Peephole to the past; an editorial adventure of the 1980s
In 2009, SABR shifted the mission of one of its two annuals, The National Pastime, from a literary and cultural review of baseball history to become the organization’s convention publication. As the convention rotated to a new location each year, the TNP focus became hyperlocal. Because I originated the idea for TNP in 1981, my first year as a SABR member, and edited it through the 1980s, a rosy glow attends my recall of those early years, especially its pictorial numbers.
In 2000 SABR commissioned an organization history that was published as a 112-page book, unsurprisingly to scant notice. From its ninth chapter:
John Thorn was named editor of The National Pastime at the Executive Board meeting of January 9, 1982. He had proposed the concept of this new Society publication to the Executive Board the previous year. In addition to being its editor, Thorn became designer, production staff, publicity staff, and advertising staff.
The premiere edition produced an all-star cast with articles authored by Bob Carroll, Art Ahrens, John Holway, Jim Bankes, David Sanders, Larry Ritter, Bob Broeg, G. H. Fleming, Don Nelson, David Voigt, Mark Rucker, Lew Lipset, Frank Williams, Fred Stein, Stuart Leeds, Harold Seymour, Bob Bluthardt, Pete Palmer, Al Kermisch, Ted DiTullio, and Gerald Tomlinson…. The cost was $5 to non-members. It was mailed in late October and immediately met with rave reviews.
When this debut number was reissued in 2014, I was asked to write an introduction. I recalled:
Our member rolls rose from 1250 in July 1981, when I had joined, to 2800 at the end of 1982. In the June/July 1983 issue of American Heritage, which had been my model for The National Pastime, the editor described TNP as “a handsomely produced publication.” By the time that issue of AH hit the stands, SABR membership had climbed to nearly 4000. “But enough button-popping about the look of the thing,” I wrote in 2014. “It is the quality of the writing that will impress most today, as it did then.”
Yes … but it was a handsome thing, which I still take great pride in designing, setting headlines with Letraset transfer type, and providing pasteups to our printer, Dean Coughenour’s Ag Press in Kansas. A visual highlight, occupying ten pages in the middle of the journal, was “The Early Years: A Gallery,” by Mark Rucker and Lew Lipset. Over the next year and more, Mark and I, with a new model in mind, would travel to archives with significant holdings in early baseball, and to the the homes of advanced collectors willing to have their prizes photographed. We also co-founded, in this period, SABR’s 19th Century Baseball Research Committee, still going strong almost 40 years later.
The result, in 1984, was a special pictorial issue of TNP dedicated to baseball before 1901. Mark designed the 78-page publication and I provided the text. On the first page I wrote:
This is not a magazine. It is a peep-hole to the past, a magic lantern show of baseball the way it was. How the game was born, how it grew, who did what and when and where — these things have been told often enough. But what was it like to be there, to pick a grounder off that rutted sod, to wave in vain at a Rusie thunderball, to scheme with Cartwright at the Elysian Fields? Words fail; we want to see.
This edition of The National Pastime is, like its predecessors, “A Review of Baseball History,” but with several obvious differences: The period under review is confined to the nineteenth century; there are no essays, no features, no statistics; and, most important, pictures do not serve to illustrate text — rather, text exists only to illustrate pictures. The editors have attempted to create not a pictorial history of baseball’s early years but an imaginary museum or gallery through which we may perceive history in the round. If this experiment meets with favor, TNP will extend the project next year to the dead-ball era of 1901–19, with an eye toward creating, eventually, an iconography of baseball.
“Iconography of baseball”: that phrase brings me up short, as it remains an unfulfilled challenge, in book form or on the web. For the years of the 19th century, I have gone some distance here, in 21 parts: https://bit.ly/39xYFLH. I continued, in my 1984 preface:
Some 275 pictures are packed into these pages; the editors, scouring over institutional and private collections over the past two years, came upon many times that number and to cut the roster had to harden their hearts. Much detective work, involving not only the history of baseball but also that of photography, went into identifying and dating the images we found. Because picture research in this period is more difficult than in the twentieth century, success is more rewarding.
The dazzling painting by Dick Perez was created for this issue of TNP as a wraparound cover and is entitled “The National Pastime: Opening Day — The Polo Grounds, April 29, 1886.” Dick issued it separately as a handsome limited edition lithograph; my copy (№1 of 200) still hangs on the wall all these years later.
It stops time at a precise moment in history, a moment captured on glass in the “detective camera” held by spectator Richard Hoe Lawrence. It is the bottom of the fourth inning of a game between Boston and New York: Hoss Radbourn is on the mound, making his debut as a Red Stocking; Mickey Welch is at bat; John M. Ward is on deck — play ball!
SABR has produced a PDF of the 1986 pictorial issue (its cover depicted above; in full here: https://bit.ly/3ozUbZm) but not yet of the original model from 1984, nor its 1989 pictorial TNP for The Big Bang Era, 1920–45, which Mark produced on his own.
SABR’s Jacob Pomrenke created a rough PDF of the 19th Century Pictorial, which he kindly shared with me. Its reproduction quality is not up to SABR’s standard, but until a high-quality version is offered, I think no one will mind my sharing the rough version with you now: https://bit.ly/3rcjIJJ.
The National Pastime, Pictorial Issue was originally published in Our Game on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.