Level Playing Fields
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Level Playing Fields LEVEL PLAYING FIELDS HOW THE GROUNDSKEEPING Murphy Brothers SHAPED BASEBALL PETER MORRIS UNIVERSITY OF NEBRASKA PRESS LINCOLN & LONDON © 2007 by the Board of Regents of the University of Nebraska ¶ All rights reserved ¶ Manufactured in the United States of America ¶ ¶ Library of Congress Cata- loging-in-Publication Data ¶ Li- brary of Congress Cataloging-in- Publication Data ¶ Morris, Peter, 1962– ¶ Level playing fields: how the groundskeeping Murphy brothers shaped baseball / Peter Morris. ¶ p. cm. ¶ Includes bibliographical references and index. ¶ isbn-13: 978-0-8032-1110-0 (cloth: alk. pa- per) ¶ isbn-10: 0-8032-1110-4 (cloth: alk. paper) ¶ 1. Baseball fields— History. 2. Baseball—History. 3. Baseball fields—United States— Maintenance and repair. 4. Baseball fields—Design and construction. I. Title. ¶ gv879.5.m67 2007 796.357Ј06Ј873—dc22 2006025561 Set in Minion and Tanglewood Tales by Bob Reitz. Designed by R. W. Boeche. To my sisters Corinne and Joy and my brother Douglas Contents List of Illustrations viii Acknowledgments ix Introduction The Dirt beneath the Fingernails xi 1. Invisible Men 1 2. The Pursuit of Pleasures under Diffi culties 15 3. Inside Baseball 33 4. Who’ll Stop the Rain? 48 5. A Diamond Situated in a River Bottom 60 6. Tom Murphy’s Crime 64 7. Return to Exposition Park 71 8. No Suitable Ground on the Island 77 9. John Murphy of the Polo Grounds 89 10. Marlin Springs 101 11. The Later Years 107 12. The Murphys’ Legacy 110 Epilogue 123 Afterword: Cold Cases 141 Notes 153 Selected Bibliography 171 Index 179 Illustrations following page 88 1. Tom Murphy 2. Garry Herrmann and Barney Dreyfuss 3. John McGraw and Wilbert Robinson 4. Hughey Jennings 5. The fi re-leveled Polo Grounds 6. Polo Grounds, 1913 7. Polo Grounds, 1912 8. Crowd at the Polo Grounds 9. Frank Navin, Ben Minor, Frank Farrell, Charles Comiskey, Ban Johnson, and Joseph Lannin 10. Connie Mack 11. Harry Stevens and Garry Herrmann 12. Jim Thorpe and (perhaps) John Murphy 13. Fenway Park 14. Ebbets Field parking 15. American League Highlands fi eld, 1908 16. John T. Brush 17. Patrick Murphy’s gravestone Acknowledgments I have incurred many debts while writing this book, and it is my plea- sure to be able to express my gratitude here. Dr. Gail Rowe, David MacGregor, and Ron Haas generously read the entire manuscript, and it benefi ted greatly from their insightful comments. Beverly Dunn was also kind enough to read a draft and, as a descendant of the sister of one of the Murphy brothers, was able to acquaint me with new details about the family. Richard Malatzky, Reed Howard, Bill Carle, Joe Simenic, Pete Cava, Jay Sanford, and Bob Tholkes were the most cheerful of companions on the pursuit that started this book, as they have been on many oth- ers. David Ball has deepened by understanding of numerous aspects of baseball history, as have many members of the Society for Ameri- can Baseball Research (sabr). The members whose insights are di- rectly refl ected in this work include Kevin Saldana, Norman Macht, Peter Mancuso, Stew Thornley, Dean Thilgen, Charles Bevis, Jane Finnan Dorward, Tom Shieber, Steve Steinberg, John Thorn, Stefan Fatsis, Bruce Allardice, Bob McConnell, David Nemec, Jim Lannen, R. J. Lesch, and Priscilla Astifan. Countless other sabr members have shared their knowledge with me over the years, and the impossibility of listing all of them does not make me any less grateful. I’m also very grateful to Rob Taylor at the University of Nebraska Press for believing in a book about so arcane a subject and skillfully guiding it through to completion. Additional thanks go to Paul S. x | acknowledgments Bodine for his expert copyediting and to all the staff of the University of Nebraska Press for their diligence in preparing, distributing, and marketing it. Many thanks as well to Pat Kelly and Tom Shieber of the Hall of Fame and to Steve Steinberg for their invaluable help in locating photos. Finally, I am very appreciative of all of the friends and family members who offered sympathetic ears, valuable counsel, and much needed encouragement. Any shortcomings that remain despite all this help are solely my responsibility. Introduction The Dirt beneath the Fingernails Baseball is sometimes said to be older than dirt. It is one of those metaphors that sounds silly on its face but that still resonates because it hints at a deeper truth. In this case, the deeper truth is that neither baseball nor dirt is quite complete without the other. Dirt is now a rare sight in urban areas, and unless embellished by a baseball game it looks a bit forlorn, as though it somehow senses that someone might decide that a parking lot would go nicely in its place. Baseball without dirt is just as unthinkable. Though adults tend to forget this, children never do—especially when they discover that baseball is an activity that allows them to get dirt on their clothes and actually earn applause from their parents. The action of baseball is shaped by its playing fi elds in ways that would be unthinkable in other major team sports. Football legislates that the “ground cannot cause a fumble,” while basketball and hockey are played indoors under as uniform conditions as possible. By con- trast, baseball is played on fi elds of varying sizes and dimensions and even on different playing surfaces. When those differences impinge upon the play, they are celebrated. Baseball lore abounds with tales of bad-hop singles and such topography-infl uenced events as home runs off the Pesky’s Pole in Fenway Park or pitcher Stu Miller being blown off the mound at San Francisco’s Candlestick Park. Efforts to minimize such eccentricities inspire no such reverence. “Cookie-cut- ter” is the most damning thing that can be said of a baseball stadium, xii | introduction and Dick Allen famously quipped, “If a cow can’t eat it, I ain’t playing on it.” This apparently odd state of affairs refl ects an important bond between the game of baseball and its playing fi elds. Although ballpark individuality has been reduced over the years, attempts to eliminate distinctive features entirely are liable to be met with a deep-seated hostility that is rooted in the game’s history. Early baseball was very much a celebration of man’s triumph over nature. The amount of work that had to be done to clear a wilderness was backbreaking. To do so only for the purpose of using that land to play a child’s game seemed ridiculous to many. That is why baseball— then as now—is generally appreciated most readily by those with a keen eye for symbolism. Those symbolic reminders of the game’s agrarian roots were key to understanding the message behind all of the ostensibly unproductive labor that went into creating a ball fi eld. It was a way of saying: It isn’t easy, but as a society we’re winning. We have attained the necessities for survival and have enough to spare that we can consecrate some of that carefully plowed dirt and make it into a ball fi eld. Then we can all play on that fi eld, an act symbol- izing what we have won: leisure time. If that sounds familiar, it may be because it was essentially the plot of W. P. Kinsella’s novel Shoeless Joe, which became the movie Field of Dreams. What made that work resonate so deeply was that its basic plot is also a very concise history of the early ball fi eld. In turn, the history of the ball fi eld is intimately connected with the history of the American people. Whether they sensed it or not, the men who carved out the fi rst ball fi elds were replicating one of the central themes of the history of the United States. At the close of the eighteenth century, European settlers were scattered up and down America’s east coast but had hardly at all ventured farther west. One important reason was fear of Indians and wild animals, and in some cases Spanish settlers, but an even more signifi cant reason was the country’s daunting geography. A 1776 mapmaker ended his map at the Mississippi River and wrote off much of central Pennsylvania as “Endless Mountains.”1 He could introduction | xiii hardly be faulted, as the obstacles to heading west were many and the rewards few. Many rivers had no bridges and had to be forded. Roads were primitive, if they existed at all. The western parts of Pennsylvania and New York were wilderness, while travel westward from the south- ern states was impeded by endless swamps.2 The situation changed dramatically in the early nineteenth century. Lewis and Clark helped to show the way, and their would-be imitators were spurred by a series of developments and discoveries—the Louisiana Purchase, the Mon- roe Doctrine, the Cumberland Gap, the building of the Erie Canal and other waterways, and the emergence of the steamboat. Thousands fol- lowed their lead and caught “western fever,” a phenomenon that fur- ther accelerated when gold was discovered in California. The struggle to forge the earliest ball fi elds was thus a metaphor for the pioneers who had trekked west in the fi rst half of the century. Yet paradoxically, as we shall see, the building and maintenance of baseball diamonds eventually came to symbolize a very different strain of the American experience: the establishment of permanent settlements. That paradox is rooted in a deeper paradox that is especially diffi - cult to appreciate in twenty-fi rst-century America.