mass media, 1882 style
Cincinnati, June 17, 1882. The Philadelphia Athletics are in town and a game is scheduled. It has been raining all night and into the morning, finally stopping at 10 o’clock. Even once the rain...
View ArticleBallplayers go drinking!
“It is reported that, at the next meeting of the League, the Worcester management will report an “outbreak” in which Goldsmith and Williamson of the Chicagos participated last Wednesday night. It...
View ArticleThe Reserve Clause and the Failure of the Free Market
‘”The salaries base ball players want nowadays,” said a prominent manager the other day, “are simply preposterous. It’s an outrage, the prices we have to pay for talent.” This is all very well from...
View ArticleThe Good Old Days
‘Hardy’ Henderson, the well-known young pitcher of the Philadelphia club, who was the first man signed for the team of next season, for the ‘Phillies,’ is now languishing in jail, awaiting trial on a...
View ArticleMonte Ward gets cute
[New York vs. Detroit 6/27/1883] [runner on first, John Montgomery Ward at bat] “[Ward] hit a hard grounder right into short-stop’s hands, which he saw as soon as he hit it would result in a double...
View ArticleMy questions about driverless cars
We have the past few years seen a steady stream of articles about the inevitable arrival of driverless cars. I am skeptical, but willing to be persuaded. I have questions about how this would work. The...
View ArticleThe Good Old Days
Holder, who was indulging in the pleasure of the weed, while at the bat, struck out. Source: New York Sunday Mercury August 5, 1860
View ArticleThe Sabermetrics Revolution
Will Leitch at New York magazine has a piece on the Cardinals’ hacking scandal that includes some very strange, to my thinking, notions about how the sabermetrics revolution affects, or should affect,...
View ArticleAn Obsolete Trick Play
Modern baseball was still new in Philadelphia in 1862, when nine players traveled to the metropolis to pick up some pointers. The city slickers in Newark were only too happy to oblige: “In the third...
View ArticleUmpiring in the Good Old Days
Last Sunday Umpire Smith was attacked by a mob, after the Cincinnati-St. Louis game, and the Globe-Democrat describes the scene as follows: “Had the umpire been a pick-pocket, who had just retired from...
View ArticleAnother Baseball Riot
I’ve got you guys’ number. It is riots that get the juices flowing. So here is another one, from 1874 in Boston. The remarkable part is that Boston won the game, and the locals still rioted:...
View ArticleThe Good Old Days
Cornelius O’Leary, his wife and three children, are dying, in Cincinnati, from the effects of lead poison by eating canned mackerel. Source: Boston Herald September 13, 1881 I’m sure the cannery went...
View ArticleThe Good Old Days
An unusual episode happened in a Providence-Buffalo game. Dorgan struck a foul ball, which bounded back and hit him. Some of the keen-eyed spectators concluded the ball was hit fairly, and volunteered...
View ArticleNow There’s Something You Don’t See Every Day
A truism of baseball is that whenever you watch a game, you might see something you have never seen before and will never see again. Of course this is true in a trivial sense of any game, but it has a...
View ArticleCould it be that he is not a gentleman?
From a report of an exhibition game between the Cleveland and the Cincinnati clubs played April 15, 1882, commenting on Cleveland pitcher George Washington Bradley: Did you ever see a great, overgrown,...
View ArticlePEDs, 1882 style
I’ll be spending next week at the beach, not thinking about you. Nothing personal. In the meantime, I’m leaving you with this utterly shameless advertisement for a Performance Enhancing Drug. The...
View ArticleWhich Rules are Real Rules?
The Deflategate Report is out, and the NFL has suspended Tom Brady for four games and fined the Patriots a million dollars and (far more importantly) two draft picks. Those corners of the media...
View ArticleAn Archival Dilemma
From the “How I Spent Saturday Morning” department, I went to the Maryland State Archives to photograph a court case file from the 1870s, because that’s how I roll. I had begun photographing it about a...
View ArticleHow did the players get where they did?
Next in my “I take requests” series, Mike Schilling asks how we ended up with the current alignment of positions? The answer is in two parts. The first is how we ended up with nine players, with more...
View ArticleHow did the players got where they did?
In Part I, I discussed how the baseball team ended up with nine players, approximately positioned where they are today. Here I will burrow down on their specific placement. Starting with the easy part,...
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