York Giants Research Articles

Mysteries of the Mighty Casey

Baseball history is filled with Caseys, from well remembered-Casey Stengel and Hugh Casey-to obscure: Dennis Casey, a big league fly-chaser in 1884 and 1885, and Bill Casey, who pitched one inning in one game in 1887.But there is only one at Bat.Ernest Lawrence Thayer's poem is, quite simply, one of most enduring and oftrecited in American history. Baseball-wise, its final lines-But there is no joy in Mudville; Mighty Casey has struck out-rank right up alongside Buy me some peanuts and Crackerjack and Who's on first?Once upon a time, facts surrounding poem's creation were cloaked in controversy. One thing is certain, however: at serves to seamlessly blend baseball and American popular culture. Its longevity mirrors appeal of a sport that is as much about failure as hurlers tossing perfect games, batters hitting for cycle, and ninth-inning walk-off heroics. In baseball, of course, a batter may fail seven times out of 10 but still be a .300 hitter, and still make Hall of Fame. Similarly, Mighty Casey, slugging hero of at Bat, is all too human. He seems destined to bash a dinger for his Mudville nine. He always does, doesn't he? This is his calling. This is his fate. But excepting death and taxes, nothing in life is certain. And Mighty Casey, as we learn at poem's finale, does not smash a majestic homer. Instead, he ignominiously strikes out, which makes him all-too-human-and all-too-identifiable to masses. As eminent Yale University professor William Lyon Phelps once observed, psychology of [the poem] is perfect, which is why it rings bell in every mind. We laugh at it, but we know it is honestly no laughing matter.Not long after its publication in 1888, phrase at became part of lexicon. In a May 30, 1895, account of a game between New York and Philadelphia clubs at Polo Grounds, The New York Times reported that, in a clutch situation, Giants' Amos Rusie retired on strikes to disappointment of crowd. It was another case of 'mighty Casey at bat.' On April 24, 1908, paper referred to New York Giants' Mike Donlin as Casey-at-the-bat Donlin. On July 28, 1916, a ninth-inning bases-loaded blast by New York Yankees' Rube against Chicago White Sox was celebrated in Times headline Oldring Proves No Casey at The appellation even transcended baseball. A May 21, 1926, Times theater review of Sean O'Casey's Juno and Paycock was headlined O'Casey at Bat.Casey Stengel biographer Robert W. Creamer reported that, early in his major league career, when Stengel whiffed in clutch situations, fans would yell out, Hey, there's Casey at bat again! Atta boy, Casey! Apparently, future Bronx Bomber skipper was unfazed by such ribbing. His 1962 autobiography was titled at Bat: The Story of My Life in Baseball. Two years later, Stengel himself was credited as author of an introduction to one of myriad published editions of Thayer's poem.More than a century after its creation, title has not lost its shine. In 1980s, numerous newspaper articles spotlighting CIA director William Casey included at in their headlines. On April 24, 1998, Los Angeles Times charted heroics of Cincinnati Reds' Sean Casey in an article headlined Larkin Likes This Casey at On March 22, 2007, paper announced that Casey Kotchman had won Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim first base job with headline Casey's at Bat for Angels Again. Kenneth Turan, Times movie critic, began an April 6, 1996, review of Leonardo DiCaprio film Total Eclipse by quipping that film is the arthouse equivalent of 'Casey at Bat.' Considerable ability has gone into a potential home run scenario, but result is a big whiff all way around.As recently as 2010-April 17, to be exact-The New York Times printed, with Apologies to Ernest Thayer, a Tom Connelly-authored takeoff, [Bobby] Valentine at Bat. …

1970s Baseball Diplomacy between Cuba and the United States

1970s Baseball Diplomacy between Cuba and the United States Justin W. R. Turner (bio) On any other day, the sight of fifty thousand fans filing into Havana's Estadio Latinamericano for a baseball game would have been unremarkable. What drew the crowd to the stadium on March 28, 1999, however, was the opportunity to see Major League Baseball in Cuba. The Baltimore Orioles, in town to play the Cuban national baseball team, were the first major-league team to play on the island in forty years. For the Orioles, the game was the culmination of a two-year endeavor. In reality, efforts at "baseball diplomacy," the nickname given to the sports exchange, began in the 1970s. The Orioles-Cuba game was not an original idea; it was simply the first time baseball diplomacy produced an actual game. Baseball diplomacy's failures prior to 1999 reflect the complicated relationship between Cuba and the United States. Earlier attempts could not overcome the political differences that separated the two nations. Political considerations overwhelmed baseball diplomacy, complicated the planning, and ultimately prevented a notable change in U.S.-Cuba relations. The shared love of baseball and the goodwill of athletic competition was an insufficient bandage for the lasting legacy of antagonism and mutual distrust between Washington and Havana. Prior to the revolution, both nations participated in a healthy baseball exchange. Cubans played in American baseball leagues and vice versa. After 1961, however, the simple task of organizing a baseball game, with its definitive rules of fair and foul, three outs per inning, and three strikes per batter, became an exercise in diplomacy. Baseball is one of the United States' most notable exports to Cuba. The game made its way to Cuba via Nemesio Guilló. A student, Guilló left Cuba in 1858 to attend Springhill College in Mobile, Alabama. When he returned home six years later, he brought a bat and ball with him and soon began organizing games with other classmates returning from the United States. The contests, played in public areas, attracted curious attention. By 1868, Guilló was a [End Page 67] founding member of the Havana Base Ball Club and the team's right fielder. That same year, the club traveled to Matanzas, where they played and defeated the crew of an American ship docked in port for repairs. Though not political in nature, this game can be loosely termed the first documented occurrence of "baseball diplomacy" between the countries. By 1878, professional leagues emerged and various clubs throughout the island played contests and competed for pennants. Cubans enthusiastically adopted baseball as a commoner's game, and playing and attending baseball games became a political act at the end of the nineteenth century, as Cubans shunned bullfighting—a reminder of Spanish rule embedded with class distinctions—in favor of the more democratic American game.1 Close ties between the United States and Cuba for the first half of the twentieth century, coupled with the sport's popularity in both countries, produced numerous interactions involving baseball. With its warmer climate, Cuba became a popular winter destination for American professional players looking to keep their skills sharp during the off-season. Such notable American big leaguers as Babe Ruth, Ty Cobb, and Christy Mathewson played in Cuba at one time. Furthermore, a few American teams were regular visitors to the island. The Brooklyn Dodgers played several exhibition games in Havana in 1900 against the New York Giants and a Cuban all-star team. The Giants returned for an exhibition tour in 1920. The Dodgers also held their spring training camp in Cuba in 1941 and 1942. They returned again in 1947 as a strategy to allow Jackie Robinson, on the verge of breaking baseball's color barrier, to escape distractions while preparing for the season.2 The high tide of the U.S.-Cuba baseball exchange prior to 1959 was the Havana Sugar Kings. Based in Havana, the Sugar Kings developed from the Havana Cubans ball club, which had been a part of the Class B Florida International League since 1946. In 1954, the Sugar Kings joined the International League as the Class AAA affiliate of the Cincinnati Reds. The club's greatest success...

Recessional

Recessional Robert A. Moss (bio) Robert E. Murphy . After Many a Summer: The Passing of the Giants and Dodgers and a Golden Age in New York Baseball. New York: Union Square Press, 2009. 418 pp. Cloth, $24.95. The Dodgers have now played longer in Los Angeles (since 1958) than they played in Ebbets Field (1913-1957), their famously intimate bandbox in Brooklyn. Fans who grew up doting on the "Boys of Summer" Dodgers teams of 1947-1957 are now elderly. New York Giants fans who thrilled to Bobby Thomson's epic home run that won the 1951 National League playoff at the Polo Grounds and who rejoiced as Willie Mays and his teammates defeated Cleveland in the 1954 World Series, similarly lost their team to San Francisco in 1958. Like their onetime Brooklyn Dodgers antagonists, they must now be content either with memories or the New York Mets. How did it happen that two storied franchises—the Giants of John McGraw, Christy Mathewson, Mel Ott, and Willie Mays, and the Dodgers of Jackie Robinson, Pee Wee Reese, Roy Campanella, and Duke Snider—simultaneously deserted the country's media and financial capital for California? Robert E. Murphy's After Many a Summer is a requiem for "the Dodgers being taken from me," as well as an inquest: "The boy left behind, and the man he becomes, wants to know more about the man who did it" (xiii). Murphy does not assume an impartial stance. From the outset it is clear to him that Walter O'Malley, the Dodgers' owner, is the villain. And although his book is subtitled "The Passing of the Giants and Dodgers and a Golden Age in New York Baseball," Murphy's emotions are mainly engaged by O'Malley and the Dodgers. Dutiful attention is paid to the Giants and Horace Stoneham, their owner, but the microscope is focused on O'Malley. His is the lead role and the object of Murphy's undisguised animus. (Truth demands that this reviewer acknowledge a similar prejudice.) [End Page 96] However, since the publication of Neil J. Sullivan's The Dodgers Move West in 1987, an alternative demon has emerged: Robert Moses, New York City's Parks Commissioner and power broker supreme. In this new scenario, also adopted by Michael Shapiro in his study of the 1956 Dodgers, The Last Good Season, O'Malley simply wants to build a new stadium for the Dodgers in Brooklyn, but Moses blocks him at every step and ultimately points him westward. Murphy mistrusts this "revisionist view," and it irks him "to see it become the standard version of events" (xiv). After Many a Summer is thus written to reestablish O'Malley's culpability. Does Murphy prove his case? I'll admit to rooting for him, but I came away convinced that his exhaustive (and exhausting) dissection of the events and evidence demonstrates that both O'Malley and Moses must share the blame and bear the obloquy. Murphy himself implicitly recognizes this, writing, "The team's fans might have cursed the fate that brought these two fiercely self-assured men together in an awkward dance around Brooklyn and Queens . . ." (113). Murphy begins with extensive historical vignettes of baseball in Brooklyn and New York dating back to 1845. These include the Civil War era Brooklyn Excelsiors, the Brooklyn Atlantic's 1870 defeat of the professional Cincinnati Red Stockings, and Brooklyn's National League championships in 1890 and 1899. The great Giants teams of McGraw and Matty are invoked as well. We are given a review of Dodger ownership up to the appearance of O'Malley, brought aboard as a young lawyer and team director in 1932. Murphy even includes short biographies of O'Malley's father, Edwin, a Tammany Hall politician and New York Commissioner of Public Markets, and of Stoneham's father, Charles, a stock manipulator and gambler, who bought the Giants in 1918 and left them to his son when he died in 1936. Both Edwin O'Malley and Charles Stoneham were onetime subjects of judicial investigations, and Murphy actually entitles a chapter "Stoneham and O'Malley: Sinful Fathers." As much as one may rue the later actions of the sons, imputing to...

Danny Gardella and Baseball's Reserve Clause: A Working-Class Stiff Blacklisted in Cold War America

When former New York Giants outfielder Danny Gardella died at age eighty-five on March 6, 2005, the baseball world paid little attention to his passing. But in the late 1940s, Gardella posed a clear and present danger to the baseball establishment when he challenged the game's reserve clause. In 1946, Gardella failed to sign a contract with the Giants and bolted to the Mexican League. Gardella and other major leaguers enticed south the border by Mexican entrepreneur Jorge Pasquel were blacklisted for five years by Commissioner A. B. Happy Chandler and unable to resume their baseball careers in the United States when the Mexican League folded. Denied an opportunity to make a living playing major-league baseball, Gardella sued the sport, arguing that baseball's reserve clause was in restraint trade and violated antitrust law. The vitriolic reply the baseball establishment was to label Gardella a radical threat to the American way life--as it is embodied in the traditions the national Brooklyn Dodgers executive Branch Rickey deserves credit for defying baseball's color line by signing Jackie Robinson, but he was also a staunch anticommunist Republican who interpreted any challenge to management prerogatives as an example Bolshevism. Speaking in Baltimore on April 13, 1949, Rickey proclaimed that individuals questioning baseball's sacred reserve clause were persons of avowed communist tendencies who deeply resent the continuance our national pastime. Commissioner Chandler also employed rhetorical excess in describing the dire consequences the Gardella lawsuit posed to the American way life. Insisting that he tried to reason with Gardella and others who deserted the United States for Mexico during a time national crisis, Chandler argued, I tried to get them to live up to their obligations and responsibilities. This was a fight against baseball in the United These players joined a group who said they were going to kill baseball in the United States. (1) Gardella, course, was no Bolshevik. He was simply a young man working-class origins who sought to maintain a job in baseball and obtain a fair salary in return for his labor. Gardella, like many other ballplayers, perceived the sport's reserve clause as limiting his economic options and endangering his livelihood. Therefore, he sued baseball for banning his return to the major leagues after testing the Mexican labor market. Gardella was essentially advocating for a free labor market, while baseball ownership sought to maintain a restricted labor supply. The baseball establishment, however, attempted to portray Gardella as a radical who was challenging traditional American values. The red-baiting employed by Major League Baseball (MLB) was an old tactic going back to nineteenth-century efforts by business to label union organizers as communist agitators. Such rhetoric was even more politically charged during the post--World War II red scare in which feminists, liberals, labor unions, and civil rights activists seeking change and reform were characterized as communist sympathizers undermining the American way life. Danny Gardella wanted an opportunity to continue playing baseball, but MLB ownership responded to his legal challenge with the rhetoric the blacklist and postwar anticommunist crusade. Thus, an examination Gardella's lawsuit against MLB offers insight into the economic structure the game as well as how business interests sought to use the rhetoric anticommunism to discredit challenges to monopolistic practices. A SPORT OR A BUSINESS? In April 1921, the District Columbia Court Appeals ruled that professional baseball was not subject to antitrust law because the sport failed to constitute interstate commerce. The appeals court concluded that although the travel players from state to state might appear to be interstate commerce, the game baseball was local in its beginning and in its end. …

Iron Man McGinnity: A Baseball Biography (review)

Reviewed by: Iron Man McGinnity: A Baseball Biography David Shiner Don Doxsie . Iron Man McGinnity: A Baseball Biography. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2009. 214 pp. Paper, $29.95. Back in the 1960s, a major-league star at the peak of his career would normally have been the subject of a book-length biography. For better or worse, that era is long gone. Contemporary baseball biographies often feature stars of much earlier vintage. This transformation reflects a number of movements in publishing, including the decline of hero journalism and the rise in academic standards in all areas of nonfiction literature, baseball included. Unlike many recent authors of baseball biographies, Don Doxsie is a journalist rather than a professional academician. As might be expected, his biography of New York Giants pitcher Joe McGinnity, the "Iron Man," is rendered in a clean and economical style. And, given how many early twentieth-century stars have been profiled in book-length biographies in recent years, it's not surprising that McGinnity's time has come. Joe McGinnity was a midwestern coal miner whose native talent for baseball made him a likely candidate to escape the mines and whose initiative and hard work led him to succeed. He boasted two full minor-league careers, one as a young man and the other after he left the majors in his late thirties. The first of those careers was singularly unimpressive given his subsequent major-league achievements. Doxsie plausibly credits McGinnity's eventual success as a pitcher to his lack of early triumphs. As a sub-.500 hurler with Kansas City in the Western Association in his midtwenties, McGinnity studied the unique underhand motion of Billy Rhines, a pitcher who had enjoyed major-league success in the 1890s. McGinnity essentially copied Rhine's unorthodox motion, which allowed him to throw a variety of curves with less wear and tear on his right arm than is the lot of most breaking-ball pitchers. As a result, he became much more effective on the hill and proved able to pitch professionally into his midfifties. The picture Doxsie paints of McGinnity is that of a rough-hewn and industrious blue-collar type who represented midwestern America as it existed a century ago. He was a gentleman off the field but a no-holds-barred competitor on it. His success as a pitcher was notable, but he was less accomplished as a manager after his major-league days came to an end following the 1908 season. He was reasonably adept at spotting talent, but too inflexible as a skipper to sustain the respect of his charges and too stubborn to adapt to changing circumstances. But he was a lifetime baseball man, and he never left the game for long. McGinnity's biographer is a diligent researcher and writer, but at times his [End Page 141] writing reveals some ignorance of the conditions of baseball during the deadball period. Doxsie writes, "McGinnity [was] destined to bat a solid (for a pitcher) .194 in his major league career" (46). In fact, although .194 is a decent batting average for a hurler today, McGinnity was a subpar hitter for a pitcher of his era. Of McGinnity's 1902 campaign, which was split between Baltimore in the American League and New York in the National, Doxsie claims that "McGinnity was a different pitcher in New York than he had been in . . . Baltimore" because his ERA dropped from 3.44 with the Orioles to 2.06 with the Giants (68). The author fails to note that most of that drop was due to the difference between the two leagues, which amounted to almost a run per game over the course of the season primarily because of different rules concerning foul strikes. While Doxsie's extensive research generally accords with today's standards, his use of secondary sources occasionally leads him to make suspect claims, as when he states that the manager who preceded John McGraw in New York "had used the former Bucknell College football and baseball star [Christy Mathewson] in the outfield in a few games" (65). One searches the baseball encyclopedias in vain for verification of that claim, which Doxsie credits to Joe Durso in a...

1921: the Yankees, the Giants, and the battle for baseball supremacy in New York

Lyle Spatz and Steve Steinberg. 1921: The Yankees, the Giants, and the Battle for Baseball Supremacy in New York. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2010. 538 pp. Cloth, $31.95 The early 1920s were a critical time for America and baseball. World War I was finally over, the acrimonious fight in the US Senate over the ratification of the Versailles Peace Treaty had ended with the Treaty's rejection, prohibition became the law of the land, and women won the right to vote. Warren G. Harding captured the presidency in a landslide victory, promising a return to normalcy after two decades of progressive activism and involvement in a foreign war. At the same time, baseball confronted two of its darkest moments: in August 1920 Yankees pitcher Carl Mays beaned Ray Chapman, killing the popular Cleveland shortstop, and the following month came the revelations that eight members of the Chicago White Sox had conspired to throw the 1919 World Series. At this crucial time in baseball history, two teams, the New York Giants and the New York Yankees, challenged each other for supremacy over the future of the game and for the loyalty of New York baseball fans. In this book, veteran authors Lyle Spatz and Steve Steinberg argue convincingly that the 1921 baseball season was a turning point in the sport's history. That year, each league experienced tight, exciting pennant races, and for the first time, both New York teams won championships. The Giants captured their seventh pennant under their longtime manager, the pugnacious John McGraw. The Yankees, also-rans since they entered the league in 1903, won their first flag behind their manager, the introspective Miller Huggins, and the home-run hitting of the incomparable Babe Ruth. All the World Series games would be played at the Giants' home field, the Polo Grounds, where the Yankees had been tenants since 1913. McGraw, who despised the American League, Babe Ruth, and his style of play, epitomized the scientific or inside baseball that had dominated the game for the past twenty years. Ruth, who had hit 54 home runs in 1920 and then 59 in 1921, single-handedly revolutionized the way the game was played. The low-scoring, pitching-dominated game that McGraw had helped to create gave way to the high-scoring, big-inning, offense-oriented game that Ruth invented. Because of their winning ways, McGraw and the Giants had long dominated the city's baseball scene. But beginning in 1920 the Yankees challenged that supremacy. The upstart Yankees became the first team in baseball history to draw more than 1000,000 fans, and the team outdrew their landlords by almost 360,000. Ruth and the Yankees lost the 1921 World Series to McGraw and the Giants five games to three, but they won the hearts and minds of New Yorkers and also of millions of Americans elsewhere. In 1921, the Yankees replaced the Giants as baseball's premier team, and the Yankees dominated the game for the next fifty years. Spatz and Stenberg divide their book into three parts: the Preseason, the Season, and the Postseason. The Preseason traces the major developments in the history of the two New York teams with an emphasis on those events that influenced the 1921 season. In the Season, the authors provide a detailed chronological narrative of the 1921 pennant races in the two leagues. One or two consecutive chapters describe the Yankees and the American League race, and the next one or two chapters switch to the Giants and the National League campaign. …

Emphasis on Expansion

The $1.6-billion New Meadowlands Stadium, the home of both the New York Giants and the New York Jets National Football League franchises, is more than 50 percent larger than its predecessor. Chosen as the site of the 2014 Super Bowl, the new facility was designed with long spans and a minimal number of expansion joints, partly to accommodate a more than 28-fold increase in the number of premium suite and club seating areas.

Trends in Stadium and Arena Construction, 1995-2015

A total of 56 stadiums and arenas opened between 1995 and 2009 including: 17 new baseball stadiums, four basketball arenas, nine hockey arenas, seven dual use NBA/NHL venues and 19 football fields. And it’s far from over: the San Francisco 49ers, San Diego Chargers, New York Giants, New York Jets, Minnesota Vikings, Oakland Athletics, Florida Marlins, Tampa Bay Rays, Minnesota Twins, Sacramento Kings, Orlando Magic, New Jersey Nets, New York Islanders and Pittsburgh Penguins anticipate new arenas by 2015. This paper summarizes recent and emerging trends associated with the capacity, cost, public subsidy and accompanying legislative characteristics of stadium and arena construction.

The Magic of the Monkey House: New Insights Into the Anatomy that Makes Primates Primates

JEFFREY T. LAITMAN*Associate Editor, The Anatomical RecordThe year 1958 began as a really horrible one for me.Two events made this so. The first occurred in the earlyspring when I realized that the Brooklyn Dodgers—ourbaseball team and the soul of Brooklyn—had abandonedus and fled to some bizarre place where people ate tacosinstead of Nathan’s franks and where it never snowed.Even their perennial nemesis—the New York Giants—left town for another unfathomable hamlet that wasalways having earthquakes. My almost 7-year-old mindcould not fathom all this; the heroes I worshipped(Jackie Robinson often patted my little crew-cut head)were gone forever. I even became a Yankees fan.My second crisis occurred before school ended in latespring. Our class had trip to the great American Mu-seum of Natural History in Manhattan. I loved museumtrips as I got to see dinosaurs, my second passion afterthe Dodgers. Tyrannosaurs, triceratops, hadrosaurs, Iloved them all, but none more than the brontosaurus. Iadored the big beasts with little heads, so much so, thatI could not help but go under the ropes to climb on one’stail to get ‘‘up close and personal.’’ Caught in this act ofdefilement by a Goliath-sized museum guard, I washauled off by the scruff of the neck (those were the daysbefore ‘‘spare the rod’’ philosophy was in effect) andejected from the Museum. My teacher banned me fromfuture trips.Ejected and branded (all but a scarlet letter emblaz-oned on my forehead) in my seventh year. To make mat-ters worse, I had no project to write up for my schoolreport; no postcards of dinos or stuffed grizzlies or mete-orites to glue into a folder. I was sure the dreaded—andoft threatened—‘‘summer school’’ would be my fate. Andworst of all—what would I tell my mother? Oy!As I sat on the front steps of our Brooklyn home,watching the other kids play stickball or marbles, I pon-dered the enormity of my failure. Lost in my melancholy,I didn’t notice my father come home. I was glad he sawme before my mother as she was the disciplinarian andhe a gentle Parisian who would say something I didn’tunderstand in French and not get too angry. When Iexplained what happened, he just said he had an idea,and I should get up early on Sunday.When Sunday arrived, my dad bundled me into ourold Chevy and set off:::to the Bronx Zoo. ‘‘Forget thedead animals,’’ dad said, ‘‘let’s look at live ones.’’ Thiswas my first time at the Bronx zoo and I was riveted toall the sights and sounds, but, truthfully, nothing set myheart to flutter. The elephants were big, but smelledfoul; the seals and sea lions looked and sounded likedogs; the rhinos reminded me of garbage trucks; I wasscared of cats the size of small cars. And then I saw asight that would forever change my world: The MonkeyHouse.I sat and stared at the assortment of baboons andmacaques and squirrel monkeys for most of the day.While I had seen some stuffed ones in the Museum, Inever realized that these animals looked and acted somuch like my family and friends. I even started to namethem in my mind after relatives: there was Aunt Flo, bigand bossy; Uncle Joe, snoozing away; Cousin Richie,climbing all over his brother Irwin, on and on. They hadhands and fingers and toes that seemed to do all that Icould do, and I envisioned them talking together andplanning their day. And then it happened: as I ponderedmy new hairy family, a wad of poop landed smack on mycrew-cut head, thrown by some impish baboon. ‘‘Wow!’’my shocked little mind took a moment to cogitate,‘‘Poop! They hit me with poop! These guys got attitude;they are definitely cool. They could make it inBrooklyn.’’A bond was forged that day between those poop-throw-ing cousins and me, one that has led me on my own ca-reer path: to understand our place among thoseremarkable relatives. Like most of us who spend ourdays trying to figure out why we pay taxes and theserelatives don’t, or how their historical trajectory landedthem in the zoo and we were able to enjoy (albeit mo-mentarily for some) the excitement of pondering dino-saurs at a museum, I’m always torn between myscientist’s focused curiosity to discover the nuances ofour collective anatomical similarities and a profound ad-oration for these kin. I know it might sound a tad odd tothose whose science keeps them at some emotional dis-tance from their object of study (I know you can’t get tooemotional over a zebrafish, drosophila, or an endoplas-mic reticulum), but one of the traits I’ve found shared byprimate biologists—anatomists, paleontologists, anthro-pologists, lab and fieldworker alike—is our emotionalties to the animals we study. There is undisputable joyin our science, but it is also inseparably coupled with anoverriding knowledge that we are studying ourselves.

Chasing Moonlight: The True Story of Field of Dreams ’ Doc Graham (review)

Reviewed by: Chasing Moonlight: The True Story of Field of Dreams’ Doc Graham Tim Morris Brett Friedlander and Robert Reising. Chasing Moonlight: The True Story of Field of Dreams’ Doc Graham. Winston-Salem, NC: John F. Blair, 2009. 220 pp. Cloth, $19.95. Archie “Moonlight” Graham led a quirky American life that would be well worth documenting even if he hadn’t played two fateful innings in right field for the 1905 New York Giants. In 1909, Graham, a newly-licensed physician from a prominent southern family, took a train to Chisholm, Minnesota—about as far north as the tracks extended. He would stay in Chisholm until his death fifty-six years later, serving as doctor to the Chisholm public schools. In Chasing Moonlight, Brett Friedlander and Robert Reising have produced a book as unusual as its subject. Their biography breaks into two disparate halves, leaving one wondering what odd psychological forces sent Graham in the direction of Chisholm. Born late in 1879, Graham spent the early years of his adult life overachieving at two professions, medicine and baseball. Hence his nickname: whether on the diamond or on the ward, he was always moonlighting. After he turned thirty, Doc Graham abandoned his peripatetic, brush-with-stardom life for a career bound by institutional routine. Like many school athletes of the late nineteenth century, Graham was a multi-sport star. He excelled at football as well as baseball. In the latter sport, he was a speedy outfielder. Though he had little power even by deadball standards, Graham hit well enough to win a batting title in the Class B New York State League in 1906. Academically, he made steady progress from the University of North Carolina to the University of Maryland’s medical school, and on to postgraduate work at Johns Hopkins—even while absenting himself every summer to play minor-league baseball. Chasing Moonlight doesn’t shed much light on Graham’s stint in the majors. Big-league rosters were smaller in 1905 than they are today, and farm systems did not exist at all. Only eleven position players saw more than the briefest [End Page 162] of action for the Giants that year. Why would such a great team tap a dime-a-dozen B-league star like Graham to sit on their bench? John McGraw, like other managers of his day, occasionally picked up a minor leaguer to serve just in case an emergency substitute was needed. During Graham’s few weeks with the team, he was needed only once. Many years later, W. P. Kinsella transformed that appearance into legend in the novel Shoeless Joe, and Burt Lancaster amplified the legend by playing Graham in the film Field of Dreams. Graham’s baseball biography could be anybody’s. The serendipity of literary invention, plus a pretty good nickname, are the only differences between him and hundreds of other men who had a cup of coffee in the bigs. So the most interesting part of Chasing Moonlight comes after 1909, when Graham left the East Coast for the Iron Range. Graham evidently became eccentric fairly quickly in this small, isolated community, and stayed eccentric till the end of his days. Lots of people who grew up in Chisholm still remember Graham. He cared for the children of the town until his 1960 retirement, and many of his patients are not yet retired themselves. They tell odd stories about their beloved doctor. Engrained in a daily routine, Graham was also provokingly absent-minded. He bought up real estate in Iron Range towns, and then forgot to cash his tenants’ rent checks. He would prescribe eyeglasses for any kid within reach—but at random, so that his specs made the child’s vision a lot worse. He would “test” children’s hearing by hollering words into their ears, so forcefully that every kid waiting in the hallway for the test could hear the words they would have to repeat. And he took kids’ blood pressure. Every child who came through the Chisholm schools faced Moonlight Graham’s sphygmomanometer. He built an impressive database of blood pressures. Graham published the results in the one scholarly article he ever wrote—the medical...

Everyone Went to Nick's

This was New York in the elegant eighties and these were the Giants, fashioned in elegance, playing on the Polo Grounds, then at 110th Street and Fifth Avenue. It was the New York of the brownstone house and the gaslit streets, of the top hat and the hansom cab, of oysters and champagne and perfecto cigars, of Ada Rehan and Oscar Wilde and the young John L. Sullivan. It also was the New York of the Tenderloin and the Bowery, of the slums and the sweat shops, of goats grazing among the shanties perched on the rocky terrain of Harlem.1Toots Shor ran New York City's best-known watering hole of the 1940s and '50s, where Frank Sinatra and Jackie Gleason were regulars and Joe DiMaggio ate two or three meals per week. When they were not at Shor's, Mickey Mantle and his Yankee buddies hung out at the Stork Club, the Plantation Room, Mama Leone's, or Jack Dempsey's joint, with the old champ often decorating the window by sitting at a nearby booth.2 In 1894 Michael T. Nuf Ced McGreevey, a devoted baseball fan, named his new Boston saloon Third Base because it was the last place one stopped before going home. By the turn of the century his establishment was a favorite of diehard fans known as the Royal Rooters. Its walls were covered with baseball pictures from McGreevey's own collection and memorabilia from friends like Cy Young.3 McGreevey's claim today to being America's First Sport Bar, however, ignores the real holder of that honor: Uncle Nick Engel's Home Plate, in New York City, just off Broadway near Madison Square. For a decade beginning in the mid-1880s, boxers, billiard players, racing men, actors, writers, playboys, and aristocrats staggered and swaggered through Nick's place, where one might bump into Mark Twain or Maurice Barrymore at the bar, or a member of the visiting Chicago White Stockings feasting on one of Nick's steak dinners upstairs. During the baseball season, managers and magnates made a point of visiting Nick's and many deals originated within its walls. Above all, Nick's Home Plate was the hangout of the New York Giants during the club's glittering first era of greatness. Team owner John B. Day and manager James Mutrie were regulars. Pictures of Giants players adorned the cafe's walls-Johnny Ward, Mickey Welch, Buck Ewing-as well as photos of out-of-town favorites such as Michael King Kelly (with a telegram from the great player to Nick tucked in the corner announcing victory in an important game) and Engel's pals from the New York stage. Nick's son Freddie, the team's batboy, was not only supposed to retrieve errant balls and bring good luck to the team on the diamond. He also delivered love notes from Giants players to adoring female fans.4Working His Way UpNick was a perambulating trade mark for the damp brand of joy that that fluxes in his Gotham glassware emporium, wrote the Washington Post.5 He was born on October 31, 1844, in New York City, the son of Adam Engel, a carpenter. The senior Engel apprenticed Nicholas and his elder brother Adam to a woodcarver, but at the beginning of the Civil War the brothers left the trade and began opening oysters at the Philadelphia Hotel at Battery Place and Greenwich Street in lower Manhattan. They worked there for seven years before moving on to North Moore and Greenwich Street as bartenders. Nick married the former Teresa Rieger in 1868.6In 1872 the brothers went into business for themselves, opening an oyster and chop house on Sixth Avenue between 28th and 29th Streets in the heart of the infamous Tenderloin district. Nearby on 27th were houses of vice such as the Heart of Maryland, the Tuxedo, the Cairo Dance Hall, and Buckingham Palace, a single room two stories high that had crammed into its confines a shooting gallery, a full-scale restaurant, and, behind curtained booths, a brothel.7 Soon the reputation of the Engel brothers' place grew as a place of good food and convivial atmosphere. The brothers parted ways in 1877, with Adam moving to the Clifton, at 35th Street and Fifth Avenue. …

Mike Murphy: Equipment Manager, San Francisco Giants

Mike Murphy has worked in the clubhouse and managed baseball equipment for the San Francisco Giants since the team moved west in 1958. Likely the longest reigning employee of any major league organization Murph is immensely popular among past and current ballplayers. In recognition of his service, the Giants named the clubhouse at ATT they played mostly afternoon games, and I'd go early to get autographs. One day, Doc Hughes asked me if I'd like a job getting the balls hit into the stands during batting practice. The next year, when was fourteen, he said the New York Giants were coming to San Francisco and asked if wanted to be the bat boy. Heck, yeah. He told me to go see Eddie Logan, the clubhouse manager, but when did Logan had already given the job to another kid. Instead, Eddie gave me a job in the visitors' clubhouse as the visiting team batboy. worked there for a year. One day the home team bat boy didn't show up, and said could handle both jobs. Eddie said, How can you do that? Don't worry, said, I'll show you how. So every half inning I'd run over to the Giants' side and put on the Giants uniform, and then in the other half inning I'd run back to the visiting side and put on the Pittsburgh Pirates uniform. At the end of the night, was one tired guy, but Logan liked what I'd done. He said I'd done pretty good. He said, I ask you to be here at 9:00 in the morning and you always come in at 8:30. My father had always said that when you get a job be there an hour early. was the Giants bat boy for three years, and then in 1961 when the trainer Red Adams passed away moved over to the visitors' clubhouse as the assistant equipment manager. I'd polish shoes [spikes] and wash the towels and sanitary, but not the uniforms. In those days, the uniforms were all wool, and they had to be sent off to the cleaners. After a few years as the assistant, became the visitors' equipment manager [1964], and then in 1979 moved over to the home side as equipment manager. The job was a lot simpler in those days as you didn't have all the gear and equipment that you have today, and you didn't have a big training table of food in the clubhouse. In those days, the players just came in, got dressed, played the game, and then after the game they pretty much left. Today, you've got all kinds of things going on in and around the clubhouse. Today, have four people working under me, and it takes all of us to get the job done. Basically our job is to make sure everybody's got all the gear they need--bats, uniforms, whatever. And that it's clean and polished and in tiptop shape and ready to go. After the game, we have baskets for the players to put their clothes in for washing. Sometimes guys don't put their stuff in the baskets, so my guys will skim through the lockers looking for whatever needs to be cleaned. The time it takes to clean shoes and uniforms depends a lot on the field conditions. On a nice day when the field is dry, it's a lot easier to do the shoes. For night games, especially if it's wet, it takes longer because you have mud in the cleats. Same with the uniforms--if players are diving and sliding all over the place, it takes more time to get out the dirt and grass stains. About an hour after the game, we have everything in the wash, and we start reorganizing and tidying up the clubhouse. The players also rely on us for lots of other stuff: Murph, can you mail this for me? Murph, can you get reservations for me and my girl at this restaurant? Murph, can you give me this or get me that? We try to fulfill everything they want. When used to work under Eddie Logan, he'd say, Keep the ballplayers happy because when they're happy they play better. …

Preparticipation Screening of Competitive Athletes

Sports used to be simple. The major decision my friends and I faced as youngsters was who would get to be Y.A. Tittle of the New York Giants in our Sunday afternoon football pickup games. The preparticipation screening of athletes also used to be simple and generally consisted of a medical form completed by a parent and a cursory physical examination performed in the gym by a general physician. Now, recreation for many young Americans requires formal play dates, and there are T-ball leagues for those too young to hit an unsupported baseball. The preparticipation screening of athletes also has become more formalized and is, in some countries, a legally regulated activity.1 The goal of both increased athletic supervision and formalized preparticipation screening is to protect young athletes from the risks inherent in athletic participation, but how best to accomplish this goal is now in hot debate. Article p 1085 Screening athletes has received increased attention because the issue of sudden cardiac death (SCD) in athletes and during exercise has become a prominent health issue. Public interest in these events probably arises from both the importance of sport in many societies and the paradox that physical activity can have both a positive and negative impact on an individual’s health.2 It is clear that vigorous exertion transiently increases the risk of SCD in individuals with established cardiovascular disease.2 Atherosclerotic coronary artery disease is the primary pathological finding in individuals >40 years of age who die during physical activity, whereas inherited cardiovascular conditions are primarily responsible for such events in younger athletes.2 Hypertrophic cardiomyopathy (HCM), an entity described shortly before Tittle played for the Giants,3 accounts for most (36% to 44%) of these deaths in American athletes, with other abnormalities, including anomalous coronary arteries (17%), myocarditis (6%), …

Was the 1891 National League Pennant Thrown?

The rich history of professional baseball in 19th century America-what Harvey Frommer has labeled primitive baseball-has acquired its own fascination for a growing number of researchers.1 The last decades of the 19th century were a time of rapid transition in the game on the field, instability in the structure of professional leagues, much squabbling among club owners, and growing friction in player-owner relations, culminating in the emergence of the first players' union and a full-scale players' revolt.The formation in 1890 of the quasi-socialistic Players League (PL) by members of the Brotherhood of Professional Base Ball Players created a bizarre set of circumstances. Most of the top-quality players were Brotherhood members and signed on with the new league, but the PL's competition with the 14-year-old National League (NL) and the eight-year-old American Association (AA) confused baseball fans and alienated many of them. Although all three leagues put out inflated attendance figures, in reality people stayed away from ballparks in such numbers that by August everybody was losing money. The AA had moved its Brooklyn entry to Baltimore, the Philadelphia AA franchise was bankrupt, and several more clubs in all three leagues were close to it. At season's end the PL's financial backers-tired of losses and disillusioned with the league's profit-sharing setup-surrendered to the NL in exchange for stock in various NL franchises. Deserted by their money men, the rebellious players had no choice but to disband their league and seek reemployment in the NL or AA.2Early in 1891 representatives of the NL, the AA, and the minor league Western Association (WA) formed a new National Agreement, whereby the three leagues would respect each others' player contracts and otherwise cooperate to achieve a stable order in baseball. The AA reorganized itself, dropping its Brooklyn, Syracuse, Rochester, and Toledo franchises and adding Cincinnati, Baltimore, and Washington. The eighth member would be Boston, its roster formed mainly from the Boston PL pennant-winners. Other former PL'ers were to be reassigned to clubs that had reserved them in 1889, with player dispositions overseen by a three-man Board of Control consisting of the presidents of the NL, AA, and WA. But when AA president Allen W. Thurman voted with the other two Board members to uphold the signing of former AA players Harry Stovey and Louis Bierbauer by the NL's Boston and Pittsburgh clubs, respectively, the AA owners fired Thurman and abrogated the freshly crafted National Agreement. Professional baseball's fourth war was underway, one that the AA-which had suffered even worse financial setbacks in 1890 than the NL-was ill equipped to fight.3 With neither league bound to honor the reserve clause in players' contracts, raids on rosters went on throughout the 1891 season, Pittsburgh being especially aggressive in going after AA players.4Whatever club they joined or rejoined, former PL'ers tended to bring with them bitter feelings toward Brotherhood members who had rejected the PL, in some instances signing PL contracts before jumping back to their former teams for more money. John Montgomery Ward, leader of the Brotherhood revolt, outright refused to return to the New York Giants, where several Judases, as Ward termed them, had remained in 1890. Ward and other Brotherhood men were especially resentful of William Buck Ewing, one of the top players of the era. Originally a close Ward ally, Ewing had captained the New York PL club, but his in-season dealings with Giants president John B. Day and other NL'ers had prompted allegations of betrayal. Ward signed with the NL's Brooklyn Bridegrooms as captain (and playing manager). Although expectations in Brooklyn were high, Ward's team ended up in sixth place.5The hard-drinking, flamboyant Mike Kelly, a remarkably versatile player and a favorite wherever he performed, had captained the Boston PL pennant-winners. …

From ‘The Finest Ballpark in America’ to ‘The Jewel of the Waterfront’: The Construction of San Francisco's Major League Baseball Stadiums

When the New York Giants moved west to San Francisco in 1958, they were welcomed by a city hungry for a professional baseball team. San Francisco's civic leaders saw the acquisition of a major-league team and the construction of a ‘big league’ stadium as an opportunity to put their rapidly growing metropolis on the map. Candlestick Park was touted as the stadium of the future when it opened, but its flaws were an ongoing controversy that led to the eventual relocation of the Giants to a privately-financed stadium in downtown San Francisco. AT&T Park was constructed as a means of connecting Giants fans to their historical past, rooting them firmly in San Francisco, but erasing Candlestick Park. The construction of both ballparks illuminates the efforts of the Giants and Bay Area urban boosters to fashion their own historical narrative of the city's team during two distinct eras.

The Echoing Green: The Untold Story of Bobby Thomson, Ralph Branca, and the Shot Heard Round the World (review)

Reviewed by: The Echoing Green: The Untold Story of Bobby Thomson, Ralph Branca, and the Shot Heard Round the World Roberta Newman Joshua Prager. The Echoing Green: The Untold Story of Bobby Thomson, Ralph Branca, and the Shot Heard Round the World. New York: Pantheon, 2006. 498 pp. Cloth, $26.95. Just when it seems as if all that could possibly be said about "the shot heard round the world" has, indeed, been said, Joshua Prager offers substantial new evidence that the New York Giants' late season surge, culminating in Bobby Thomson's home run against the Dodgers' Ralph Branca on October 3, 1951, was mechanically enhanced. In The Echoing Green, Prager, a senior special writer for the Wall Street Journal, documents the way in which the Giants, under the direction of their irascible and, in this case vengeful, manager, Leo Durocher, successfully stole signs from opposing teams' pitchers, helping New York to overcome a thirteen-and-a-half game deficit to force the fateful three-game playoff series against Brooklyn. But, as its title (taken from a poem by William Blake written in 1789, the text of which comprises volume's epigraph) suggests, Prager's work is not a conventional, statistics-laden baseball book. Rather, it is a richly told social history, itself poetic at times, which paints a picture of a pennant race, the individuals involved, and America at a cultural turning point. Although, according to its subtitle, The Echoing Green is The Untold Story of Bobby Thomson, Ralph Branca and the Shot Heard Round the World, particularly compelling are the untold stories of the lesser-known participants, those who labored behind the scenes at Durocher's behest to steal signs. Here we meet Henry Leonard "Hank" Schenz, utility infielder and owner of a 35mm Wollensak telescope with perfect optics for thievery, and the improbably named Abe Chadwick, a Ukrainian immigrant and rabid Dodgers fan, who, as an electrician working at the Polo Grounds, rigged the buzzer system used to [End Page 119] relay signs to the bullpen. We also encounter Herman Franks, an expert reader of stolen signs, who manned the telescope at a Giants' clubhouse window high up in centerfield at the Polo Grounds, and Sal Yvars, the third-string catcher whose value to the Giants lies in his ability to flash the stolen signs to the dugout. Indeed, it is the stories of those who may very well have directly aided Thomson and certainly made his homer both possible and necessary, along with that of Branca's tragedy and Thomson's triumph, which give this text both its richness and its poignancy. Cultural and historical context are also key to Prager's approach, clearly situating the dramatic ending of the National League's 1951 season among contemporary events. Describing the game's impact as the first sporting event seen coast-to-coast on live television, for example, the author compares it to the Kefauver hearings on organized crime, broadcast using the same technology, which, according to Prager, "brought to light the limitless reach of unscripted live television" (180). Considering the increasing importance of television in 1951, moreover, he cites Milton Berle's long-term contract with NBC, which paid the cross-dressing comic the astonishing salary of two hundred thousand dollars per year. He even invokes The Catcher in the Rye, published just that spring, when describing the letters TURN, inscribed by Brooklyn's Clem Labine on the fingers of his glove, a reminder to rotate his hand following his delivery so as not to tip his pitches. Prager's treatment of the "shot heard round the world" also extends beyond the 1951 season. One of the most concise and beautifully written passages provides context for the mass exodus of the National League from New York, just six years after Thomson's home run. He writes, "It was also now, in the eye of a bereft city, the crystallization of a time no longer. For what lingered most of a home run was the carnival it begat" (302). He goes on to say: Indeed, since a home run had life disillusioned, had crusades upended and breakthroughs blurred. Six years had turned cigarettes suspect, the Pill...

The Rise of Baseball's Racial Quota System in the 1950s

Sportswriter John Lardner was a longtime observer and admirer of Branch Rickey. Assessing Rickey's St. Louis Cardinals before the 1934 season, a fiery outfit that would become immortalized as the Gashouse Gang, Lardner wrote presciently that Leo Durocher and Pepper Martin more energy and fire between them than you'll find in the entire rosters of many clubs. (1) When Rickey came to run the Brooklyn Dodgers in the 1940s, Lardner watched as the executive built another powerhouse team. He saw through most of the smokescreens and cagey circumlocutions often employed by the man New York sportswriter Tom Meany memorably dubbed the Mahatma. When Rickey delayed Jackie Robinson's promotion from Montreal to Brooklyn until the last week of 1947 spring training, Lardner never doubted that the gifted black pioneer would make the roster and excel. Nor did the journalist ever believe that Rickey, despite his public vacillations, would not reinstate Leo Durocher as Brooklyn manager in 1948, given that his suspension for the entire 1947 season by commissioner Happy Chandler was unwarranted. Fast forward to 1954. Rickey is laboring in the fourth year of a so far very unsuccessful Pittsburgh Pirates rebuilding project, but Lardner, the eldest of many gifted writing sons of immortal humorist Ring Lardner, is still eager for Rickey's opinion on matters of sporting and social importance. In the Newsweek magazine May 10, 1954, issue, Lardner devotes his regular column to a discussion of The Fifty Per Cent Color Line. It is a piece inspired by a recent incident concerning Rickey's former team, the Dodgers, who benched left fielder Sandy Amoros on days that Don Newcombe was pitching. Lardner realizes that Brooklyn management fears the precedent of a starting lineup with five black players: Newcombe, Amoros, Jackie Robinson, Roy Campanella, and Jim Junior Gilliam. (A year before, by the way, a lot of controversy had surrounded Jackie Robinson taking some playing time from Billy Cox at third base.) Remembering that Rickey had presided over the Dodgers' initial integration boldly, thoughtfully and successfully, Lardner writes, There are times when you wish he had worked the old field a while longer. What would he do, for instance, about the 50 per cent color line if he were still in Brooklyn? (2) In his heyday in Brooklyn, Rickey would usually give a thoughtful answer to a thoughtful question. Before the start of the 1950 season, his last year in Brooklyn, Rickey frankly admitted that when he traded fleet black center fielder Sam Jethroe to the Boston Braves, it was the first time in his long career he had let go of a player who might be better than those he retained. He conceded that ownership's fear of too many black players was a contributing reason, but he felt that, on the positive side, the Braves would at least have joined the Giants and Dodgers as a third National League team in the market for black players. (3) By 1954, however, Rickey was not eager to engage in a public colloquy with John Lardner on the quota system. He had his hands full trying to rebuild the cellar-dwelling Pirates, who had waited until the same year of 1954 to bring up their first black player, second baseman Curt Roberts. Though Rickey had hired twenty-two scouts of color in his first years as Pittsburgh boss, their work wouldn't bear fruit until after Rickey's departure from the Pittsburgh helm in 1955. (4) Yet I think that Lardner's unanswered rhetorical question in The Fifty Per Cent Color Line remains a provocative and important one to historians. It seems to me no coincidence that the article appeared just a week before the United States Supreme Court issued its historic decision against school segregation in the case of Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka. It is also no coincidence that from 1951 to 1959 the National League pennant was monopolized by the three teams with the most black players: the New York Giants in '51 and '54, the Dodgers in Brooklyn in '52, '53, '55, and '56 and in Los Angeles in '59, and the Milwaukee Braves in '57 and '58. …

Burying the Black Sox: How Baseball's Cover-Up of the 1919 World Series Fix Almost Succeeded (review)

Reviewed by: Burying the Black Sox: How Baseball’s Cover-Up of the 1919 World Series Fix Almost Succeeded Bill Swanson Gene Carney. Burying the Black Sox: How Baseball’s Cover-Up of the 1919 World Series Fix Almost Succeeded. Washington, DC: Potomac Books, 2006. 303 pp. Cloth, $26.95. Whatever we know about the "Big Fix," author Gene Carney instructs us to leave at the door as we enter his treatment of this tragic baseball event. Having read numerous books and articles on the topic, I found this difficult to do. The instruction, however, has merit. Through his extensive research, Carney has determined that the Black Sox [End Page 143] scandal of 1919 was far more complicated than we have traditionally believed. The title of Eliot Asinof's 1963 book, Eight Men Out, is really a misnomer. True, eight members of the Chicago White Sox were banned from baseball for life by newly appointed commissioner Kenesaw Mountain Landis for throwing the 1919 World Series, but the fingers of guilt extended far beyond these eight ballplayers. Carney states, If baseball reflects America, then in this story we see corporate America, reflected in the White Sox and Major League Baseball, silencing whistle-blowers, keeping real investigators off the trail, controlling the damage and the spin, and finally, when the lid is blown, keeping the focus on eight employees, as if they alone had "guilty knowledge." (xv) This seems to be supported by the fact that only select parts of the accused players' testimonies were reported in the papers, which, in turn, were controlled by the owners. Carney's perspective is that the lords of baseball knew what was going on during and after the fact, yet tried desperately to cover it up and retain public favor so baseball would not go the way of boxing and horse racing. Even Landis's attribution of equal guilt to all eight players may have served to cover the roles of the owners in this sordid mess. The setting for the "Big Fix" was a different scene from today's. In 1919 baseball and gambling were strongly connected. It was not unusual to see Arnold Rothstein, a big-time New York City gambler, in the luxury box of Charles Stoneham, owner of the New York Giants. For years, baseball owners had closed their eyes to the gambling problems plaguing baseball. Carney states, Baseball was in the stranglehold of gamblers, and had been for some time. Gambling and cheating in baseball were not isolated . . . nor were these activities indulged in only by players. The Black Sox scandal was more like the tip of an iceberg. But Major League Baseball could not let that become widely known, or the sport would collapse. (237) Carney's book raises more questions than it answers. He presents conflicting testimony, confessions and subsequent denials, and the "disappearance" of grand jury testimonies. Carney states, There was too much monkey business—competing syndicates double-crossing each other, stiffing players, players stiffing players, players telling other players who's in and who's not, but lying, perhaps. Then there's the problem of the players who were in on the fix changing their minds—possibly at different times, maybe even during games. (270) Did some of the players who were initially in on the fix want out, but couldn't remove themselves for fear of reprisal from gamblers? And is it that obvious when a player isn't doing his best? Mistakes—errors and strikeouts, for instance—happen even when people are really trying. [End Page 144] Over the years, some have claimed that the idea of fixing the 1919 World Series came from one or more of the players on the White Sox. Others believe the plot was hatched by gamblers. Establishing exactly what happened more than eighty years after the fact is a very difficult, if not impossible, task. Carney quotes Louis Hegeman, an Illinois attorney, in a presentation on the case of Joe Jackson at the 1992 Convention of the Society for American Baseball Research: "No two historians have agreed on what occurred in the World Series of 1919 and its aftermath" (286). Rather than answering questions, Carney presents the evidence...

Worth a Billion Words? Library of Congress Pictures Online

Early in the 1911 baseball season, the Washington Senators played a series of games against the New York Highlanders (then increasingly being dubbed the “Yankees”). After two games in Washington, D.C., the Senators journeyed to New York City to play the Yankees' season opener on their home field, Hilltop Park. Patriotic decorations decked the stadium, and a band was scheduled to play. The New York-based Bain News Service was on hand to capture the scene, making photographs that could be offered to subscribing publications all over the country. The Washington Senators'infielder Herman A. “Germany” Schaefer obliged by posing simultaneously in front of and behind the camera, playfully assuming the role of photographer for the Bain News Service's coverage of the event. (See figure 1.)1 Schaefer was known for antics that entertained fans and buoyed up his teammates, so it is not surprising that the news photographer focused on him to depict the high spirits that accompanied the start of the season. Although Schaefer could not have known that he was about to launch the best hitting year of his career, both players and fans were likely already in a mood to celebrate that April. The unseasonably bad weather that had marred preseason play was starting to break. Moreover, the Yankees and the New York Giants had just agreed to share Hilltop Park for the season in the wake of a disastrous fire that swept through the Polo Grounds, the home field of the Giants. An even more tragic fire had swept through the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory downtown less than a month before. The Bain News Service carried grim pictures of the aftermath, and the New York Times was still regularly covering the Triangle factory story. The pleasures of the game and attendant hoopla could certainly have offered welcome distraction from the horrifying realities of the fire and the exploitive labor practices it highlighted.2

The First Army-Navy Baseball Game

Baseball folklore has it that Abner Doubleday chased the cows out Elihu Phinney's cow pasture on an afternoon in 1839 and thus was inspired to invent the game baseball.1 While home on leave from the United States Military Academy, Cadet Doubleday drew up the rules and designed playing field, the baseball diamond, blazed the trail to the exciting game which has become America's national pastime.2Yet organized baseball at West Point did not take shape until 1863, when small group cadets applied for permission to procure the necessary equipment and play game baseball.3 Their request was approved. By 1867, the regulations were published for members the Corps Cadets to play baseball. The sport would provide exercise for the cadets and amusement for the good citizens Highland Falls [located just outside the gates West Point].4 Games were played on the southeast corner the parade field, in an open area between the cadet barracks and the academic building. The game quickly gained many followers and by the 1890s, West Point cadets were fielding team to compete against other colleges and universities.Cadets George White (Class 1891), Jay Morrow (1891), Billy Pattison (1893), and John Rice (1893) established Army's first varsity baseball team in 1890. The inaugural extramural game was played on the first Saturday August 1890, against the Riverton Club Philadelphia. The eight-inning contest ended in an 8-8 tie, but baseball had come to West Point to stay. The sport gained popularity, opening a new field for the expenditure cadet energy.5 Because the success Cadets White, Morrow, Pattison, and Rice had made with baseball, Dennis Michie organized the United States Military Academy's first football team the following autumn.The SetupTen years later, during the winter 1900-1901, athletic leaders at West Point and Annapolis arranged series baseball games between the two academies. The first Army- Navy baseball game would be played in the spring 1901, with the cadets traveling to Annapolis, Maryland, to play the midshipmen. In his annual briefing to the President the Army Athletic Association, First Lieutenant Leon B. Kromer, the Army's Officer Representative for Baseball in 1901, recounted how the baseball team used professional assistance to strengthen the skills its players. He wrote,A game with the Naval Cadets being ahead us it was resolved by all to leave no stone unturned to develop the best team possible. Accordingly, Mr. George Davis, Manager and Captain the New York National League Team, was engaged to come up on Saturdays during February and March to the candidates in batting. He came and his work was successful; upon his advice Mr. Charles Irvine was secured to stay with the team for the month preceding the Navy game. The two came up together several times and when Mr. Davis left to join his own team, great deal progress had been made, and we were on the right road.6In January 1901, George Davis the New York Giants, future Hall Fame inductee, had agreed with Lieutenant Kromer to coach our baseball nine for consideration $25.00 and expenses.7 The motion to hire Mr. Davis was moved, seconded, and carried by the Army Athletic Council. Six weeks later, the council also carried motion to close with Charles Irvine as baseball coach. In 1901, Davis was star on the National League's New York Giants and teammate Sammy Strang Nicklin, future Army manager. Irvine was close friend Davis, and he coached the team for the month preceding the Army-Navy game, proving himself to be most capable and to him is due in great measure the success the team.8 Irvine had played professional baseball in Kansas City (of the Western League) and Providence (of the Eastern League). He had also gained much experience as of various college teams throughout the states. …