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Category Archives: Baseball

Tim McCarver, 1941-2023

19 Sunday Feb 2023

Posted by Keith Muchowski in Baseball, Those we remember

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Tim McCarver in 1965 the year after the Cardinals defeated the Yankees in the World Series

I’ve been sending and receiving many texts and emails these past few days from friends discussing the death of baseball player and announcer Tim McCarver. One of the things that touched me the most was that he died in Memphis, where he had been born and raised. To the best of my knowledge he did not live there once his long career began. I assume he returned once he knew the end was near and to come full circle. He was of course a fine ballplayer–you don’t play 20+ seasons in the Majors and win two World Series if you’re not. His biggest contribution to the game though was in the booth. Indeed he is in the Hall of Fame as a broadcaster. The closest parallel to what he accomplished would be John Madden in football. Both simplified the action on the field for listeners without dumbing it down. Fans expect the local broadcasters to be homers on some level, which is natural given that the hometown listeners are by definition the primary audience. McCarver though was unafraid to challenge and call out what he regarded as lackadaisical play. The Mets famously let him go in 1999 after sixteen season due to complaints from players. Think about that.

Some friends of mine once had a brief conversation with him at a Barnes & Noble on the Upper East Side as the they all waited in line to speak to the clerk about finding what they were looking for on the shelves. They said he could not have been more delightful. McCarver wasn’t perfect, because no one is. The tension between him and boothmate Jack Buck was sometimes palpable. And as a friend and I were saying the other day, sometimes the quips and puns were a little forced and premeditated. I suppose there’s a thin line between preparation and spontaneity. Still, as I told my friend, the occasional linguistic overindulgences were a small price for listeners to pay for everything Tim McCarver provided us.

The 1927 Stockton Knights of Columbus

22 Saturday Oct 2022

Posted by Keith Muchowski in Baseball

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After the World Series of 1927 a barnstorming tour is organized with Lou Gehrig and Babe Ruth who appear in the promotional printed in New York City in October of 1927. (Photo by Transcendental Graphics/Getty Images)

I was having lunch with some folks last weekend when we got on the topic of the extended playoff system. I have found the twelve-team formula more interesting and exciting than I thought I would. Still, I understood others’ concerns that in a short series—3, 5, or even 7 games—baseball becomes a crapshoot. Unlike in basketball where the best teams wins almost all the time, baseball comes down to who is hot at the time. We have already seen more than one team with 100+ regular season wins get bounced out of the post-season. I’ve been enjoying the games, but we can’t really say that we’re watching the best teams at this point of the season. That said, it’s a tough game and you are only as good as you are playing in the moment. That’s why they play the games. Ninety-five years ago today the 1927 Murderers’ Row Yankees had clinched their World Series and its biggest stars were on a barnstorming tour of the Midwest. I love this image on so many levels.

Opening Day 2022

07 Thursday Apr 2022

Posted by Keith Muchowski in Baseball

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Menu from 1956 welcome home dinner / NYPL

I walked past what used to be the St. George Hotel yesterday during a walk in preparation for a coming class visit to the surrounding area. I refused to follow the lockout over this past off-season. However imperfect is MLB and however disappointing are the people who run organized baseball, it is always good when the game returns.

Baseball enters the Roaring Twenties

05 Thursday Aug 2021

Posted by Keith Muchowski in Baseball, Film, Sound, & Photography

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Forbes Field, circa 1910. Harold Arlin broadcast the first MLB radio broadcast here on August 5, 1921. / Library of Congress

About six weeks ago I was visiting a historic site with a friend when we had the opportunity to meet someone affiliated with the institution. We had no idea upon arriving that this would happen and were pleased as punch that it did. Back in the day our host had spent thirty years doing radio in the Midwest before changing careers. Hearing his mellifluous voice and gift of gab, I immediately understood why he would have been drawn to that calling. I have no doubt either that the was very good at it. The uses and misuses of communications technology have justifiably been in the news a lot lately. Today, August 5, 2021, however marks a technology anniversary of a happier note: it was one hundred years ago today that the first Major League Baseball game was broadcast on the radio. To say it was an experiment would be an understatement. Harold Arlin of Pittsburgh’s KDKA purchased a ticket like every other attendee that afternoon at Forbes Field, set himself up along the first base line, and called the play-by-play into what radio men referred to at the time as “the tomato can,” a reference to the unwieldy microphones in use at the time. The Pirates defeated the Phillies 8-5.

No one knew how the broadcast would would go. Westinghouse, which owned KDKA, certainly had nothing to lose in what was very much an experiment. It all makes sense though. If you manufacture and sell radios for a living you have to show people why they might want to buy a radio and what they might do with it. How many of us knew that we “needed” a smart phone or tablet until Steve Jobs and others convinced us fifteen or so years ago that we did? Westinghouse was naturally determined to see what radio might do. The previous fall KDKA had scored another first when on November 2, 1920 it transmitted the first commercial broadcast, of the presidential election that put Harding in the White House. Franklin Delano Roosevelt was the losing vice-residential candidate but certainly grasped where the future was heading. Then again Mussolini and Hitler soon understood radio’s possibilities as well.

Fred C. Reed of the Smithsonian holds the “tomato can” microphone used by Harold Arlin to broadcast the results of the November 2, 1920 election between Warren G. Harding and James M. Cox. Arlin used a similar device the following year when broadcasting the first-ever Major League Baseball radio transmission. Westinghouse/KDKA donated this microphone to the Smithsonian in 1938, when this image was taken. / Library of Congress

The retired radio man I was describing at the top of this post has been over 270 major and minor league ballparks across the decades and had the memorabilia scattered across his apartment to show for it. Our conversation could not help but go to baseball and we agreed that the game is best consumed via the wireless as opposed to the telly. For one thing the ball is in play so little in baseball, allowing for conversation in a way not possible over the airwaves in hockey, basketball, and other sports. The best radio men–Bob Uecker, thankfully still going strong at 87 comes to mind–weave a narrative as they bring you each pitch and at bat. They tell a story, which itself gets bigger as the games pass and the season moves along.

How did I learn that today was the one hundredth anniversary of Harold Arlin’s KDKA radio broadcast? I was listening to the Mets-Marlins game on the MLB App earlier this afternoon when the radio guys started talking about.

Hank Aaron, 1934-2021

22 Friday Jan 2021

Posted by Keith Muchowski in Baseball, Those we remember

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Jimmy Carter and Henry Aaron in the White House, 1978. Carter had been Georgia governor and present in Fulton County Stadium when Aaron hit number 715 four years previously.

People have been texting and emailing over the course of the day with the news and their thoughts on the passing today of Henry Louis “Hank” Aaron. I don’t know what I have to say about his career and life that others have not said already, so I won’t go in to them too deeply. Still I felt it necessary to take a few minutes and recognize the man and everything he represented, and I don’t mean merely on the playing field.

One of my most vivid memories as a baseball fan was watching him hit number 715 off Al Downing, the Dodger pitcher destined to become a trivia question. There is a great recording of Frank Sinatra doing a live show in New York City and mentioning to the audience from the stage that Aaron had broken Babe Ruth’s record. Sinatra even mention Downing by name. Like most people, I had no idea what the man was forced to endure. I remember being excited in the late 1990s when players like Mark McGwire, Sammy Sosa, and Barry Bonds were breaking home run records seemingly every year. In September 1998 a friend and I visited the Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown and there in the front entranceway was McGwire and Sosa’s memorabilia. Did we happily pose for pictures in front of it all? Of course we did.

My friend and I were hardly alone in our excitement. Most Americans got caught up in it. Looking back with twenty plus years of hindsight it all seems so tawdry, and I don’t just mean because many players of the era were/are alleged to have taken performance enhancing steroids. I know that previous eras had their own similar scandals which, as with steroids, were often hushed up by people in position to do something about it. In the 1950s-70s that usually meant the amphetamines, or “greenies” as players called them, that some used to get through the grind that is a major league season. All that said, there was something obscene about so many players hitting so many home runs day in and day out as they were in the late 90s and early 2000s.

Sadaharu Oh and Hank Aaron exhibition, Hinomisaki Park 2013

I love the photograph directly above of Aaron’s Braves uniform juxtaposed with that of Sadaharu Oh, the slugger who for the Yomiuri Giants in Nippon Professional Baseball hit more home runs than any other professional player. Football is America’s passion and soccer has always been the world’s leading sport. Basketball has come into it own over the past several decades on the international level–long gone are the days when the Americans could assume the Olympic gold medal. One however should never underestimate baseball’s cultural reach. Today one of baseball’s greatest and most dignified men has left us. It’s all very difficult to process.

(images: White House staff photographers, NARA; Motokoka, Wikimedia Commons)

Sunday morning coffee

06 Sunday Sep 2020

Posted by Keith Muchowski in Baseball

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Embed from Getty Images

 

I hope everyone’s Labor Day Weekend is going well. I’m using the time to relax and catch up on a few things. This past week my colleague and I introduced our class to the New York City of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Because ours is an interdisciplinary class we divide up the elements, with broad allowances for overlap. Generally he covers the architectural and urban planning aspects and I cover the social and historical, though again there is much overlap and interconnection. We are trying to emphasize that the evolution of New York City is not just a story of steel and concrete, but of people. Our students were shocked to discover that today’s Penn Station is not the same one that existed decades ago only to be torn down and dumped into the swamps of New Jersey as scrap. It is always exciting when students learn something new.

Yesterday I was on Getty Images looking for various visuals that I might show the class this coming week to bring the story home of the dailyness that was the old Pennsylvania Station before its demolition in the 1960s. Getty is gracious in allowing individuals to use its embed feature for non-commercial purposes. The station was part of people’s lives, which many passed through in the course of their work and play. One picture I may use is the one we see here of Babe Ruth in Pennsylvania Station on February 24, 1928, presumably leaving for spring training. This of course would have been the year after the Murderers Row 1927 team. Still, the ’28 Yanks weren’t too shabby, winning 101 games and sweeping the Cardinals in the World Series.

Enjoy the rest of your Labor Day Weekend.

Tom Seaver, 1944-2020

03 Thursday Sep 2020

Posted by Keith Muchowski in Baseball, Those we remember

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Tom Seaver throws first pitch at City Field inaugural, 11 April 2009

I was listening to the Brewers game last night when Bob Uecker declared over the radio that pitcher Tom Seaver had died. For the remainder of the game Uecker and his boothmate, in between balls and strikes, had a discussion about Tom Terrific’s influence on the 1969 Mets, and on baseball over the course of the past 50+ years more generally. I had noted with great sadness a little over a year and a half ago when Seaver’s family announced that he had dementia and was thus retiring from public life. It was a combination of the dementia, Lyme disease, and COVID-19 from which he succumbed. I remember like yesterday when he threw his no-hitter for the Reds again the Cardinals in June 1978. It is no wonder Sparky Anderson, the Reds skipper that season, once famously declared that, “My idea of managing is giving the ball to Tom Seaver and then sitting down and watching him work.”

A friend of mine from where we grew up in Florida remembers meeting Seaver at what we used to call Little Yankee Stadium in Fort Lauderdale. (The stadium was so-named because the Yankees used to hold their Spring Training there.) Back in the day Spring Training was more laid back and one could get closer, even walk straight up to, a player waiting to get on the bus or what you. Seaver was leaning against a poll working on a crossword puzzle when my friend, probably all of twenty at the time, approached and got a gracious five minute audience with the pitcher. Seaver’s final season was 1986 when he played in Boston. His record that year wasn’t very good but I always felt he was a stabilizing force in what was a tumultuous season for the Red Sox as they closed in on the pennant. Unfortunately he got injured and so did not play in the post-season against the Mets, which would have been something.

More than just a pitcher and ballplayer, Seaver was a cultural force. There was just something about him that appealed to people’s better and wiser sensibilities. People connected with and through him. I was emailing with someone about all this today, who said that Seaver, and the Mets more generally, were the sole cultural connections he had with his father-in-law, an immigrant who’d fled persecution in Europe and settled in New York in the mid-twentieth century.

(image/Sgt Randall A Clinton USMC, via Wikimedia Commons)

Remembering the Negro Leagues, part two

16 Sunday Aug 2020

Posted by Keith Muchowski in Baseball

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Today is the second and concluding section of our look at the history and legacy of the Negro Leagues, which began play one hundred years ago in 1920. In August 1945, just weeks after the dropping of the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki ended the Second World War, former Negro Leaguer and veteran Jackie Robinson signed a contract with the Brooklyn Dodgers that ultimately signaled the beginning of the end of Negro League baseball.

If you have not already, read part one here.

Baseball declined in talent during the Second World War when many players traded their baseball uniform for a military one and substandard replacements took their place. Returning players, black and white, resumed play in the summer of 1945 and baseball quickly regained its popularity. Major League Baseball remained strictly segregated however, despite the deep pool of African-American talent. White and black players were nonetheless familiar with each other because they played frequently in exhibition games. These might be games between two teams from different leagues or contests between collections of black and white all-stars. There is consensus among baseball historians that the best Negro players would have been stars in Major League Baseball. Calls to integrate baseball in the years just prior to the Second World War stalled once America joined the conflict. Demands for integration became more intense after the war as African-Americans demanded equal access not just within baseball but across society.

Larry Doby 1951 Bowman Gum card

African-American Jackie Robinson had been a standout in baseball, football, basketball and track at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) before serving in the Army as a second lieutenant during the Second World War. He played briefly for the Kansas City Monarchs after his return before signing a contract with Branch Rickey of the Brooklyn Dodgers on August 28, 1945. Robinson played for the minor league Montreal Royals in 1946 and led the team to the International League title. He made his Major League debut at Ebbets Field the following season on April 15, 1947 against the Boston Braves. Larry Doby became the first African-American to integrate the American League, when he appeared for the Cleveland Indians on July 5, 1947. Robinson, Doby, and the two other African-American players who broke baseball’s color barrier that season endured cheap shots from opposing players, taunts from fans, and even death threats over the course of the season. Baseball teams continued integrating and African-Americans, many of them former Negro League players, quickly became standouts. An African-American won the National League Most Valuable Players award eight out of ten times in the 1950s.

By the 1960s both the American and National Leagues were fully integrated and African-Americans were making major contributions to the game. Retired Boston Red Sox outfielder Theodore “Ted “ Williams used his July 1966 National Baseball Hall of Fame induction speech to express his hope that someday ballplayers like Satchel Paige and Josh Gibson might be added to the Hall “as a symbol of the great Negro players that are not here only because they were not given the chance.” Major League Baseball Commissioner Bowie Kuhn formed a Negro League Committee to determine what players to induct. One month later Satchel Paige became the first Negro League player inducted into the Hall. The committee continued its work until 1977 and inducted several additional players. In 2006 the Hall of Fame created a committee of historians to examine the cases of other Negro players, owners, and executives who might also merit inclusion.

Curt Flood

African-Americans contributed off the field as well. Star player Curt Flood sued Major League Baseball for refusing a trade from the St. Louis Cardinals to the Philadelphia Phillies in 1969. The case eventually went all the way to the Supreme Court in 1972, and while Mr. Flood lost the decision his trial helped end the “reserve clause” system that kept players contractually tied to one team at the owners’ discretion. The Flood Decision helped bring about arbitration and free agency. African-American participation in professional baseball waned in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries as other sports grew in popularity. While blacks comprised over 25% of major league players in 1975, the percentage is today less than 15%. Conversely, players from Latin America, the Caribbean, and Asia comprise a larger percentage of players than previously. Major League Baseball has spurred interest in the game through such programs as the Reviving Baseball in Inner Cities (RBI) program, which began in 1989.

Paseo YMCA, Kansas City Monarchs mural

The Negro Leagues Baseball Museum (NLBM), located in Kansas City, Missouri, was founded in 1990 and opened to the public in a modest space one year later. Today the NLBM shares a state-of-the-art facility with the American Jazz Museum in Kansas City’s historic district. The Paseo YMCA, two blocks from the Negro Leagues and Jazz Museums, was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1991. It was at The Paseo, in the heart of Kansas City’s bustling African-American community, that Rube Foster and others founded the Negro National League in 1920. The Paseo is now the home of the Buck O’Neil Education and Research Center (BOERC). Mr. O’Neil (1911-2006) was a star player for the Kansas City Monarchs and later a coach and manager in the Negro and Major Leagues. He was integral to the founding and growth of the NLBM.

(images from top: Love of the Game Auctions, Bowman Gum, St. Louis Cardinals/MLB, Mwkruse via Wikimedia Commons)

 

 

 

Remembering the Negro Leagues, part one

15 Saturday Aug 2020

Posted by Keith Muchowski in Baseball

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Tomorrow, Sunday August 16, Major League Baseball is observing the 100th anniversary of the Negro Leagues. Part of that observation will include the wearing of throwback uniforms, which I love. In July 2018 I wrote an encyclopedia article on Negro baseball for a project that eventually got cancelled. For two years I have been waiting to find a spot for it somewhere, and that tine has come. Today is part one, which brings the story up to 1945; tomorrow will cover the succeeding seventy-five years. I hope you enjoy reading the piece as much as I enjoyed researching and writing it.

Bud Fowler (top middle) with Keokuk, Iowa professional baseball team, 1885

Baseball originated in America in the decades immediately prior to the Civil War. No one person invented the game. Instead players created different rules independently of each other in different locales. Baseball also evolved from such European games as cricket and rounders. African-Americans too enjoyed playing baseball and were active in the game’s growth. Freepersons and slaves fielded teams during the years of the game’s development. Union and Confederate alike played the game in their respective camps during the Civil War, further spreading and standardizing the game. Black and white squads barnstormed after the war, playing games as they could. In 1869 the first white professional team, the Cincinnati Red Stockings, was founded. The Cuban Giants, formed in 1885, were the first African-American professional team. As the game grew more institutionalized during the Gilded Age black and white players played in a number of predominantly segregated baseball leagues. Some of these now long gone affiliations of clubs are considered major leagues up to the present time.

In 1876 the National League came into being. The American League was founded in 1901. Determining the role of African-Americans in the early years of organized baseball can be difficult given the scarce data and varying criteria. John W. “Bud” Fowler is believed to be the first African-American to break professional baseball’s color barrier, playing for a number of minor league clubs from 1878 to at least 1895. Scholars usually credit Moses Fleetwood Walker, who played the 1884 season for a Toledo team in the American Association, with being the first African-American to play for a major league team.

Rube Foster (right) then of the Chicago American Giants playing against a white Joliet, Illinois team in 1916

Though there were six dozen African-Americans playing minor league or independent ball in the late nineteenth century, major league baseball, like the nation itself, was entirely segregated by this time due to the so-called “gentlemen’s agreement” among owners to exclude blacks. African-American teams and leagues nonetheless remained popular and were common in the early 1900s. African-American baseball began a new era when Andrew “Rube” Foster founded the National Negro League on February 13, 1920. Properly understood, Foster’s creation was the origin of what is today called the Negro Leagues. The Negro National League was initially quite successful with teams primarily in the Midwest fielding such stars as Leroy Robert “Satchel” Paige, third baseman William Julius “Judy” Johnson, slick fielding shortstop John Henry “Pop” Lloyd, and center fielders James Thomas “Cool Papa” Bell and Oscar McKinley Charleston. However, organized black baseball faced increasing hardship as African-American communities struggled financially in the late 1920s. The NNL further floundered with Foster’s declining health and eventual death in 1930. The Great Depression hit the Negro National League hard and the organization disbanded in 1931.

A newly reconstituted Negro National League began in 1933 and a competing Negro American League started play in 1937. The new Negro National League now played in the Northeast; the Negro American League was concentrated in the Midwest and South. The champions of these leagues played a Negro World Series from 1942-48. Previous African-American leagues in the 1920s had played what organizers called the Colored Championship of the World. The 1930s and 1940s are considered the golden age for Negro League baseball. Stars of this era included not only many holdovers from the previous era but new standouts such as slugger Walter “Buck” Leonard, Monford “Monty” Irvin, Roy Campanella, and Jack Roosevelt “Jackie” Robinson. The annual East-West All-Star game was an especially popular feature in Negro League baseball. Prominent Negro teams spanning various eras and leagues included the Birmingham Black Barons, Chicago American Giants, Hilldale (PA) Daisies, Homestead (PA) Grays, Indianapolis ABCs, Kansas City Monarchs, Newark Eagles, and Pittsburgh Crawfords.

Meanwhile baseball was growing beyond the borders of the United States as American influence expanded. Cubans had played baseball to a limited degree in the nineteenth century. Esteban Enrique  Bellán of Havana became the first Latino to play major league baseball in the United States when he played the 1871-1873 seasons for the Troy (NY) Haymakers and New York Mutuals of the National Association. Cubans in turn introduced the game in the Spanish-speaking country of the Dominican Republic. The game quickly gained popularity in other Latin American countries, across parts of the Caribbean, and in Mexico as well. Baseball in Cuba was waning by the time of the Spanish-American War. The American presence after the conflict rejuvenated interest in the game, leading to a baseball renaissance on the island that continues up to the present time.

Babe Ruth in Vancouver aboard the Empress of Japan on October 20, 1934 as part of all-star contingent heading to Asia

Baseball also spread across the Pacific. The Japanese began playing the game as early as the 1870s. American teams, usually comprised of all-stars, began visiting in the years shortly after the Russo-Japanese War. The most famous of these goodwill tours was a 22-game visit to the Far East featuring such American players as Jimmie Foxx, Vernon Louis “Lefty” Gomez, Lou Gehrig, and George Herman “Babe” Ruth playing against Japanese and other Asian all-stars in 1934. Many of these countries in the Caribbean, Latin America and the Far East developed their own leagues and built ballparks of professional standards. There were always at least a few Hispanic baseball players in the various major leagues from Bellán’s service in Troy in 1871 up through the full integration of colored players into Major League Baseball after the Second World War.

Click here for part two.

(image: top, National Baseball Hall of Fame, National Baseball Library; middle, RMY Auctions; bottom, Stuart Thomson photographer)

 

Opening Day 2020 redux

23 Thursday Jul 2020

Posted by Keith Muchowski in Baseball

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Baseball field before Healy Hall, Georgetown University 1900

Opening Day of the truncated sixty game MLB schedule starts tonight when the Yankees face off against the Nationals in Washington D.C. I’m turning the game on the radio in a few minutes. I posted on what was supposed to have been Opening Day in late March, almost four months ago now. I was talking to someone the other day about potential anomalies that might occur due to the truncated schedule and other issues. We speculated that someone, or someones, may even hit .400. It’s not unusual for someone to hit above that mark for 2+ months at the start of a normal season before the longevity of a full complement of games brings them back to the statistical norm. While any batters hitting .400 for the first time since Ted Williams nearly eighty years ago would not really constitute a record of any sort, would there be some type of asterisk in the recognition of the achievement? Who knows? The wait-and-see uncertainty is strangely apropos and symbolic of 2020 itself.

(image/Georgetown University Library)

 

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