Vintage Baseball

[Tomasso]

Boy that was a great series. I haven't even watched an inning of this one but I'll tune in for the seventh game if it happens.

 

[David Conwill]

I was looking for vintage shots of a sporting-event crowd c. 1933 (still am, if anyone has one), and found this thread instead. I just read it all, and I must say it was a great read.

I’m not really a sports guy, but I’ve long held that American reverence for the game of baseball. It definitely gave me a warm feeling to travel the annals of baseball history with you folks.

Thanks!

-Dave

 

[LizzieMaine]

Fans in the stands by Boston Public Library, on Flickr

(Fenway Park, c. 1934)

 

[V.C. Brunswick]

I was looking for vintage shots of a sporting-event crowd c. 1933 (still am, if anyone has one), and found this thread instead.

While not really actual vintage per se, I've always liked the whole look of the film Eight Men Out.

[video=youtube;NZYltpZT0KI]http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=endscreen&NR=1&v=NZYltpZT0KI[/video]

In this scene the player getting hit by the ball was the signal that the fix was on.
[video=youtube;33eDOoV7Umk]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=33eDOoV7Umk&feature=related[/video]

 

[Tomasso]

That looks like Hugh Hefner's old man.......

 

[David Conwill]

Thanks, folks!

-Dave

 

[LizzieMaine]

W
In this scene the player getting hit by the ball was the signal that the fix was on.

That player was Morrie Rath -- a decent second baseman who is remembered today only because Eddie Cicotte plunked him in the back. And yet his fate was more tragic than any of the other players in that Series -- he killed himself at the age of 58. Interestingly, he broke in with the White Sox in 1912, and knew most of the conspirators well.

There's a story there waiting to be told.

 

[Tomasso]

Phillie fans would and once actually did boo Santa Claus.

[video=youtube;AWvza6en5Rg]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AWvza6en5Rg[/video]

 

[St.Ignatz]

Yo Lizzie and A.C., that wasn't the REAL Santa so lighten up.

 

[Tomasso]

Yo Lizzie and A.C., that wasn't the REAL Santa so lighten up.

lol Yeah, but you booed the REAL Mike Schmidt. :eusa_doh:

 

[St.Ignatz]

lol Yeah, but you booed the REAL Mike Schmidt. :eusa_doh:

Never the man. We knew what he was capable of and expressed our displeasure when he didn't deliver at the plate. If you are a visiting player in Philadelphia and don't get booed then you must not be very good. There are guidelines to booing in Philadelphia.

 

[pgoat]

Great thread. I believe a few of us once posted here a while back about playing old school ball - I once played in a league that had 1860s style and 1880s (I played the latter). We wore cotton uniforms but they were a heavy serge type fabric clearly made to visually resemble wool. The jerseys often had bib-style button fronts and the hats were shallow crowned with short brims. We basically played on teams using the names and colors of actual old defunct local teams in that area.

The ball itself was slightly larger than today's, made of horsehide, with crisscrossed stitched seams. The balls started off firm enough but became mushy quite rapidly after a few games. Neither era allowed for mitts although the 1880s did accept fingerless work gloves - which were sometimes used by our first basemen. I should mention catchers in the 1880s games wore full modern padding and masks, and used a regular catcher's mitt in the interest of injury prevention. The 1860s league allowed flies to be caught with a player's cap (!) and a fly caught on the first bounce was considered an 'out.'

There was only one ump - dressed as the local preacher - and they stood behind the pitcher. There was no mound but we laid the field out on a slope with the plate slightly lower to give the pitcher some help. Bases were a 90 foot diamond and the balls/strikes were 5/4 respectively, for a walk or strike out. You had to be up there cutting, if it was close, it was called a strike. Forehead to shins and anything remotely close to the sides of the plate was a called strike.

The good news was it was slow pitch in the 1860s - underhand in some cases, but regular fast pitch in the 1880s. We had some pretty amazing players. A pitcher on my team threw everything from sliders to screwballs to knucklers. We had guys who'd played in college and the minors - one guy was so fast he got to first in somewhere around 4-5 seconds with no problem. He had a few inside the park HRs in the time I played there. Amazing to watch. Another guy on my team was huge and had a picture perfect swing; he teed off regularly with home runs over the fence.

You had to be VERY strong to hit those balls far - this was the 'dead ball' remember. When you made solid contact it sounded like a whip cracking. I was not a power hitter and I once got one very solid hit off a pitcher whom I hit well. From the way it felt I was thrilled - with a modern ball I am pretty sure it would have come close to clearing the fence, something quite unusual for me. But the dead ball just died at the top of its arc and landed softly in the bare hands of the other team's shortstop!

It was a lot of fun playing in those games. Crowds loved them and we all had a great time as well. The players would walk around the benches (no dugouts) and talk with the fans in character. We adopted silly names you'd see in the first century of ball - Dizzy, Country Boy, etc. My name was "monk"

 

[V.C. Brunswick]

Sounds like lots of fun! Got any pics?

 

[pgoat]

alas, no pics from my playing days (early 1990s).

but here is a link to their fb page, with photos. There are some modern uniforms (NY Yankees, etc) in the "ghost game" pic, but the other ones with the bibs are like the ones we wore. I was on the Huntington Suffolks; they were one of the "H" jerseys, i think Hicksville was the other..

 

[pgoat]

one of the team sites has this page with rules for each era

 

[bil_maxx]

My favorite baseball movie is a League of their Own, weird huh?

Mine too. I had a teacher who actually played in that league and still spoke fondly of it 60 years later. She was almost 90 when she died in 2007.

 

[LizzieMaine]

A major predecessor to the AAGPBL was the Bloomer Girls -- a network of women's professional baseball teams that barnstormed the country in the teens and twenties taking on all comers.

The Bloomer Girls operation ran like a vaudeville circuit, with dozens of teams on the road at the same time, going from town to town taking on local town teams, factory teams, black teams, and even other barnstorming units like the House of David. The vast majority of players were women in their late teens and early twenties, but occasionally a slight, feminine-looking young man would slip in as a ringer, playing in a wig and other appropriate modifications and hoping no one would catch on. The most famous graduate of the Bloomer Girls was in fact a man -- Smoky Joe Wood, an overpowering pitcher who went on to lead the Red Sox to the 1912 World Championship by winning 34 games that season. His record as a Bloomer Girl is lost to the ages, but he did spend a bewigged summer touring with them.

 

[TimeWarpWife]

Had I been aware of baseball in the 1960s, I probably would have liked it. But, being a girly-girl and under 10 years old for all of that decade, I never paid attention to the games when my dad, uncle, grandfather, and male cousins watched it on TV or listened to it on the radio. When I see pre-1970s movies or documentaries about it, I wish I'd been able to be a part of the great American pasttime. The professional baseball we have today isn't even a ghost of its former self, but IMO, just another big business with overpaid prima donnas with attitudes who don't play the game for love of it, but for how much money they can make and how famous they can be. I did come to love football in the 70s, so I got in on the tail end of professional players actually playing because they loved the game, rather than getting paid a boatload of money for it. Back then, most professional players had jobs during the off-season - including my all-time favorite player, the legendary Roger Staubach - to support themselves and their families. Ah, the good old days.

 

[LizzieMaine]

It was actually my grandmother who taught me to love The Game -- she lived and died with the Red Sox, had the radio on during every game of the season, even the late-night games from the Coast, and I only wish she could have lived to see them win it all. She taught me who on the team you could count on and who was a bum -- she had a thing for scrappy utility infielders like Dalton Jones and John Kennedy, and she despised overpaid, overweight second-rate pitchers like Bob "Sad Sack" Stanley -- and every time I yell back at the screen during a bonehead play I think of her.

Baseball was the lingua franca of our neighborhood when I was growing up -- it was the one common thread that connected everyone I knew. Any time of the year, no matter what the circumstances, you could turn to the person next to you, say "How 'bout them Sox?" and you'd get a conversation going. That, to me, is what made The Game great -- its value as a vehicle for cultural adhesion.

 

[Tomasso]

A major predecessor to the AAGPBL was the Bloomer Girls .

There were also the company teams. I had an aunt who captained the baseball and basketball teams at Western Electric in the 30's. She received the salary of a middle manager without ever holding down a real job. She was in essence a professional athlete.