters in baseball — the eighth-inning and ninth-inning strategies of the 1990s represent little if any advance whatsoever upon those of the 1970s or the 1950s.

The differences do not offer evidence that one usage pattern provides better results than another, that the mod­ern concept of a specialized bullpen contributes to win­ning baseball games more frequently than other, older bullpen usage patterns. Contrary to accepted wisdom, a highly structured bullpen — one in which roles are defined and adhered to in a reasonably rigid fashion — appears to provide no advantage. As a general proposition, teams with a highly structured bullpen lose late-inning leads in roughly the same proportion as teams of previous eras. The evidence is substantial that a significant increase in the number of saves recorded in recent years is wholly reflexive and gratuitous, and provides little actual advan­tage in the standings.

The study was originally conducted by examining games played in 1992, 1972, and 1952, then updated for the past two seasons. These seasons provide contrast both across time and in the generally accepted patterns of bullpen use. In 1992 managers assumed that their starting pitchers would not finish games and had defined clear roles for their relief staff. In 1972 bullpen roles were evolving but not yet rigid; the concept of a closer (as opposed to the earlier “fireman,” who was summoned in times of trouble) was in its early stages. Several teams did not even utilize closers. In 1972 a manager hoped that his starting pitcher would finish the game, but was willing to use his bullpen if necessary. In 1952 bullpen strategies had only begun to develop. Most teams still viewed re­lievers as failed starters or last-resort journeymen. Com­plete games were reasonably common, and only a few teams — the Yankees and Phillies being examples — had developed first-rate relief specialists. In 1952 a manager hoped his starting pitcher would finish the game and turned to his bullpen only when forced to do so.

Although managers did not derive greater benefit from their bullpen in 1992 than in previous seasons, they clearly relied on it to a far greater extent. Forty years earlier managers who led by one run after eight innings went to their bullpen only 17 percent of the time. By 1972, this figure had risen to 29 percent. In 1992, how­ever, managers who led by one run after eight innings went to their bullpen a whopping 66 percent of the time while winning 4 percent less often. An even clearer exam­ple of this trend to reflexive bullpen use is seen in the category of games in which a team led by three runs after eight innings. In 1952 managers in that situation called for a reliever only 21.4 percent of the time; by 1972 that percentage had actually fallen fractionally, to 21.3 percent. In 1992, however, managers of teams that led by three runs after eight innings went to their bullpen 54.7 percent of the time. They could hardly have achieved a significantly greater winning percentage, since teams in that advantageous position won 95.1 percent of the time in 1952, and 95.5 percent of the time in 1972. In fact, in 1992 teams that led by three runs after eight innings also won 95.5 percent of the time.

For practical purposes, this shift in patterns of bullpen use, two generations in the ­making, can be compared to periodic and whimsical changes in dress hemlines: A lot of money is spent, but the gain is in the eye of the beholder.

This focus on improved pitching occurred in the con­text of a rapidly increasing advantage gained by big league hitters in the 1990s. Scoring had stabilized from the late 1970s through the mid-1980s at about 4.5 runs per team per game in the AL, with the DH-less NL generally about half a run per team less. Home run rates were also relatively static over that time span. Then, in 1987, in a summer of record hot weather throughout the east and Midwest, all hell broke loose from the pitchers’ viewpoint.

“The Year of the Hitter,” as 1987 quickly became known, caused the same kind of consternation among fans, the media, and those in the game that “The Year of the Pitcher” caused in 1968. While scoring rose less than 10 percent in both leagues, homers in the AL were clubbed at a pace of one per team per game, highest in AL history and only slightly below the NL record pace of 1955. In the NL homers jumped almost 20 percent to the highest rate since 1961.

As in 1968, a change in the strike zone definition was seized upon as the means to reverse the trend. Incongru­ously, the de jure strike zone was actually reduced from the “batter’s armpits” to the “midpoint between the top of the shoulders and the top of the uniform pants.” This was an attempt to expand the de facto strike zone, which many claimed had umpires calling balls on any pitch above the waist. Even though skeptics said that the besieged men in blue weren’t following the new rules, both scoring and homers plummeted in 1988 to the levels of the early 1980s.

Runs and home runs in both leagues remained rela­tively stable from 1988 through 1992, and the controversy was muted. Then, on April 6, 1992, without an announce­ment or even any plan, baseball went back to the future.

On that day, Oriole Park at Camden Yards opened its gates in Baltimore for the first time. Instantly, every other ballpark in baseball became dated, and any multipurpose stadium was living on borrowed time as a baseball venue. As the first of what came to be called the “retro ballparks,” Camden Yards received universal acclaim. Its old-time feel and old-fashioned attention to detail com­bined with its modern amenities to thrill fans and players alike. It succeeded beyond anyone’s wildest dreams and spawned a legion of imitators in other cities.

One of the essential elements in creating the fan­-friendly atmosphere at Camden Yards was keeping the fans close to the field. Not having to worry about con­figuring the park for football games, the architects placed the seats close to the action. This seemingly innocent detail automatically boosts offense, as the ability of the fielders to catch foul popups is curtailed, resulting in more swings for the hitters. Of course, more swings means more hits and more runs.

In 1993, 16 years after the AL did so, the NL finally expanded to 14 teams by placing new franchises in Colorado and Florida. The effect that playing baseball at a mile-high altitude has on the game can be seen in the statistics from Mile High Stadium, the temporary home of the Rockies for their first two seasons, and Coors Field, the Rockies’ “retro” ballpark that opened in 1995. As in 1961, pumped-up offensive stats were seen in an expansion year. As in 1961, many blamed expansion for diluting the level of pitching talent, conveniently ignoring that expan­sion also dilutes the level of hitting talent. As in 1961, the engines fueling the offensive boom were the two new ballparks, both of which were exceedingly generous to hitters. In fact, Denver and Miami had the two best hit­ters’ parks in the NL in both 1993 and 1994. (Note that the calculation for ballpark effect accounts for the per­formance of the home team, so having a bad pitching staff doesn’t affect the result.)

Playing in a converted football stadium in Denver in 1993–94 boosted runs by about 30–50 percent over league average — a very large effect, equal to or greater to the effect of the best hitters’ parks (e.g., Wrigley and Fenway) in the most extreme years in their long history. Playing in Coors Field, a more intimate (even though its dimensions are spacious by normal standards) baseball­-only park since 1995 has boosted scoring by 35–70 per­cent per year. This is a stupendous offensive inflation never seen since the advent of permanent concrete-and-­steel ballparks in the early 20th century. The mile-high effect on home runs isn’t quite as dramatic, but it’s still huge.

After the big increase in offense and homers in 1993, the 1994 season saw another jump. All summer long, fans and the media were abuzz with speculation about whether anyone could reach the 61 home runs of Roger Maris in 1961. By then the record had stood for 33 years; Ruth’s mark had stood for 34 years before it was toppled by Maris.

It was certainly not a coincidence that per-game attend­ance in 1994 was the highest ever seen in baseball, before or since. At the time play was tragically stopped by the strike/lockout after games of August 11, two players already had hit 40 home runs: Matt Williams of the Gi­ants (43) and Ken Griffey Jr. of the Mariners (40). Wil­liams was on a pace to hit 61 home runs, equal to Maris in 1961, with Griffey and others close behind.

The 1994 season — the first in major league history where more than one home run was hit per game by each team — set the stage for the rest of the decade. As the offense steadily increased, the frequency and the impor­tance of baserunning diminished somewhat in the 1990s as scoring shot up to near-record levels. While the overall rate of stolen bases dropped less than 10 percent from the 1980s, it dropped more than twice as fast from 1996–2000 than from 1991–1995. Furthermore, the rate of stealing in 2000 (0.60 stolen bases per game) was the lowest since 1973, the first year of the DH era. Still, even at the relatively depressed rate in 2000, stolen bases were more frequent than the average for all five decades from the 1920s through the 1960s.

A little perspective on the magnitude of the offensive explosion of the 1990s is in order. As the table below shows, the 1990s did not see the highest level of offense in baseball history, nor did it even see the second-­highest level. Overall offense in the 1990s was below that of both the 1920s and the 1930s. Even the five runs-plus scored by each team in each game in the last two years of the decade— when it seemed like the sky was falling for all the wailing and gnashing of teeth in the sports media — fail to top the list of highest-scoring seasons of all-time.

Perspective, however, is not an explanation. Just what has caused the so-called collapse of the historic balance be­tween pitching and hitting (if you ignore the 1920s and 1930s)? Boiling down the many, varied, and complex factors influencing baseball games is incredibly difficult. Multiply that by 162 and it boggles the mind. If it were simple to analyze baseball, predicting who would win each season would be a snap. Prognostications in base­ball — whether for a season, a series, or an individual game — are by far the least accurate in all of team sports.

Stripping away all the hype in recent years about the offensive binge, the home run explosion, and the effects of repeated expansions, it’s clear that the sky isn’t falling in major league baseball. In 1930, generally considered to be smack in the middle of what is frequently called the “Golden Age” of baseball, fully 5.55 runs were scored by each team in the average game — 8 percent more than in 2000! The golden years of 1929 and 1936 also saw run­ners cross the plate more frequently than in 2000. In fact, the slugger-happy 1990s saw only four of the top 10 scoring seasons of the century, and only five of the top 20.

Many trends, both intended and unintended, have com­bined to push scoring and homers up since the mid­-1980s. The biggest reasons are the new ballparks, changes in existing ballparks, stronger hitters, and better bat selection. Putting them all together at the same time has produced the current big-offense climate in the major leagues.

Baseball fans crave intimacy, and intimacy helps hit­ters. The result: new baseball-only ballparks are usually better hitting venues than the parks they replace. Putting domes on ballparks in colder climates helps hitters as well. In the past two decades, teams have been constantly modifying parks to accommodate fans, and most of those modifications have directly or indirectly helped the hit­ters. Every time that premium seating is installed behind home plate and between the dugouts, foul pops that used to be caught fall into the stands. Outfield fences have been moved in more often than out, and fence height has been reduced in many parks. Some of the huge new score­boards erected have helped block winds blowing in at the batter.

Three factors given far more play than they deserve for increased offense are expansion, the supposed shrinking of the strike zone, and the use of performance-enhancing drugs or supplements. Brute strength is not a requirement in baseball as it is in football or several other sports. The effects of baseball players using legal, if controver­sial, supplements like creatine are completely unknown. It’s entirely possible that creatine might make no difference in a ballplayer’s performance — think of the placebo effect.

While the strike zone has clearly been compressed at the top, it has also been expanded at the bottom and on the outside. The unhittable sinker or splitter below the knees has replaced the “high, hard one” of bygone days as the pitcher’s best pitch. The downward drift of the strike zone started with the change in umpire’s chest protectors, then continued as pitchers were taught to keep the ball down and to view the high fastball just as if it were a hanging breaking ball — that is, a dangerous mistake.

The relentless “keep the ball down” coaching at all levels worked until good righthanded power hitters, who used to feast on high pitches and eschew low pitches, learned to reach down and lift any pitch above the knees. Once they developed that skill, their greatly increased arm and upper-body strength, courtesy of rigorous, year-­round training, allowed them to hit those pitches with power. Improved strength and conditioning has also al­lowed smaller players, whose game often depends on their speed or their defense, to hit more home runs (think about how rarely the term “singles hitter” is used any more). That’s also why there’s been such an increase in opposite-field home runs in recent years: power hitters with incredibly strong arms now stride into pitches on the outside part of the plate and literally muscle them 400 feet to the opposite power alley. When pitchers stopped busting hitters inside with high fastballs, hitters started crowding the plate and taking advantage of the increased reach it gave them.

There’s nothing mysterious about all of this; left­handed batters have been known as low-ball hitters for decades. It just took an adjustment in hitting styles for righty swingers. That takes years of practice, but profes­sionals can and will make that kind of adjustment when their livelihood depends on it — and those hitters that can’t change are quickly replaced.

Another little-appreciated improvement in hitting has come from lighter bats. Bats weighing 30–34 ounces have replaced the 36–40-ounce shillelaghs wielded by the sluggers of yesteryear. Scientists studying the physics of hitting have found that the tradeoff in distance in hitting a ball with these lighter bats is very small, but lighter bats allow hitters to hit more pitches squarely because they can swing faster and have better bat control. A 425-foot homer is no better than a 410-foot homer, but hitting more pitches harder means more long flyballs — and that means more home runs.

Finally, while expansion has most certainly diluted the pitching, it has also diluted the hitting to a commensurate degree. This means that Pedro Martinez and Randy John­son will be facing more inferior hitters, just the same as Alex Rodriguez and Barry Bonds will be facing more inferior pitchers. Thus, individual hitting and pitching records both become easier to break every time the league expands, but that doesn’t mean overall offense must go up.

The upward trend in home runs has nothing to do with juicing the ball and everything to do with superb profes­sional athletes reacting to changing circumstances. Hockey scoring has plummeted in the 1980s and 1990s, yet is anyone blaming the puck? If hockey scoring re­bounds, as it surely will, will rumors spring up about the “lively puck”?

Baseball players, coaches, and managers are paid large sums of money to adjust successfully when their oppo­nents are beating them. Scoring has risen and fallen throughout baseball history for many reasons, and home run rates have done the same. Major fluctuations can be due to seasonal variances in the weather, an especially talented crop of young players entering the league, and to the adoption of different playing, pitching, hitting and coaching strategies.

Right now, hitters have the upper hand. No doubt about it: power hitters are thriving. The beleaguered pitchers and their coaches haven’t yet figured out how to counter the new generation of sluggers. But what’s so bad about that? Fans love high-scoring games.

It’s no exaggeration to say that Babe Ruth and his majestic home runs saved baseball in the 1920s. Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa enchanted fans and non-fans with their home run heroics in 1998, lifting the game off its sickbed on the strength of their strong arms and power­ful bats. Major League Baseball can put a damper on scoring anytime it wants by changing the rules in several ways. Whether it really wants to do so is another question.

One of the oldest baseball adages is that pitching and defense win games. Without bothering to analyze the validity of that old chestnut, it’s plainly obvious that home runs and scoring win the hearts of the fans.

The Changing Game, Part 6 was originally published in Our Game on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Zane Grey’s 1922 novel … and baseball

Zane Grey (1872–1939) was a fabulously prolific and successful writer. His 85 books sold more than 100 million copies and inspired 111 films, nearly all of them “Westerns.” But the road to fame as America’s Man of the West was a long and circuitous one — as I have recounted in several stories here at Our Game (https://goo.gl/3X6otW) — and baseball was never far from the core of his being. Three early works featured baseball : The Young Pitcher, The Short-Stop, and The Redheaded Outfield and Other Stories. And those of us who regard ourselves as baseball experts thought that after 1920 Grey never again wrote about baseball. Not so, it turns out.

She recalled the first time she had ever seen him. It was at Cape May, where a group of college men maintained baseball games with visiting teams, professional and otherwise. Her aunt, with whom she lived, and most of her Philadelphia friends, always spent some weeks at the seashore. And Marian enjoyed games and bathing and dancing as well as anyone. One summer afternoon a friend took her to the athletic field and pointed out the famous Indian star. How curious she had felt! There was a strange pain in the recall of that first sensation. Her eyes fell upon a tall bareheaded athlete, slenderly yet powerfully built, his supple form broadening wide at the shoulders. His face was dark, his hair black as coal. Striking and handsome as he was, it was not his appearance alone that thrilled her so. She was a thoroughly modern young woman and had seen her share of college games. In action the Indian was simply beautiful. He had earned his great fame as a football star, and had been picked by experts for the All American team three successive years. But he did not need to be so great a baseball player to be good to look at. He played an outfield position, and the chances of the game fell so that he had little to do except run. And his running grew more and more thrilling to Marian. How easily he moved — what a stride he had! Marian found she was not alone in her admiration. This Indian athlete did not need her applause. Toward the end of the game, at a critical time for the home team, he hit a ball far beyond the reach of the opposing fielders. The crowd roared its delight. The Indian dashed down toward first base, and, turning, appeared to gather speed as he ran. Marian felt the pound of her heart, the sudden shock of delight and pride in the Indian’s sheer physical prowess. He ran as the Greek runners must have run, garlanded for their victories. How fleet! How incredibly faster and faster! Then he was making the turn for home base, and the crowd was yelling wildly. He seemed to be facing Marian as he sped on, magnificent in his action. He beat the throw and scored his home run, a feat the audience applauded with prodigious abandon. Marian then became aware that she too had been rather undignified.

This passage is from Grey’s The Vanishing American, which critics, often unkind to his potboilers, generally praised. Surely the ballplayer, Nophaie, is based on Jim Thorpe, who in 1922–23, the time of the book’s original serial publication in Ladies’ Home Journal, was long removed from his Olympic glory and even more distantly his collegiate football exploits. Though he had never played ball in Cape May, except perhaps on a lark, some summer day in 1915, the year he played for Jersey City, he may well have bumped into Zane Grey.

Nophaie had been captured by white rustlers and taken away from the desert and his people by force. They took him far to the east, where, as the renamed Lo Blandy, “Nophaie lived and studied in the white man’s school and college for eighteen years.”

Returning to the West he recalled, in a letter to Marian Warner, the white woman he had come to love while attending college in Pennsylvania and playing baseball on the Jersey shore.

I was young and full of fire that summer at Cape May. I drank the white man’s liquor, Marian. I was praised, fêted, sought because I had become a famous athlete — the football and baseball player, winner of so many points against the great colleges. I danced and played the same as white college men.

Then I met you, Marian. You were different from most of the white girls. I loved you at sight and respected you when I knew you. I stopped drinking for you. And for an Indian to give up whisky, once he knows its taste, is no small thing. I loved a white girl. I called you Benow di cleash, the white girl with blue eyes. And I’m sure your influence kept me from the fate of more than one famous Indian athlete — Sockalexis, for instance, who ruined career and health in one short year….

The red sand I tread is part the bones and flesh of my ancestors. I will live my life here and mingle my bones with theirs. I will do all I can for them. But alas! the eighteen years’ education forced upon me by the whites enables me only to see the pitiful state and the doom of the Indians.

Come, Marian, to Oljato — come to help me awhile or just to see the wildness and beauty of my home, so that always afterward your memory will be full of the color and music and grandeur and fragrance of the Indian land.

Though he played his last big-league game in 1919, Thorpe had continued to play baseball and football. His last year of minor-league baseball was … 1922. In pro football he hung on until 1928.

In its original serialized version, The Vanishing American offered a harsh portrayal of government agents and missionaries who preyed upon Native Americans. According to Zane Grey biographer Thomas Pauly, afterwards “the magazine was deluged with angry letters from religious groups, and the Bureau of Indian Affairs vehemently denounced his depiction of their efforts.” When Harper published the novel in book, the editor similarly asked Grey to tone down those depictions, which were watered down further in the 1925 film, Paramount/Famous Players-Lasky’s most costly and ambitious to that time. Most of it was filmed within the Navajo Nation reservation; locations included Monument Valley, Rainbow Bridge and Sagi Canyon. [Worth watching; look for Gary Cooper in an uncredited bit part!]

“Please Nophaie, put your uniform on for me,” she begged. “It’s only a girl’s sentimental whim. But I don’t care what it is. That girl loves you.”

“Benow di cleash, I hate the sight of that uniform now,” he said.

“Oh, why?”

“I don’t know. I didn’t hate it until I got back here — on the desert — home.”

“Oh! Well, you need never put it on again after this time. Just once for me. I want to take your picture. Think — I have pictures of you in football suit, baseball suit, Indian suit, and now I want one of you as a soldier — an American soldier. Why not?”

And she was not above lending her arms and lips to persuasion, which quite vanquished him.

“You’re a white girl, all right,” he laughed.

“White? Certainly, and your white girl.”

Grey further challenged social mores of the period not only by depicting a romantic relationship between Nophaie and Marian but also ending the serialized version with Nophaie surviving and the two remaining as a couple. In both the version published by Harper in 1925 and in the film, Nophaie dies.

Jim Thorpe, the Vanishing American was originally published in Our Game on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.