Archive for the ‘Book Reviews’ Category

 

Marc Blau, who gave me assistance with my Clark Griffith biography, has a new book out on Tacoma baseball – plenty of photos and some good insight.

 

At a discussion this morning in Columbia, Maryland about Roy Campanella with Neil Lanctot and a room-full of SABR and baseball enthusiasts.

One of the points was Campanella’s dwindled status in baseball/cultural circles. Like many ballplayers, his place in cultural literacy doesn’t necessay reflect the esteem that serious baseball history fans have for him. Nonetheless, he is certainly worth exploring.

Lanctot’s portrait seems comprehensive and well worth the read. He even interviewed the police officiers on the scene during Campy’s accident. Lanctot wrote for a general audience but there are enough baseball nuggets there for the serious fan. Worth the time and expense of picking this one up. (A lot of material here for the Jackie Robinson fan as well.)

 

Chapter 4: The Cauldron of Baseball

John Thorn continues his myth busting in Chapter 4. The target this time is the genteel image of the Knickerbockers and the ideals of amateurism. To prove his case, Thorn presents the toughs of the previously unknown New York Magnolia Ball Club, a misdeed by Alexander Cartwright and some sorted history in the game of cricket.

Thorn argues that the time-honored belief that baseball reared solely from the respected class is thwarted by the Magnolias, a group of politically active, saloon-owning, Irish sports and criminals.

All three Magnolia officers had impeccable working-class, sporting, ruffian, and political associations of the sort that historians have until now presumed to emerge only with the unruly Brooklyn clubs of the mid-1850s, notably the Atlantics. Indeed, the Magnolia was precisely the sort of poison for which the fastidious Knickerbocker Base Ball Club was created as an antidote two years later.

The leap here is that enough of New York society and future baseball public wasn’t put-off enough by the hardened men – that played for the Magnolias – for them in their perhaps brief existence to have had an influence – at least as a beacon of things to avoid or a harbinger of things to come.

The Magnolias played at Elysian Fields as early as November 1843 (two years before the Knickerbockers). Thorn claims that the New York Club played there during this time as well but he doesn’t clearly explain how he knows this, to my reading. The implication then is that the lawyer William Wheaton and other respectable members of the New Yorks later formed the Knickerbockers and managed their membership base in an effort to shun potential troublemakers.

This is probably so since the Knickerbocker club was a social organization and men of similar ilk tend to hang together, and avoid those they cannot relate to. However, men of all ilks were/are drawn to the game. Clashes, and there would be many over the next century, were inevitable.

The intent of these reviews was to examine early baseball. After this chapter Thorn moves into the professional ball era and thus I’ll end my summaries.

 

Chapter 2: Four Fathers, Two Roads

Debunking, Re: Alexander Cartwright

At Best he may be credited with recruiting players for a club he, along with fellow baseball devotees, wished to form.

As to ninety feet, nine men, and nine innings, the accomplishments engraved on Alexander Cartwright’s plaque in the Baseball Hall of Fame, it may be said with certainty that neither he nor the Knickerbockers originated any of these central features…

During Cartwright’s time with the Knickerbockers (he left within a few years to pursue gold on the west coast), the number of players per side, distance between the bases and innings played was never set; in fact, then, the winner was the first team to score 21 runs.

…Cartwright also did not create certain other features sometimes credited to him: the fixed pitching distance that endured as forty-five feet until 1880, or the requirement that a ball be caught on the fly to register an out, or a system for calling balls and strikes. In short, the creation of modern baseball awaited a distant day, long after “the man who invented baseball” had made Hawaii his permanent home.

…Cartwright was further credited with laying out the game on a diamond rather than a square. Yet even this was no innovation in 1845.

Cartwright’s son and particularly his grandson pushed the idea (around the time of the Mills’ Commission) of Alexander’s innovative contributions to the formation of the sport. Their boasts (some a manipulation of history and others an outright fabrication, including fraudulent journal entries) were accepted and ultimately landed Cartwright in the Hall of Fame.

Cartwright and Doubleday were accepted as the game’s originators for much the same reason – “proving” the game’s American origins.

Debunking, Re: Knickerbockers

Their claim to fame rests in:

• Being the first to organize as a baseball club
• Creating written by-laws and rules for play (formalized on 9/23/1845)
• Eliminating soaking
• Devising concept of ‘foul territory;’ however

It appears today, however, that they were neither the first club to organize nor the first to write down their rules, and that the concepts of tagging, forced outs, and boundaries were likewise not original with them.

At least five such clubs preceded the Knickerbockers, who for a century and a half have received too much credit.

They are (from New York):

• Gothams (1830s, aka Washington)
• New York Base Ball Club
• Eagles (1840)
• Brooklyn Base Ball Club (part of the Union Star Cricket Club)
• Magnolia Ball Club (1843)

The Olympic Ball Club of Philadelphia (1831-1833, town ball), who played a version of the English game rounders, is also worth considering. They eventually adopted the New York rules in 1860.

There may be a lineage between the New Yorks, Gothams and Knickerbockers.

Early Mentions of Baseball

These earlier references should also be noted:

• 1784 laws against ball playing at the University of PA
• 1805 reference to the game “bace” at Columbia College in NYC
• 1823 reference to a contest connected to a local NYC bar, Jones’ Retreat
• 1829 mention of ball playing in Philadelphia
• 1830 mention of 18 men playing ball outside an orphanage in the January issue of The American Sunday School Magazine

Early references involving children and women:

• 1744 mention in children’s book by John Newberry
• 1755 mention in John Kidgell’s The Card
• 1755 mention in diary of William Bray
• 1791 laws against ball playing in Pittsfield, MA
• 1798 mention in English novel Northanger Abbey by Jane Austen
• 1824 mention in Mary Russell Mitford’s Our Village
• 1825 in Baltimore, recollection of John W. Oliver

Early American Versions of Bat, Base and Ball Games

Thorn examines the important ball games and their varying rules and style of play in New York, Philadelphia and New England. Some are:

• Cat, various versions
• Cricket
• Round ball
• Rounders
• Town ball (undetermined early name other than ‘playing ball’)
• Wicket, various versions including single-wicket cricket

Four Fathers

Thorn cites four men who did have a meaningful influence on the game’s early development:

• Doc Adams
• William Wheaton
• William Tucker
• Louis Wadsworth

Doc Adams

• Earned a medical degree from Harvard in 1838
• Began playing baseball in New York in 1839 with other doctors
• Joined Knickerbockers one month after their formation
• Left Knickerbockers in early 1862
• Baseball’s first shortstop
• According to Adams: “Some of the younger members [of the New York Club]…got together and formed the Knickerbocker Base Ball Club”

William Wheaton

• Lawyer
• Cricket player
• Member of Gotham club
• Member of New York Base Ball Club
• One of five original 1845 Knickerbockers to head west during the Gold Rush of 1849
• Member of Knickerbockers from 1845 to the Spring of 1846
• Settled in San Francisco
• Umpired at least two contests before the Knickerbockers began inter-team play – in October 1845, New York versus Brooklyn
• Umpired first Knickerbocker contest (intra-squad) at Hoboken’s Elysian Fields on October 6, 1845
• Thorn believes he is the one – being the lawyer of the bunch – that penned the Knickerbockers’ formal rules

The Gothams had previously established written rules in the 1830s. Wheaton asserted that the Knickerbockers’ later version was nearly identical to Gothams.’

William Tucker

• Tobacco merchant
• Member of New York Base Ball Club
• One of five original 1845 Knickerbockers
• On by-law committee with Wheaton

Louis Wadsworth

• Attorney for Custom House
• Moved to NYC in 1848
• Joined the Gothams
• Noted first baseman
• Joined the Knickerbockers in 1854
• Returned to Gothams in mid 1857
• Thorn claims, “He is the man responsible for baseball being played to nine innings and with nine men.” Interesting must-read story of this on pp. 51-53
• Became a judge in Union County
• Blew a fortune and died in a porrhouse

Chapter 3: The Cradle of Baseball

Chapter 3 begins with a discussion of the ancient bat and ball games in order to identify the origins of baseball – which in all likelihood can’t be pinpointed, as Thorn notes.

Looking to establish the physical origin of the game – like Cooperstown, Pittsfield (MA) or perhaps Philadelphia, Thorn notes “Pittsfield is a fine place to honor the spirit of baseball.” Of course, noting his personal discovery of the 1791 legal citation in that city influences this perception.

Thorn continues his slap at the Knickerbockers mythology claiming, “As in so many many … thing, they were not the first.” Thorns cites their claim to fame as stemming from the fact that they survived the longest – hence the victors tend to rewrite history or its often unduly bestowed on them.

Thorn raises a good point in this chapter as to why in the 1830s or 1840s that Americans finally felt the need to put to print the rules and regulation of baseball. I discussed this more in length in a previous post.

 

Summary

Baseball in the Garden of Eden by John Thorn

A modest and infrequent post summarizing the work.

The book is presented, in part, as a debunking piece about the true origins of baseball, not only shooing away the already discredited Doubleday myth but other equally untenable histories such as the excessive credit bestowed on Alexander Cartwright and the Knickerbocker Club.

John Thorn presents new material and reexamines old in an effort to get to the heart of what actually occurred during the 19^th century. The title of the book, referencing Adam and Eve, is an ever-present reminder that bat and ball related games have been played since long before recorded history began; hence, we must acknowledge that whatever material is found and presented is only part of the story.

What we can grasp, hopefully, is the genesis and growth of the organized game. That is the main focus of Mr. Thorn’s work – an effort to part the muddy waters, so to speak, and lead us to the promise land of clarity through new research and a reevaluation of preconceived notions.

Chapter 1, Anointing Abner

Constrained by the lack of evidence in another direction, [A.G.] Mills …knew he would have no choice…but to anoint as baseball’s inventory young Abner Doubleday.

This is how Thorn sums up Mills’ commitment to the findings of his committee, the Mill’s Commission – a group amassed in the early 20^th century to examine the issue of baseball’s paternity. In other words Mills was “duped” into anointing Doubleday the founder of baseball and the town of Cooperstown, New York as its birthplace.

For one, Mills knew very well that Doubleday did no such thing. The two were friends for twenty years and not once did Doubleday mention his baseball youth to Mills, a well-known former president of the National League. Later asked, “What conclusive evidence he had for Cooperstown as the birthplace of the national pastime,” Mills flatly replied, “None at all.”

The Mills Commission stemmed from a difference of opinion between Al Spalding and Henry Chadwick, who repeatedly claimed that baseball emanated from the English game of rounders. Spalding, on the other hand, preferred a more American flavor to the game’s origin.

In forming the commission Spalding tipped his hand and displayed a want for a specific outcome from the investigation:

I have become weary of listening to my friend Chadwick’s talk about base ball having been handed down from the old English game of “Rounders,” and am trying to convince myself and others that the American game of Base Ball is purely of American origin, and I want to get all the facts I can to support that theory. My patriotism naturally makes me desirous of establishing it as of American origin…”

It was an old Cooperstown resident Abner Graves that came to Spalding’s rescue. Graves remitted the letter that sparked the Doubleday Myth which took on a life of its own after being published in several newspapers in 1905 – even before Spalding latched onto it.

In March 1908, the Spalding Guide published the findings of the Mills’ Commission anointing Abner; thus, in Thorn’s opinion Spalding with his preconceived outcome and publishing empire was Mills’ duper.

In the war of the media, Spalding won out over Chadwick – as the latter passed away a mere month after the findings were published. Though Chadwick was able to fire off a letter asking Mills to reconcile the fact that, “The old Philadelphia Town Ball Club played [a form of baseball] under the “Rounders” rule…in 1831, eight years earlier [than the 1839 date ascribed to Doubleday]”

Mills to his credit remained on the hunt for the true origins of the game. In 1908, in particular, he made efforts to place and chronicle the early efforts of Louis Fenn Wadsworth.

 

Book Review

Dave Larson’s Wide Awakes, Invincibles, & Smokestackers: Early Baseball in Tall Timber Country

$25, 2006, 174 pages, from Kirk House Publishers, Minneapolis, www.kirkhouse.com

At first glance Dave Larson’s Wide Awakes, Invincibles, & Smokestackers might be passed up as a mere kid’s book with its cartoon cover featuring a Paul Bunyan-type figure. The title is odd enough to evoke various degrees of interest, confusion or perhaps even apathy. In truth, the material is about the beginnings of the game in a remote outpost of the Pacific Northwest – the Puget Sound area in Washington State and into Canada. The title refers to various regional team nicknames, which if researched are odd and potentially silly no matter what part of the country one studies.

The work is a compilation of stories and game accounts from local sportswriters taken verbatim. A little narrative, prospective and insight is scattered throughout the work, including a few short biographies of significant figures. Twenty full-page cartoon depictions are scattered throughout the text. More interesting are the 50-plus black and white photographs, mainly group shots, quite a few which surely haven’t been seen outside the area for decades. A personal favorite was the Stanwood club of 1891, “Champions of Snohomish and Skagit Counties.”  Wide Awakes, Invincibles, & Smokestackers is billed as “entertaining” and “humorous” with stories from a simpler time. And, it is.

The work doesn’t pretend to be a comprehensive history of the sport in the area. Rather, it gives us snapshots from local scribes which when added up portrays the underside of the game which is often overlooked today. There are no flashy major league personalities or star-studded facilities to capture our attention. They’re on the other side of the country. What is noticed though is the development of the game from one community’s perspective. At times they adapted their own rules and always they portrayed their personality.

The hardworking men and women of Puget Sound drove as much energy into their play time as they did their daily responsibilities. They knew how to have a good time and take the sport for what it is, essentially entertainment. They were also steadfastly biased, staunchly supportive of their local nine. The battles with the big city teams, Seattle and Tacoma, were taken very seriously and sparked more than their share of heated debate. Eventually, the ball clubs of Puget Sound branched out and joined the network of leagues and communities which united the country and formed the industry we know today. The stories along the way show the Pacific Northwest as unique in the development of baseball as any other outpost.

The story of baseball in the Washington Territory began before statehood, before the attachment to the transcontinental railroad and even before the clearing of the land. In the beginning the game was played in unlevel meadows with scattered ditches, potholes, water traps and tree stumps underfoot. If the area of Puget Sound was known for its tall timber, it was known for tall aspirations as well. The first citation starts appropriately enough with a supposedly inexperienced group of men who formed a nine in Port Townsend in 1869. Thoughts weren’t as much on daily practice and skill building as on a proposed grandiose excursion to the biggest city in the west, San Francisco, to take on and, of course, defeat the top area club.

Six years later, another story tells us that the game was still in its infancy in that part of the country. It also speaks to the fortitude and spirit of the frontiersmen. “Several clerks, a mining engineer and two trappers” challenged some local miners to a contest. It’s interesting to note that, “few of the miners had ever seen a base ball and most of them scarcely knew the game existed, but they were not about to take a back seat…so they accepted the challenge.” The contest was halted for a time while the men bickered about the practice of stopping batted balls with their feet instead of their hands.

Even in 1877, a sportswriter was concerned for the novice ballplayers that seemed to take more than their share of balls to the mouth, eye or head. He declared that luckily there was not a “fatal case of base ball yet,” but he warned, “The undertaker is waiting impatiently.”

Another story tells of the Snohomish Pacifics who took off for Seattle by steamer only to run aground in a sand bar. They had to paddle a row boat seven miles before catching up with another steamboat.

The 1884 territorial championship pitted Snohomish against Seattle in a best of three series. Seattle pulled out the rubber match to take the crown but Snohomish proved to be a worthy adversary and would prove itself a force in the area during the decade and into the next.

By the 1890s, the larger cities, Tacoma and Seattle, were dominating and a heated rivalry developed between the two that of course fed the typically raucous crowds. Enthusiasm dictated that wire reports were sent back to the home city of the visitors. In a scene reminiscent of the next century’s World Series ado, men and women gathered on the streets where announcements were made with the incoming reports after each half inning. Blackboards posted the scores and significant events. The cities took pride in a 22-inning contest in 1891 which was said to be the longest pro contest on record. Tacoma and Seattle formed the core of the area’s first foray into the big time, the Pacific Northwest League of 1892, which included a slew of familiar names including Hall of Famer Clark Griffith.

On the lighter side, a “scrub” game in Snohomish in 1893 pitted players in “all stages of dress and undress and various conditions of uniform.” Local personalities, some dressed in clown outfits, fill the pages. The writers of the era, as today, focused on the colorful storylines and characters. At times, style won out over substance but all-in-all their entertaining prose leaps from the pages and emits a homespun feeling. Who wouldn’t want to take a lazy steamer trip with family and friends to a nearby town and play or watch a hard-fought game with a local rival and then traipse to the nearby Poodle Dog Café for a feast fit for a king and a good bit of braggadocio between bites?

However, baseball is baseball after all. Puget Sound was no different than any other area when it came to gambling, charges of game-fixing, rowdy crowds, threats against reporters, excessive drinking, criminal activity and fisticuffs. Also, umpires figure prominently in Larson’s work. Outside the normal kicking (arguing) and baiting, umpires were subject to physical abuse and bombardments of rotten vegetables and eggs.

Another universal aspect of the game is hero-worship, and there was enough to go around. Walter Thornton was a particular favorite. An orphan, he moved to Snohomish as a teenager and became the first from the area to make the majors. Local newspapermen funded his attendance at Cornell College where he was noticed by the great Cap Anson. He joined the club now known as the Chicago Cubs after his first college season. In 1901, Thornton managed and played first base for the locally heralded Everett team, an independent squad, which won its first 27 contests. Everett’s pitcher was Fred Schock, a member of the University of Washington nine. He shut out each of the three big professional clubs – Tacoma, Seattle and Spokane. In 14 games that season, Schock averaged nearly ten strikeouts a contest.

The 1905 Everett Smokestackers won the Northwestern League pennant. The nine included longtime ballplayer and manager Billy Hulen, who appeared in two seasons in the majors, and outfielder Heinie Heitmuller who played for Connie Mack in Philadelphia from 1909-1910. Heitmuller died near the end of the 1912 season of typhoid fever, but his batting average was strong enough to finish for the lead in the Pacific Coast League. Another local ballplayer of note was Thomas Bird who rode with Teddy Roosevelt’s Rough Riders.

Larson also presents extended pieces on excursions (trips from town to town), steamships, Native American and female baseball and various local challenge matches, such as Fats vs. Leans and Bachelors vs. Married Men.

Larson’s Wide Awakes, Invincibles, & Smokestackers takes us on a journey of not only early baseball history and the development of the game, but gives us a glimpse into the characters and personalities of the northwest. The scribes of the day hold little back. If they felt cheated, they ranted and raved and outright accused. Conversely, if the hometown team lost to a stronger nine, they sucked it up and readily admitted so. The ballplayers and teams of Puget Sound may not be familiar to us today but their quest to play the game and to enjoy it always will.

Dave Larson’s Wide Awakes, Invincibles, & Smokestackers: Early Baseball in Tall Timber Country

$25, 2006, 174 pages, from Kirk House Publishers, Minneapolis, www.kirkhouse.com