Category Archives: Baseball

2019, put it in the books

31 Thursday Oct 2019

Posted by in Baseball, Washington, D.C.

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Nationals Ballpark, June 2019

This was the view from our seats at Nationals Ballpark this past June when we saw the Nats take on the Braves in a game that ended on a sliding catch by the Nats center fielder in the ninth that saved the game. Last night the Nationals defeated the Astros in seven to give a Washington D.C. team its first World Series since the 1924 Senators. Of course the Senators were not the only game in town back in the day; the Homestead Grays played there as well–and would have given the Senators a run for their money.

I have always been entranced by baseball in the nation’s capital, an interest fueled by the fact that my mother was born there. I reached out to numerous family members these past few weeks to ask if anyone knew if our grandparents (or parents, depending on the generation) attended Senators games while living in the District during the Depression and Second World War. No one knew for sure, but alas the consensus seemed to be no. In the 1980s my grandfather also had a Redskins Starter jacket. I never knew if his interest in the Redskins came from his time in D.C., or grew from the fact that that football team played in Boston for a time in the 1930s. He and his growing family would have been living in Anacostia when the team moved from New England to Washington in 1937. My grandparents moved back to Boston in 1945 when the war ended, with three daughters all under the age of ten in tow. The family turned, or returned, its rooting interests to the Red Sox, which is as it remains today.

It was a great season and post-season and it is so good to see championship baseball return to Washington.

District of Columbia Stadium, July 1962

12 Friday Jul 2019

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JFK and Stan Musial meet before the start of the All-Star Game at District of Columbia Stadium, July 10, 1962.

I’m still reading the coverage about the late Jim Bouton. He led an extraordinary life. Though there was one game played yesterday, Major League Baseball fully starts its second half today with a complete schedule.

When we went to the Braves-Nationals game a few weeks back we took in some of the photographs and memorabilia on display showcasing the long history of baseball in the nation’s capital. It goes back well over a century. I don’t recall the above image being there but I stumbled across it yesterday and found it intriguing. It is John F. Kennedy and Stan Musial at the 1962 All-Star Game in the then sparkling new District of Columbia Stadium, renamed RFK Stadium after the assassination of Bobby Kennedy six years later.

From 1959-62 Major League Baseball played two All-Star Games each season. The proceeds went to the players’ pension fund. This was the first one, played on July 10, 1962. Musial had campaigned for Kennedy in the 1960 election, unlike the Red Sox’s Ted Williams, who was a Nixon man. LBJ is there in the right hand corner. From 1964-67, after the Kennedy assassination, Musial was chairman of the President’s Council on Physical Fitness and Sports. I remember the Council vividly, and earning a patch in elementary school for doing five chin ups or what have you.

Kennedy was to throw out the first pitch. The AT BAT 24 on the scoreboard was the Pirates’s Dick Groat. Musial was forty-one years old when this photograph was taken and playing in his twenty-second All-Star Game. He came in as a pinch hitter in the sixth inning and broke a scoreless tie to give the National League a lead it would not relinquish. The Senior Circuit won the game 3-1.

Enjoy the second half.

(image/JFK Presidential Library and Museum)

 

Jim Bouton, 1939-2019

11 Thursday Jul 2019

Posted by in Baseball, Those we remember

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Jim Bouton as a Yankee in 1963

I have been texting a few people over the past hour about the death of Jim Bouton. I had read several years ago that he was suffering from a degenerative brain disease but his death, as death always does, came as a shock. His Ball Four was so much more than a “sports book” or tell-all, but really one of the great memoirs of its time. Published in 1970, Ball Four was part of the zeitgeist of the moment. As I told a friend earlier, I always loved the way Bouton stood tall against the likes of Mickey Mantle and Bowie Kuhn. At the end of the day there was nothing the Baseball Establishment could say or do. They knew it was true. And the truth has a value all its own.

I could go on talking about Bouton but instead will give him the last word. As the pitcher said in Ball Four’s closing line:

“You spend a good piece of your life gripping a baseball and in the end it turns out that it was the other way around all the time.”

(image/Baseball Digest, August 1963)

Juneteenth 2019

19 Wednesday Jun 2019

Posted by in Abraham Lincoln, Baseball, Federal Hall National Memorial, Memory

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Citizens of Austin, TX observe Juneteenth, June 19, 1900. One would imagine these individuals remembered General Granger’s 1865 proclamation.

I was off today and spent a big chunk of the hours preparing for an event that will probably come to pass next month. If/when it does, I will write about it in this space. One of the best things about being off on a Wednesday is that this middle day of the work week is getaway day in Major League Baseball. What that means is that teams often play day games on this third day (Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday) of a series before quickly “getting away” to the next town for a weekend series. While working today I had the Astros/Reds game on. During the broadcast they mentioned that today is Juneteenth. I lived in Texas for many years and know what a big holiday this is in the Lone Star and neighboring states. Unfortunately it remained an exclusively regional affair for much of the next century; there is no mention of Juneteenth in the New York Times until 1933, and after that not until 1981. Over the past several decades Juneteenth has become more significant nationally. Awareness was aided by the 1999 publication of Ralph Ellison’s posthumous novel Juneteenth. Ellison was born in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma in 1914.

Gordon Granger, circa 1861-65

Juneteenth began in 1865 and marked the moment when on June 19th of that year Brevet Major General sailed into Galveston Bay and read his General Order #3, which began with the announcement that “The people are informed that in accordance with a Proclamation from the Executive of the United States, all slaves are free.” One must remember that Lincoln’s January 1, 1863 Emancipation Proclamation only applied to slaves within jurisdictions under Federal (Union) control. General Granger spent much of the next six weeks traveling within Texas to spread the news.

Holidays have a funny way of disappearing and coming back. Here in New York we used to have Evacuation Day every November 25. Evacuation Day marked the moment in 1783 when the British, acknowledging defeat, packed up and sailed from New York Harbor back to England. Evacuation Day petered out eventually, presumably because it fell so close to Thanksgiving. It was for Evacuation Day 1883 that they dedicated the John Quincy Adams Ward statue of George Washington on the steps of Federal Hall, then still the New York Sub-Treasury. I would argue that Juneteenth should become a national holiday, or at least a national observance. It is already officially commemorated in forty-five states.

(top image/Austin History Center and the Portal to Texas History; bottom/LOC)

 

 

Opening Day 2019

28 Thursday Mar 2019

Posted by in Baseball, Robert Moses, Style

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Professional and college baseball players such as the 1919 University of Michigan baseball team were returning to the field in that first spring after the Great War’s end.

The days have been busy and full this week, which is a good thing. We took our students to the Brooklyn Heights Promenade yesterday afternoon to view and discuss the construction of Robert Moses’s Brooklyn-Queens Expressway. I concluded the presentation with a brief reading, just two paragraphs, from Truman Capote’s 1959 Holiday magazine article “A House in the Heights.” Capote lived in at least two rented homes in Brooklyn Heights during his time in New York City. I pointed out to students the one at 16 Pineapple.

I would be remiss if I were not to note that today is Opening Day of the Major League Baseball season. Today is the earliest Opening Day ever. It makes sense to push up the start of the season to accommodate the longer post-season; they just don’t want it falling into November. I came across this photograph of the 1919 University of Michigan baseball team and find it extraordinary on a number of level. First of all is the stunning clarity of this image, taken not on the field but within the control of a photographer’s studio. The menswear of both the players and coaches/managers is intriguing as well. One of baseball’s most special features is that you get dressed up to play it. Baseball uniforms are not so much gym clothes but style wear. There is a reason the Yankees wear pinstripes.

When this photo was taken ball players were returning from Europe and rejoining their college and pro teams. I’ll probably come back to it in October, but as it would turn out the 1919 Black Sox scandal, and subsequent trial, would add to the bitterness and cynicism of the post-Great War milieu in the early 1920s.

Enjoy the season.

(image/Rentschler’s Studio, Ann Arbor, Michigan; Bentley Historical Library)

Sunday morning coffee

02 Sunday Sep 2018

Posted by in Baseball, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Great War centennial

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I hope everyone’s Labor Day Weekend is going well. It has been good to have a three day weekend after the long, hard push of the first week of the academic year. I am off to Grant’s Tomb in a little bit and am running a tad late, but wanted to quickly share this photograph. This was Labor Day 1918 in Seattle. Here we see sailors marching around and behind a Red Cross float. The War Industries Board and other governmental and quasi-governmental organizations did much to quell civil unrest during the Great War but there were still a surprising number of strikes. Here is a list I found in a very cursory search, which I am sure it is hardly a complete tally. Franklin D. Roosevelt was Assistant Secretary of the Navy in the Wilson Administration and would consciously do all he could as president during World War 2 to ensure labor peace. Still, strikes did occur during the Second World War as well.

Labor Day 1918 fell on Monday September 2. It also marked the end of the Major League Baseball regular season. Teams did not play a regular 154-game schedule but were limited to about 130 games, depending on how many they had gotten in by Labor Day. There were a large number of double-headers that day to squeeze in as much as they could.

Enjoy your weekend, all.

(image/Museum of History & Industry, Seattle)

 

Grover Cleveland Alexander changes uniforms

16 Monday Apr 2018

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Grover Cleveland Alexander’s World War One draft registration card

A few weeks back on Opening Day I mentioned that baseball once began much later than it does today. The Cubs and Cardinals began their 1918 seasons playing each other on April 16. Those on the field in St.Louis that day included Grover Cleveland Alexander, starting for the Cubs, and Rogers Hornsby, playing shortstop for the Cardinals. Alexander was an established star by this point and was slated to earn $8000 for the season; Hornsby, an up-and-comer in his third season with the Cardinals, would earn precisely half that after losing a bitter contract dispute to the Cardinals’ Branch Rickey. Throughout late 1917 and early 1918 baseball players were getting their draft notices from their local boards. In January 1918 Hornsby had appealed for a deferment to board officials back home in Fort Worth, Texas. Hornsby argued that his baseball salary was his family’s sole source of income. He received a Class 3 deferment and was thus free to play ball.

Owners understood that there was a manpower shortage and agreed to a 21 (not 25) player roster for the 1918 season. They also held an abbreviated spring training. Though Grover Cleveland Alexander turned thirty-one in February 1918 he was still eligible for the draft. In December 1917 the Philadelphia Phillies traded Alexander and batterymate Bill Killefer to the Cubs. The trade was partly about money but another, more cynical, reason may have been because Phillies management realized that both players were likely to be drafted into the A.E.F. sometime in 1918. The trade was a huge deal and made headlines across the country.

Alexander held out for a signing bonus but finally reported to the Cubs in mid-March. Meanwhile his draft board went about its work. The head clerk in Howard Country, Nebraska announced on April 12 that as of yet Alexander had not been called. There was great confusion, with some newspapers saying Alexander had been drafted and others saying he had not. Less than forty-eight hours later things had become clearer. Grover Cleveland Alexander had indeed been drafted into the Army and was to report to Camp Funston by the end of the month. Alexander asked to be allowed to join the Navy but his draft board would not have it.

Cubs and Cardinals 1918 Opening Day box score, via Baseball Almanac. Grover Cleveland Alexander had been drafted just days before the game and would join the Army by the end of April.

The pitcher’s call-up finally came just as the Cubs were breaking training in mid-April. On April 16 Alexander and the Cubs were in St. Louis to begin their season against the Cardinals. That very day Killefer received notice from his own draft board in Michigan that he had been declared 1A: eligible for draft and service. The board had originally designated Killefer 4A but the government appealed that status and won. So there they were facing the Rogers Hornsby and the Cardinals at Robison Field. Alexander pitched well but not effectively enough to win. The Cardinals took the contest 4-2. He went 1-for 3 at the plate. Hornsby went 1-for-4 with a run scored and an RBI. Sure enough, Alexander would soon leave the Cubs to train at Camp Funston. He pitched two more games, winning both and ending his season, before it truly began, with three complete games and a 1.73 ERA.

Opening Day

29 Thursday Mar 2018

Posted by in Baseball, Woodrow Wilson, WW1

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Today is Opening Day of the baseball season. I think it might be an intriguing summer here in New York. The Mets and Yanks are looking pretty good. Time will tell.

John Kinley Tener, governor of Pennsylvania and president-elect of the National League, throws out the first pitch in Brooklyn, April 1914. Four years later he would discourage NL owners from starting afternoon games an hour later during the newly-inaugurated Daylight Savings Time.

Opening Day 1918 came of April 15, which was about normal for the era; in the years of the 154-game season and no divisional playoffs, baseball started much later than today. In the weeks leading up to that season’s first pitch, baseball had an interesting issue to think through: what to do about Daylight Savings Time. Congress passed and President Wilson signed the bill creating DST in mid-March 1918. Perhaps not surprisingly the innovative Germans were the first country to try Daylight Savings during the Great War, starting the practice in 1916. The Brits, French, Dutch, Italians, Scandinavians and others quickly followed suit. It was thus inevitable the Americans would institute it as well. Daylight Saving Time here in the United States began at 2:00 am Sunday March 31, 1918. It also happened to be Easter.

Baseball teams, especially in the National League, began discussing the merits of moving weekday games from 3:30 to 4:30 pm at the time of the passing of the legislation in mid-March. Executives believed that moving games back an hour would boost revenue at the turnstiles because it would be easier for people to come to the game from work. It was the extra hour of sunlight made the potential time shift possible. Remember, night games did not begin until the mid-1930s. Much of official Washington vehemently opposed the idea, noting that the Daylight Savings measure was intended not for entertainment purposes but to save resources such as gas and coal, and to boost productivity in the munitions factories.

For several weeks after the legislative passing of Daylight Saving Time, Charles Ebbets and other owners contemplated moving games back an hour to boost attendance. The Brooklyn Daily Eagle captured Ebbets’s decision a few weeks prior to Opening Day.

One man in agreement with this was National League president John Kinley Tener. The Irish-born Tener grew up in Pittsburgh and took to baseball as a young immigrant. He participated in Albert G. Spalding’s world baseball tour in the late 1880s. Tener played for Cap Anson’s Chicago Nationals (today’s Cubs) in 1888 and 1889 and then did a brief stint in the Players League in 1890. A Republican, Tener served in the U.S. Congress from 1909-11 and then became governor of Pennsylvania. It was while serving in Harrisburg that the National League owners voted him president in December 1913.  He took the job with the condition that he finish out his gubernatorial term. Tener took the National League reins in 1915.

As early as March 19, 1918, when Daylight Savings Time became law, some baseball executives began advocating for the 4:30 start. Officially the National League Office had no position and left the matter up to individual clubs. The New York Giants wanted to move to 4:30 to better accommodate subway commuters. Charlie Ebbets, owner of the Brooklyn Robins (later the Dodgers), too was keen on the shift. Ban Johnson, president of the American League, split the difference and advocated for a 4:00 start time for his clubs. Johnson’s National League counterpart, Tener, made clear his preference that teams stay with the 3:30 start time. Ebbets eventually bowed to the pressure and kept his team’s schedule as it was in past seasons.

Enjoy the season, everyone.

(top image/Library of Congress)

Sunday morning coffee

23 Sunday Jul 2017

Posted by in Base Hospital No. 9, Baseball, Governors Island, Memory

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Dr. Schrock went back to France in 1928 and returned to the United States aboard the Ile de France.

I listened to the Mets come-from-behind, walk-off-with-a-homer win last night. They were down 4-0 in the first inning and won 6-5. Baseball is so conducive to listening on the radio. The Mets’ announcers got into a long discussion about the 1973 Mets-Athletics World Series, in which the As defeated the Mets in seven games. They had a good talk about Ray Fosse, the As All-Star catcher from the 1970s who currently does As radio broadcasts. Among other points, they noted that Fosse, Johnny Bench, Bob Boone, Carlton Fisk, and Thurman Munson were all born within nine months of each other in 1947.

Robert D Schrock as a young undergrad at Wabash College, circa 1905. He won an award for oratory at Wabash and later graduated with honors from Cornell Medical School before working as a doctor in the A.E.F.

While listening I was also doing a bit more digging on Dr. Robert D, Schrock and his World War I experience. He did his basic training at Governors Island in the middle of a heat wave in July-August 1917. Dr. Schrock was one of more than two dozen physicians at New York Hospital who in 1916 volunteered to go to Europe. By this time they fully understood what they would be getting into; it was the year of Verdun and the Somme. And it was not just the doctors; a full contingent of nurses, administrators, and orderlies all agreed to put on a uniform and go. It would have been more, but someone had to stay back and run New York Hospital itself. That is why the board of directors devised a plan deciding who would stay and who would go. Remember, the United States was not in the war yet. Nor was it a given that America would join the fight at all. Had they gone right away it would have been all about saving and repairing the lives of the various nations in the war at the time. Dr. Schrock and the rest of Base Hospital No. 9 arrived in St. Nazaire in late August 1917 and after a bit more training went to various facilities to attended the maimed. Schrock himself spent nearly three weeks in the front lines at the Battle of Passchendaele (Third Ypres), which was already in full swing when the New York Hospital Contingent arrived in France and lasted in November. He and two other doctors were thrown into saving the British, Indians, Canadians, and ANZACS.

Schrock arrived in France as a first lieutenant and returned to the United States as a major aboard the Wilhelmina in April 1919. One gets the impression that his Great War experience was a big influence in his life. An Ancestry search reveals that he traveled at least twice to Europe in the ensuing decades. At least twice. I found conclusively that he returned to France in 1928, presumably for the tenth anniversary of the Great War. He came home from that trip aboard the Ile de France, one of the great and less heralded luxury liners. In summer 1937 he and wife Elizabeth traveled to Germany, returning on the New York in early August. One can imagine the sobering realization that a second world war was imminent hanging over that trip. It’s an incredible story. I know a few people who have been preserving and organizing their relatives’ Great War letters. If someone in your family fought in the war and you have their photographs and letters, I encourage you to document it in some way. The Great War centennial is an opportune time to do it. Each story is another tile in the mosaic.

(image/top, New York Public Library; bottom, The Wabash)