National@ Pastime
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================~~==- THE --============== National @ Pastime A REVIEW OF BASEBALL HISTORY Iftime is a river, justwhere are we now Fifty years from now some of our SABR members of to as we float with the current? Where day will write the history of 1991, as they look backfrom the TNPII have we been? Where may we begoing vantage point of 2041. How will we and our world look to on this journey? their grandchildren, who will read those histories? What I thought itwould be fun to take readings ofour position stories will they cover-RickeyHenderson and Nolan Ryan? by looking at where ourgame, and by extension, our coun Jose Canseco and Cecil Fielder?TheTwins and the Braves? try, and our world were one, two, three, and more Toronto's 4 million fans? Whatthings do we take for granted generations ago. that they will find quaint? Whatkind ofgame will the fans of Mark Twain once wrote that biography is a matter of that future world be seeing? What kind of world, beyond placing lamps atintervals along a person's life. He meantthat sports, will they live in? no biographercan completely illuminate the entire story. But It's to today's young people, the historians of tomorrow, ifwe use his metaphor and place lamps at 25-year intervals and to theirchildren and grandchildren thatwe dedicate this in the biography ofbaseball, we can perhaps more dramati issue-fromthe SABR members of1991 to the SABR mem cally see our progress, which we sometimes lose sight ofin bers of 2041-with prayers that you will read it in a world a day-by-day or year-by-year narrative history. We can see filled with excitement and peace, where all your battles will the game (and the world) as mom and dad saw it in 1961, as be for pennants. our grandparents saw it in 1941, our great grandparents in -JOHNB. HOLWAY 1916, and so on back to 1841. 1841 1941 The Year2AD. (After DoubledaY),MarkAlvarez 2 The Magnificent Yankee, Carl Lundquist 34 300 for Lefty, Paul Doherty 38 1866 Early's FirstWin, Al Kermisch 40 A Year to Remember-Especially in Brooklyn, TheTurning Point, W lloydJohnson 4 Lee MacPhail 41 Where Was the Jefferson Street Grounds?Joel Spivak 5 Why Did Mickey Miss the Ball?, Norman Macht 44 BossTweed and the Mutuals, David Q. Voigt 6 WhitWyatt-The Dodgers' 1941 Ace, Thomas Liley 46 The Red Stockings' Last Hurrah, L. Robert Tiemann 7 "Please Don't Let Them Knock Me Off This Roof', The Magnates Regain Control, Bob Gelzheiser 9 Bob Ruland 48 The Cubans' Last Stand,]erry Malloy 11 The Gutsy Gashouse Gang, Alden Mead 50 A Mammoth Homer, A Petied Game, L. 13 Robert Tiemann The Splendid Splinter's Splendid Finish, Harrington "Kit" Crissey 52 1916 Mexico's Year of]osh Gibson, Gerald F. Vaughn 55 Alexander the Great,]oe Dittmar 14 The Golden Age of Puerto Rican Ball, Luis Alvelo 57 Why Connie Mack's HairTumed White, Winter in Cuba,]orge Figueredo 59 George Kochanowicz 17 Ted's Titanic All-Star Homer, Glen Stout 61 A World Series for F1atbush, Richard Goldstein 19 Showdown in St. Louis, Bill Borst 63 The Prince of Darkness, Martin Donell Kohout 21 Before the Game Was Color Blind, Todd Bolton 65 A Letter from the Attic, Bob Carr 23 Stan the Boy, Ralph Horton 67 The Babe Saves Boston's Season, The Funeral of Lou Gehrig, GarrettJ Kelleher 68 Richard "Dixie" Tourangeau 25 The Midnight Sun, Oscar Eddleton 69 26 Straightfor McGraw, Tom Knight 28 The World's Oldest Batboy,]ohn B. Holway 30 1966 Quit While You're Ahead, Jack Kavanagh 32 Caramba! Here Come Los Hermanos Alous, Bob Ruck 70 A Year to ForgetforYankee Fans, Vic Debs 72 AstrotutiArrives, John Pastier 74 Sandy K is Pitching Today, Eddie Gold 76 Editor: John B. Holway Frank Robinson Inspires Oriole Magic, Roslyn A. Mazer 77 Sandy's Last Hurrah, Lyle Spatz 80 The Changing of the Guard, David W Smith 82 Marichal the Magnificent, THE NATIONAL PASTIME (ISSN 0734-6905, ISBN 0-910137-46-3), Number II. Published by The Society for American Baseball Research, Inc., Peter C. Bjarkman andJose Dejesus, Jr. 83 P.O. Box 93183, Cleveland, OH 44101. Postage paid at Birmingham, AL. Baseball Comes to the Land of Cotton, Dan Linder 85 Copyright 1992, The Society for American BasebaIl Research, Inc. All rights reserved. RtlJlfoduction in wliole orpartwithoutwrittenpermissionis prohibIted. Atlanta's 1966 Season, Ray Murphy 86 Printed by EBSCO Media, Birmingham, AL. Moe's Mischief, Gerald Tomlinson 87 A REVIEW OF BASEBALL HISTORY 1 Almost, almost The Year 2 AD. (After Doubleday) MARKALVAREZ OffiCiallY' baseball was two years old in 1841. Abner lofted the ball straight upward about six feet for the batsman Doubleday had invented the game in the summer of 1839 in to strike at on its fall. It sounds like a cross between slow a pasture in Cooperstown, NY, a site now enshrined as pitch softball and hitting fungoes. Doubleday Field. Graves said that Doubleday improved this primitive game This official version of the game's history was sufficient to in several ways. plant the Hall of Fame in upstate New York and the name First, he made it a team game, with definite sides. Doubleday in the minds of mostAmericans. Today, though, Second, he limited the number of players on eachside to it's a version to which few subscribe-although many pay it eleven (not nine), so as to avoid collisions and injuries. the respect due a top-notch legend. Third, he established that there would be four bases, not Abner Doubleday was assigned his status as father of the just two goals. Graves claimed that Doubleday then named game early in the twentieth century by the Mills Commis the game "Base Ball" after his new inventions. sion, which had been established by Albert Spalding to Even casual students of the game now know that young discover a purelyAmerican origin for baseball. That it came Doubleday couldn't have joined the other boys in the pasture up with a general of the Civil War, a hero of both Sumter and that day, because he was atWest Point But even ifhe'd been Gettysburg, was a plum that the publicity-savvy Spalding granted a pass for the specific purpose of developing a na couldn't resist plucking. tional pastime for his developing nation, the game he came The evidence for the Doubleday story was a letter sentto up with wasn't baseball. Itwas simply a version of the town the committee by one Abner Graves, a Colorado mining ball already being played everywhere in one form or another. engineer who'd been raised in Cooperstown, and who Actually such games had been played in America almost claimed to be presenton the day when the future general laid from the beginning of European settlement A second wave down the rules for the game thatwould become the national of Pilgrims-''lustyyonge men, and wilde enough"-gotinto pastime. hot water for playing ball in Plymouth on Christmas Day, The boys of Cooperstown were apparently playing a ver 1621. The game they played was stoolball, an old English sion ofTwo Old Cat, similar to the game familiar to many of pastime in which stools were used as rudimentary bases. us as work-up or scrub. Between twenty and:fifty ofthe schol In its simplest form, one player stood in front of a stool ars at the Otsego Academy and Green's Select School and used his hand to swat the ball, while the thrower tried to participated at one time in these matches. The batter hit the slip it by him and bounce it off the little seat. Players kept ball, ran to a goal:fifty feet away, and returned. Ifhe made it, score by counting the number of times the hitter made con he stayed at bat. Ifsomeone caught his fly, the fielder came tact with the ball, and they changed places when the thrower in to hitThe batter could also be put out by the old-fashioned hit his target. With more players and more furniture, players expedient of being "plunked," as Graves put it, or hit by a ran from stool to stool after a hit and could be put out if a thrown ball. The mostinteresting feature ofthe game Graves fielder drilled them with the ball before they reached their described is that the tosser stood close to the batter and goal. Any modem American seeing this form of the ancient 2 THE NATIONAL PASTIME ~ ---------------------------------- game in progress would recognize its resemblance, however distant, to baseball. And even ifhe didn't know that stools were once called crickets, any Englishman would notice that the upturned three-legged stool looks like the stumps that the batter guards in modern-day cricket. By setting up two stools this way, players would have created a primitive cricket pitch. It looks as ifwe've gotwhat anthropologists call a common ancestor here-the primitive precursor of two great national sports. The term "base ball" has been in use at least since the early eighteenth century, often used interchangeably with "round ball," "goal ball," "baste ball," "rounders," and "town ball." By the early nineteenth century, both cricket and town ball in its various forms were commonly played throughout the land. Cricket, with its highly developed rules, sophisti cated skills, and multiday matches, was popular with more leisured classes, while American farmers and townspeople hacked away at their own more primitive games, which al ways featured "plunking," "soaking," or "burning" as a way to put the batter or runner out.