OK, last week I gave you Whitman and Melville. While I’m still on a literary jag, let me offer this bouquet of Shakespeare quotations on baseball, gathered by Henry Chadwick in 1868. The play’s the thing, after all.  Shakespeare’s other recognized contributions to baseball’s dramatic literature include The Comedy of Errors, A Midsummer Night’s Dream (referencing the Al-Star Game), and, of course, The Speed Merchant of Venice. As Father Chadwick wrote, “Old Billy, ye play writer, must have been ball player once. Read what he says:”

“I will fear to catch.”—Timon.

“What works, my countrymen, in hand? Where go you with bats and clubs?” —Coriolanus.

“Let us see you in the field.”—Troilus and Cressida.

“The very way to catch them.”—Coriolanus.

Nerd fun, for sure.

[This essay by Don Jensen continues from Part 1, which appeared in this space yesterday.] Finally, Nick’s success came from courting customers who represented not so much the opposite of the High Victorian gentility, but rather its underside: namely, the world of sport, or the sporting life. The world of the uncultivated macho dandy whose love of sport had nothing to do with High Victorian “athletics” and everything to do with, simply, the eternal gamble against Fate. His patrons would bet on anything, and were therefore willing to turn loose all the minor vices that were kept leashed in the social sphere above them.³² There were plenty of chances as soon as one stepped out of the Home Plate’s front door.

Baseball and show business were intermingled elements of the sporting life. The New York newspapers listed the Giants’ games, which began at 3:30 in the afternoon, together with the evening’s theater offerings and ads for the town’s menu of variety, burlesque, and freak shows. A benefit ballgame between actors and journalists at the Polo Grounds in September 1888 for the dying minstrel Carl Rankin was “one of the funniest games of ball in American history,” according to The New York Times. The journalists came out on the field in a spare set of Giants uniforms; the actors wore stage costumes, while Nick, decked out in a Tyrolean yodeler suit, “stood guard over the inevitable keg of beer at third base.” The game was called at the end of the eighth inning “out of mercy to the spectators who were so exhausted with laughter as to scarcely be able to rise from their seats. Nick and other members of the fund committee turned over $1,200 to the ailing musician.”33

Critics occasionally said that Engel kept such a high profile because it was good for business, but many more defended him. “I know him pretty well,” said journalist W. L. Harris in 1891, “have traveled with him to Philadelphia a great many times to see games, and know him to be a Simon-pure crank. He would rather see a ball game than eat the finest dinner, and that is saying a good deal, for Nick is a good liver.”34

The “High and Mighty Order of Baseball Cranks of Gotham” 

Nick Engel sometimes called himself “Umpire,” but on one subject he was far from neutral: the New York Giants. There was scarcely an event in the team’s tumultuous decade after he opened the Home Plate in which Nick was not standing nearby in the sepia-toned shadows, or warming up Giants morale with one of his juicy steak dinners. Nick, along with other sporting men, formed the core of the “High and Mighty Order of Baseball Cranks of Gotham.” They attended as many games at the Polo Grounds as possible, and often accompanied the team on the road (with Nick often bringing along his stove). Engel, Bell, Hopper, and Judge Cullum, another enthusiast, had regular seats at the Polo Grounds; these were reserved for them with a padlock and chain to which they held the key.35 A Giants home game, recalled an old-timer many years later, was not supposed to begin until De Wolf Hopper arrived on his tally-ho, driving right into the park.36 Engel and Hopper organized the benefit for the team after they defeated Brooklyn in 1889 to win their second pennant in a row.

Engel was an ardent admirer of the Giants shortstop, a frequent saloon patron. Ward “is one of the brightest men I ever knew,” Engel marveled. “He can hold his own in any company, and his speech at the time the world tourists were received in New York [at Delmonico’s in 1889] was as good as any of the others.”37 The “others” included those of Chauncey Depew, and Mark Twain. Loyal above all to the players, Engel backed Ward’s Brotherhood League in the Great Rebellion of 1890 even though the revolt broke his friend John Day’s heart.38 Day “was warned they would quit him but he wouldn’t believe it,” said one crank years later. “‘What!’ says John, ‘My boys? Never.’ But they left him flat, all except Smiling Mickey Welch and Mike Tiernan.”39

The Home Plate served as the new league’s informal headquarters. “Hurrah for Judge O’Brien! Hurrah for John M. Ward! Hurrah for the Players’ National League!” were the cheers as hundreds of guests drank bumpers of wine to the health of the new league at a “wildly enthusiastic” gathering at Nick’s on January 28, 1890—the day the courts threw out the National League moguls’ attempt to enforce the reserve clause against Ward.40 Engel was a member of the New York delegation at the Players’ League convention held inClevelandin March. Despite his sympathy for the upstarts, the doors of the Home Plate remained open to players who had remained loyal to the National League.41 Engel also kept his sense of humor. Before the 1890 season began, he accepted the wager of eccentric Chicago fan Edward Everett Bell of his long locks against Nick’s “imperial” whiskers that the Chicago Players’ League club would win the pennant. The Players’ League Giants finished two games ahead of Chicago so, in payment, Engel marched Bell to the Brunswick Hotel, where a barber cropped all of Bell’s hair save a pigtail, and Giants pitcher Tim Keefe gave him an ice-water shampoo. The party then moved on to Nick’s saloon, with Bell still extolling the merits of his Chicago club. Nick saved Bell’s hair and promised to send a lock to each member of the team.42

Ward blamed the demise of the Players’ League on “stupidity, avarice, and treachery.” Its official death came shortly before noon on January 16, 1891, when it was ratified out of existence at a joint meeting of the National League and American Association. After the decision, Ward and other Players’ League leaders met at Nick’s, where they toasted each other, reminisced, and laughed in between singing off-key melodies such as “You Have Lost Your Popularity” and “My Good Old Friends Who Never Alter.” Their National League adversaries Al Spalding and Cap Anson were there, as well, celebrating their victory. Hearing the singing from a back room, the victors joined the vanquished in the main room, where there was “conventional cordiality” and a “warm and dignified” debate about all that had happened. After a round of “He’s a Good Old Has-Been,” Ward stood and gave a toast. “Pass the wine around,” said Ward, standing to give a toast. “The league is dead. Long live the league.”43

“The Prince of New York Cranks” 

The Players’ League was indeed dead, but Nick Engel’s fame continued to grow. He dabbled in Republican politics, became a leader of the Elks, and prepared steak dinners for legislators in Albany. He was one of the participants in the March 1893 annual meeting of the National League held at the Fifth Avenue Hotel, when the pitcher’s distance was moved five feet back from home plate to its modern distance of 60 feet, 6 inches. Charles H. Hoyt’s forgettable Broadway flop of 1895, A Runaway Colt—featuring Cap Anson in his theatrical debut—included a character playing Nick in the third act, in which the Colts ballclub, overweight and out of shape, worked out in the team’s gymnasium. Engel was caricatured “superbly,” according to the Brooklyn Eagle.44

Business at the saloon, still a favorite hangout of athletes, pool players, and actors, continued to be good and Nick spread it around generously. When his old friend Ned Williamson, the Chicago infielder, died in 1894, Engel sponsored a benefit for his widow. He led a fund for Charley Bennett, the Boston catcher whose legs were severed in a freak train accident in that same year. When Digby Bell’s penniless opera company was stranded in Terre Haute, Indiana, in 1895, Nick helped bail it out. But Nick had his friendly rivals. Among others, Honest John Kelly (who acquired his nickname in 1888 when, while serving as an umpire, he refused a $10,000 bribe) opened a competing Tenderloin saloon, “The Two Kels,” with baseball star Mike Kelly in 1890.

Temple Cup Victory

The player rebellion inflicted a heavy financial blow onJohn Day. In the years after the peace agreement he was forced to sell shares of Giants stock. Edward Talcott, a New York lawyer who had owned the Players’League Giants, purchased an interest in the club. As part of the transaction he insisted that Jim Mutrie be replaced as manager, even though under him the team had finished in third place in 1891. The Giants dropped to 10th under Pat Powers the next year but improved to fifth after the club brought in John Ward in 1893, by which time Talcott had acquired a controlling interest in the team. By then, however, the old sense of community between owner and players that had marked the years before the Great Player Rebellion were largely gone. Talcott looked upon the Giants primarily as a business interest.45 Instead of being junior colleagues of the owner, the players had become employees, regarded by the magnates as childish and potentially troublesome.

Players no longer referred to an owner as “our good friend,” which was [old Giants infielder] Gil Hatfield’s term for John B. Day.… Changes in attitude led to the creation of sharp social lines. Owners, even managers, no longer fraternized with their players. The easy camaraderie of Nick Engel’s Home Plate Saloon, where Day and Mutrie drank with “the boys,” was over. Their successors were only hired hands to the New York magnates of the nineties.⁴⁶

Nick Engel led a group of 160 cranks and sportswriters on a special train to Baltimore to open the 1894 season. After a pregame parade through downtown Baltimore with a band and the teams riding in carriages, the Giants lost to the Orioles by a score of 8–3 before the largest crowd in Baltimore history, more than 15,000 fans. Nick also brought along his cooking paraphernalia, and enough members of the Tenderloin Beefsteak Club attended to organize after the game a Baltimore branch of the fraternity.

The Orioles swept the series; by the end of May the Giants were in sixth place (Engel told the press that he was “disgusted” by the Giants’ play after a 16–7 loss to Brooklyn in May).47 They rallied as the season wore on, however, and finished with an 88–44 record, just three games behind Baltimore. In the postseason Temple Cup Series (a best-of-seven between the National League’s first- and second-place teams), the Giants stunned the Orioles by winning four straight. After the triumph, Engel organized a public reception for the champions at the Broadway Theatre.⁴⁸

Digby Bell recited “A Tough Boy on the Right Field Fence,” his familiar poem about a knot-holer. Hopper and his company performed “Dr. Syntax.” After a brief time backstage, Hopper returned, but the audience clamored for Ward. “There was such an uproarious demand for him that Hopper had to come to the captain’s rescue,” promising that Ward would speak soon, when the Temple Cup was formally awarded. Hopper then recited “Casey at the Bat,” and the crowd cheered. After the event had concluded, both teams retired to Nick’s place and shared reminiscences of the season just past over bumpers of beer.49

It was almost like the old days.50

Decline   

When word leaked during the 1894 season that Edward Talcott wanted to sell the Giants, many of Ward’s friends began urging the now-retired team captain, already a stockholder, to buy the team himself. Ward declined and kept to his decision to practice law. Nick Engel and other cranks then began discussing the idea of John B. Day returning to become the team’s managing director. In January 1895 Talbott found a buyer: Andrew Freedman, a real estate baron and Tammany Hall politician, who purchased 1,200 shares, nine more than an absolute majority, for $45 a share. He took over the team amid general goodwill from both press and cranks.51 Sportswriter Sam Crane wrote an article welcoming Freedman to the National League.52 On the evening of February 25, Engel tendered the team a steak dinner at the Home Plate.53 The next day Nick, Crane, and others saw the club off at Pier 35 for their voyage to spring training in Savannah. The new captain, third baseman George Davis, announced that he regarded the Giants as second to no one in the league, and that he expected to win the pennant.54

Thus began the Freedman era. It was probably the darkest period in the team’s long history. Freedman “had an arbitrary disposition,” wrote the Sporting News, “a violent temper, and an ungovernable tongue in anger which was easily provoked and he was disposed to be arbitrary to the point of tyranny with subordinates.”55 Within weeks he was making enemies. Freedman eliminated complimentary passes to the Polo Grounds for Engel, Hopper, and others; alienated the other owners in league meetings; punched Edward Hurst, a writer for the New York World, whose copy displeased him. On August 18, Sam Crane was refused admittance to the Polo Grounds after criticizing Giants management.56 Davis lasted 33 games as manager, compiling a record of 16–17 before Freedman fired him. He was followed by first baseman Jack Doyle (32–31) and Harvey Watkins (18–17), an actor who was working for Barnum and Bailey’s circus when Freedman offered him the job. The Giants finished in ninth place.

No longer welcome at the Polo Grounds, Engel continued to root for the Giants from a distance. He attended the Giants–Bridegrooms game in April 1896 at Washington Park in Brooklyn with other former members of the Gotham Rooters’ Club. (“This … will hardly please President Freedman,” remarked the Brooklyn Eagle, “as Washington is only an hour’s ride from here.”)⁵⁷ Nick detested Freedman as well. “A bond of sympathy links Nick Engel and John T. Brush [owner of the Cincinnati club and later of the Giants],” the Washington Post stated. “Nick and John T. turn on an electric fan and nestle to the windward of it when Andrew Freedman is incinerated in the fire of their cayenne confabs. And Andrew speaks equally kindly of John T. and Nick.”58 The estrangement between the club and Engel proved permanent.

On Friday afternoon, October 22, 1897, Nick was working at the Home Plate, but left early for his home on 148 West 92nd Street complaining of illness. He had not been feeling well the previous few weeks. When he reached home, the good life finally caught up to him: Nick passed away suddenly, the doctors later said, from fatty degeneration of the heart. Engel was one week short of his 53rd birthday.

The news shocked the baseball world and the theatrical “profesh.” Engel’s funeral—on October 25 at Church of the Blessed Sacrament on 72nd Street—was packed with friends from all over the city. The Elks had a supplementary service at the Scottish Rite Hall on Madison Avenue. Nick Engel was survived by his wife Teresa, six children, and his brother Adam. “Oh, the memory of the jovial hours, the inviting odors of gently broiling steaks and chops, foaming ale, and the only profitable, real bohemianism ever cultivated in America, which arises with the name of Nick Engel!” wrote Leslie, the Beefsteak Club veteran.⁵⁹

Transition

The neighborhood had been changing for years, though Nick had seemed too preoccupied with Freedman and the Giants to pay much attention. The sporting life had been gradually becoming more open and fluid—more modern. The stretch between Madison Square and 42nd Street had become known as the “Upper Rialto,” and the night life was spilling even beyond. A portrait of New York published in 1899 noted, “The best and worst of it is to be met here—stars, supers, soubrettes, specialists and managers alike…. The life of the street is as active at midnight as at noon, for the theatres create a constant patronage for the restaurants, which are crowded up to the early hours of the morning.”60 The best and worst were gradually strolling northward, away from the Home Plate and toward what in 1904 was christened Times Square, after the New York Times Building that was in construction. The term the “Gay White Way came into currency … defining an area from the Hoffman House at Twenty-Sixth Street to Rectors [the first and greatest of the lobster palaces], between Forty-Third and Forty-Fourth Streets….” 61 And Broadway was becoming sexy— not crude, like the Tenderloin, but suggestive and racy.

Nick Engel’s friend, Honest John Kelly, established a house on 45th Street that included a saloon on the ground floor, gambling on the second, and Kelly’s domicile on the third.62 At a luncheon in April 1899, small cards were placed on tables at Delmonico’s on Madison Square announcing that the establishment would close on the 18th of the month. A new version opened at 44th Street.

Nick’s sons Adam and Nick Jr. tried to carry on their father’s legacy. There was a “jolly” Tenderloin Club dinner with Buck Ewing and Joe Vila and others in December 1898, just like Nick used to cater. But the Giants were bad and many of the old regulars were no longer around. The sons sold the Home Plate itself in 1902, the year the Flatiron Building opened to announce the arrival of commerce on Madison Square. By then, the saloon had long since disappeared from the newspapers, though later there was one embarrassing incident for those who remembered the saloon in its heyday. The Washington Post disclosed in 1907 that John Montgomery Ward had notified James Conry, a later owner of the Home Plate, that he was going to court to regain possession of an old photograph of the 1894 Temple Cup–champion Giants that had hung on the saloon’s walls. Ward insisted that he had lent the picture to Nick Engel with the understanding that it would be returned, while Conry maintained that he purchased everything in the café when he closed the deal. More poignantly still, Nick’s prized photo of King Kelly, the paper noted, had mysteriously disappeared.”63

Always an ardent Giants fan, in his advanced years Freddie Engel lived on West 116th Street, not far from the first Polo Grounds. He kept with him the remaining photographs of the Giants that had hung in his father’s establishment. In 1957, Freddie refused to attend the last Giants game before their move to San Francisco. If he went to the game, he told The New York Times, he would have to admit that the Giants were irretrievably lost to him.64

Andrew Freedman sold the Giants to John T. Brush in 1902 after the worst season in their history. The team revived quickly under Brush, giving Digby Bell and the other cranks much to root for. With John McGraw as manager, the Giants won league championships in 1904 and 1905, beginning a golden new era for the club. Freedman was instrumental in putting together the political and financial package that led to the opening in 1904 of the IRT subway system, which stopped in Times Square, thereby ensuring Madison Square’s demise.

Ashes

The lights dimmed quickly. Delmonico’s was already gone, and, one by one, the other Madison Square landmarks and hangouts closed or moved northward in the next few years. In 1912 and 1913, an 18-story, neo-Gothic limestone building was erected on West 27th Street to replace three brownstone row houses, including Number 16, where Nick Engel had once reigned. The building was occupied in the 1920s by the American Museum of Safety.65 But even though the Home Plate had disappeared, decades later Frank Craven, the playwright, director, and actor, fondly recalled Nick and the sporting life:

Novotny’s place, where Digby Bell and Harry Woodruff and Willie Hopper and most of the profession used to get their tobacco are gone. The hole in the wall farther down the street where one could get a plate of stew for a nickel, and “a baby”—which was a double schooner of beer—has passed out of the picture. The dairy next to the stage door of the Empire, with its bottle of milk and graham muffins and the shaker of salt, I don’t see any more—or Nick Engel’s either.⁶⁶

NOTES

This week I am pleased to give Our Game over to my friend and esteemed colleague, Don Jensen. In two parts, he will share with the readers of Our Game an outstanding article he contributed to the fifth edition of Base Ball: A Journal of the Early Game, back in Spring 2009. With the kind permission of the journal’s publisher, McFarland, I will occasionally bring to your attention other outstanding works that heretofore have been unavailable to the broad readership interested in baseball history. 

Jensen, a longtime SABR member, is author of  The Timeline History of Baseball (Thunder Bay Press, 2009) and contributing author to SABR’s Deadball Stars of the National League (2004) and Deadball Stars of the American League (2006), both published by Potomac. A former diplomat, he is Resident Fellow at the Center for Transatlantic Relations, Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies, Johns Hopkins University; he is also a consultant to the US government. He lives in Alexandria, Virginia, and is a devoted fan of the Giants (in New York and San Francisco) and the San Francisco Seals. 

Everyone Went to Nick’s: High and Low Life in Manhattan’s First Sports Bar

Don Jensen

“This was New York in the elegant eighties and these were the Giants, fashioned in elegance, playing on the Polo Grounds, then at 110thStreet and Fifth Avenue. It was the New Yorkof 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.”1

Toots 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 café’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.4

Working His Way Up

Nick 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 1868.6

In 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. Nick started a café at 12 West 27th Street, which he operated for 10 years. In 1887 he moved next door to number 16, where he opened the Home Plate.8

Setting the Scene: Madison Square in Nick’s Heyday

A primary reason for Nick’s success was the Home Plate’s central location. By 1890, bustling Madison Square, just two blocks from his establishment, was barely recognizable from the “open and useless field” where the Knickerbocker Club had played an early version of baseball little more than four decades before. The square boasted an ambiance that many people compared to Paris, a mixture of stately homes and elegant entertainment.9  Nearby were the newest theaters, the most luxurious hotels, and the most exclusive clubs. Broadway from Madison Square south to Union Square had “champagne sparkle,” wrote Harry Collins Brown. “All the world came to Broadway to flirt, find amusement and to meet acquaintances among the city’s finest jewelers, furriers, florists and haberdashers.”10 Broadway, from 23rd Street down to 8th, was known as the “Ladies Mile,” a reference to the great department stores that had grown up in the area, and to the many smaller “fascinating, alluring, irresistible” shops nearby. During the afternoon shopping hours Broadway was clogged with victorias, landaus, broughams, and coupes, and along its sidewalks promenaded an endless procession of elegantly attired women with their long “walking dresses” in the urban dust. “What are the Parisian boulevards, or even Regent Street,” marveled King’s Handbook in 1892, “to this magnificent panorama of mercantile display?”11

The hotels on Madison Square, a prime source of Nick’s clientele, were world famous. The elegant Fifth Avenue Hotel, made of brick and white marble, was the social, cultural, and political hub of elite New York; it could accommodate 800 guests. Every president since Buchanan had stayed there during his visit to the city, and it was the frequent meeting place of the team moguls of the new National League. Immediately north of the Fifth Avenue Hotel were the Albemarle Hotel, where Lily Langtry lived when in New York, and the Hoffman House, preferred by Sarah Bernhardt. Every “gentleman” worthy of the name visited the Hoffman House bar to see its notorious major adornment: a painting of Nymphs and Satyr by the Parisian artist William Bouguereau, which hung beneath a red velvet canopy, lit by a crystal chandelier, and reflected in a large mirror. So popular was the scantily clad subject that reproductions of it were to be found on labels inside cigar boxes, on silver matchbox covers, on plates, urns, and even bathroom tiles.12 The Brunswick Hotel, on Fifth Avenue and 26th Street, was the headquarters of the aristocratic, horsey set, which enjoyed the hotel’s bird and game dinners and rare vintages. Directly across the street from the Brunswick, occupying the block between Fifth Avenue and Broadway, was the most glamorous establishment of all, Delmonico’s, where Albert Spalding’s all-star baseball teams were feted in 1889 when they returned from their world tour. New Yorkers claimed that one could starve from indecision at the corner of Fifth and 26th from having to choose from rival cuisines.13 The more venturesome could walk over to the Home Plate for a prime cut of meat.

Madison Square was equally famous as Manhattan’s center for amusement. “It was the period of Lily Langtry and her scandals, of Lillian Russell and Diamond Jim Brady, of the first American tours by Sarah Bernhardt. Playwrights became producers and theater owners: Augustin Daly, David Belasco, Henry D. DeMille.”14 The second Madison Square Garden (built in 1889 on the very spot where the Knickerbockers had played) was at the northeast corner of Madison Avenue and 26th Street. Designed by architect Stanford White, it featured a concert hall, theater, and roof garden (where in 1906 the architect would be shot by the new husband of his former mistress, Evelyn Nesbit). Madison Square was also displacingUnion Square as the center ofNew York’s legitimate theater, increasingly a major industry with its piano shops, theatrical agencies, printers, costume shops, and photography studios. As the city grew, that industry was migrating up Broadway.

Most theaters around Madison Square catered to the elite. At the socially exclusive Lyceum, Thomas Edison had personally installed the electric lights. On opposite sides of the street at 30th were Daly’s and the new Wallack’s, where on August 14, 1888 Nick Engel’s friend and fellow baseball crank De Wolf Hopper first recited “Casey at the Bat.” But there were also pockets of lower-brow entertainment of the sort that appealed more to working men from the Bowery or visitors from out of town. The Eden Musee, at 55 23rd Street near the Fifth Avenue Hotel and across from McCreery’s Department Store, “featured the usual retinue of freaks, midgets, fire eaters, sword swallowers, waxworks, a Chamber of Horrors and ‘Ajeeb, the chess mystery,’ a pseudo-automaton … consisting of a hollow figurine inhabited by a child dwarf.”15 In a concession to the generally high-toned tenor of the neighborhood, the Eden Musee also displayed a wax likeness of actress Helen Dauvray, future bride of Giants’ shortstop John Ward, during her stay at the Lyceum.16

Engel’s Home Plate sat on an entertainment fault line, as well. A short walk from the intersection of Fifth and 26th west to Sixth Avenue began a world “that existed just below the veneer of Victorian respectability—beyond the pale, but not too far beyond, often illegal, but just a few hundred yards down the primrose path, in a smoky purple haze….”17 From 23rd Street northward, dingy by day and depraved by night, the neighborhood—known as Satan’s Circus or the Tenderloin—descended into a gas-lit carnival of vice. Along the avenue and the streets branching off it were houses of prostitution—“the abiding places of the Crimson Sisterhood”—garish saloons, and low dance halls.18 It was estimated in 1885 that half of the buildings in the neighborhood were given over to some type of immorality. In the blocks between 23rd and 40th Streets, between Fifth and Sixth Avenues, the turf was carefully divided up among specialties: 28th Street was devoted to high-end gambling houses, 27th to poolrooms with bookmaking operations, while 24th, 25th, 31st, 32nd, and 35th were reserved for whorehouses. (The so-called Seven Sisters on 25th Street were adjacent brothels in residential brownstones. The Sisters sent engraved invitations to visitors whose arrival in New York had been announced in the press).19 Houses of assignation were everywhere.20 At Koster and Bial’s Music Hall, one block from the Fifth Avenue Hotel, patrons could drink and watch Lily McTwobucks do a version of the cancan. In 1885 Koster and Bial’s witnessed the debut of Carmencita, noted for wearing her corsets on the outside of her dress.21The Haymarket concert saloon, on Sixth just south of 30th, forbade its wealthy clientele from close-up dancing with prostitutes and expelled visiting working-class girls if they showed their ankles. At the same time, the establishment provided curtained galleries behind which discreet sex could be practiced. Visiting ballplayers or men-about-town could also retire to the Haymarket’s balcony, where cubicles featured sex exhibitions, or “circuses.”22

A Genial Host

Nick Engel was always an exceedingly cordial host. He often told friends he would rather cook than eat, and constantly kept his ears open for new ways of cooking steak and preparing clam chowder. He put these recipes into practice. Giants pitcher Mickey Welch even composed ditties about the excellence of Nick’s offerings.23 Engel’s fame lay primarily in his steak dinners, often served to friends at midnight, which he broiled himself. Guests sat on wooden boxes, broken-down chairs, or anything they could find, and were protected by towels, which served as bibs and napkins. Knives, forks, and spoons were taboo.24

Engel learned the art of broiling steaks—and of serving them without utensils—in the late 1870s from “Uncle Billy” Miller, for 40 years the proprietor of a century-old tavern, Shannon’s Corner, at the junction of Market, Hamilton, and Monroe Streets in Lower Manhattan. Shannon’s steak dinners used the juiciest cuts provided by butchers at the nearby Catherine Street Market in honor of their favorite customers, ship captains (often oystermen), who bought large quantities of meat for long voyages. Each guest devoured his allotted three pounds of hickory-broiled and buttered beef between planks of bread. The tradition lasted for many years, with sea yarns spun and songs sung far into the night in an atmosphere of unlimited ale and greasy-mouthed gusto.25 As the fame of Shannon’s spread, well-to-do merchants, swells, and men-about-town began to drop by, as did actors such as Edwin Booth and Nick Engel’s friends De Wolf Hopper and Digby Bell. Hanging on the wall of the Home Plate, next to photos of ballplayers and actors, was a picture of Billy Miller’s ancient grill room, with Miller broiling a steak and Engel serving the assembled guests.26 Nick learned his craft well. He “was by gourmands accounted the most famous beef cook in America, probably the world,” wrote drama critic Amy Leslie, “and the honor of initiation into the secret ways of preparing his steaks he granted to not over a half-dozen other guests who have devoured his delicious oven productions.”27

In the 1880s, a rash of nostalgic beefsteak clubs broke out in Manhattan, though without the original, salty simplicity of Shannon’s Corner. (By now a gridiron and hickory coals had given way to gas stoves, which also produced the desired smokeless heat.) Rich merchants and assorted tycoons, eager to escape the stultifying formality of their wives’ dinner parties, willingly joined them. No expense was spared, and sometimes stage designers were hired to turn large halls into “old-time” taverns. In the fall of 1889, Frederick Oppermann, a wealthy brewer, organized with Engel’s help the Turtle Bay Beefsteak Club, and 20 more clubs sprung up in the city alone. Turtle Bay members were eager to extend the enjoyment of their table to the “heathen, who, if not gastronomically befogged by the mysteries of French cookery, are still suffering the intestinal tortures of the frying pan.” Nick, his son Nick Jr., and his brother Adam were all key Turtle Bay missionaries. Two clubs were formed in Brooklyn and others arose in Pittsburgh, Washington, Milwaukee, and Syracuse. All clubs outside New York were initiated into the Order of Beefsteak Eaters by a committee from the parent Turtle Bay Club. For the installation in Pittsburgh, the New Yorkers took a special train and brought with them 220 pounds of meat and 40 pounds of chops, furnished by the same butcher who used to provide meat for Uncle Billy Miller.28 At the creation of the Washington branch of the order in 1894, Nick Sr. served as carver, Nick Jr. as assistant barkeeper, while Adam helped entertain.29 The National Theater furnished a stage setting representing the interior of a London Tavern, with a cavernous fireplace, an old spinning wheel, ancient muskets and cutlasses, curious old clocks, and some “deadjohns and bottles that were literally as dusty as if just out of a time-forgotten cellar.”30

As the years passed, the Turtle Bay Club (later styled the Tenderloin Beefsteak Club with Nick Engel as its chef) maintained a headquarters at 455 Seventh Avenue, on the fringes of Satan’s Circus. The dining room “was a long, bright kitchen, with a funny square little finish at one end suggesting the shape of the ‘T’ bone in a porterhouse steak.” As at Shannon’s Corner, utensils were forbidden, and overturned boxes, butter tubs, and reed baskets were the only seats allowed.31

NOTES

1. Graham, F. 1952. The New York Giants: An Informal History of a Great Baseball Club (2002 reprint) (p. 3).

2. Reisler, J. 1999. Babe Ruth Slept Here: The Baseball Landmarks of New York City (p. 113).

3. www.mcgreevysboston.com

4. The New York Times: Sept. 29, 1957.

5. Washington Post: July 12, 1896.

6. The New York Times: Oct. 23, 1897.

7. Sante, L. 1991. Low Life: Lures and Snares of Old New York (pp. 114–115).

8. The New York Times: Oct. 23, 1897.

9. Berman, M. 2001. Madison Square: The Park and its Celebrated Landmarks (p. 6).

10. www.preserve2.org/ladiesmile/flatiron.htm. Traub, J. 2004. The Devil’s Playground: A Century of Pleasure and Profit in Times Square (p. 11).

11. Morris, L. 1951. Incredible New York: High Life and Low Life of the Last Hundred Years (p. 111).

12. Berman 2001, 46.

13. Morris 1951, 110.

14. Sante 1991, 88.

15. Ibid., 99.

16. Ibid., 88–89. See also Traub 2004, 8.

17. Wolf, T. 1972. “Forward,” in The Police Gazette, ed. G. Smith and J. Smith (p. 9).

18. Morris 1951, 11–12.

19. Burrows, E., and M. Wallace. 1996. Gotham: A History of New York City to 1898 (p. 959).

20. Sante 1991, 187–188.

21. Ibid., 95.

22. Burrows and Wallace 1996, 1148.

23. The New York Times: Sept. 29, 1957.

24. Boston Daily Globe: May 6, 1915.

25. Batterberry, M., and A. Batterberry. 1999. On the Town in New York: The Landmark History of Eating, Drinking, and Entertainments from the American Revolution to the Food Revolution (p. 306).

26. Chicago Daily Tribune: Mar. 26, 1893; The New York Times: Oct. 26, 1896.

27. Leslie, A. 1899. Some Players: Personal Sketches (p. 583).

28. Chicago Daily Tribune: Mar. 26, 1893.

29. Reed received a medal at the Washington event which he attributed to his “indomitable gluttony, as he had eaten twenty-nine pieces of the steak, a record which has never been broken” (Leslie 1899, 388).

30. Washington Post: Feb. 25, 1894.

31. Leslie 1899, 584–586.

The first businesses to exploit baseball players to promote their products were tobacco companies. It seems strange now to see advertisements featuring such Hall of Famers as George Wright, King Kelly, and Hoss Radbourn endorsing Red Stocking Cigars, but those were the days when smoking was an unalloyed pleasure. The largest card set ever issued—numbering over 2,300 separate images—was a photographic series produced by the Goodwin Company for its Old Judge brand in the late 1880s.

The Goodwin Round Album, a spectacular chromolithographed 1888 premium, featured the most popular players of the day in eight circular pages with anywhere from one to four stars per: Cap Anson, King Kelly, and Charlie Comiskey each occupies a page of his own. The page shown here has some of the New York National League team, such as manager Jim Mutrie, third baseman Art Whitney, and pitcher Ledell Titcomb, who was graced with the splendid alias of “Cannonball.” The “mascot” was a young boy; in years to come the fashion in good-luck charms ran to street urchins like Detroit’s “L’il Rastus,” dwarfs like the Philadelphia A’s Louis Van Zelst, and gently demented souls like the New York Giants’ Charles “Victory” Faust.

Baseball cards continued to be identified with tobacco products into the 1910s, when confections like Colgan’s Chips and Cracker Jack got into the act. Gum cards were next, and they ruled the hobby from the 1930s to the 1980s (Goudey, Fleer, Topps). Finally, a court decision broke Topps’ virtual thirty-year monopoly on trading cards by permitting Donruss to distribute trading cards without gum. The go-go decade of card collecting was in gear, as other companies joined the industry (Score, Pacific, Upper Deck, a reinvigorated Fleer). Cards were not just for kids anymore, for the first time since the days of the tobacco cards; grown-up collectors spent big bucks to recapture their youth or, with often unhappy results, to invest for their own kids’ futures.

***

What is the first baseball card? Learned knights of the cardboard may dispute this point. I believe that if the definition of a baseball card is to be understood as an item mass produced for sale, then the first would be the illustrated ticket to the inaugural soiree of the Magnolia Ball Club, an event that took place in 1844 to celebrate the club’s founding the year before. Others may advocate for a view of the Atlantics of Brooklyn team of 1868, distributed free by Peck & Snyder Sporting Goods to their customers. Featuring such luminaries as Joe Start, Dickey Pearce, John Chapman, and Bob Ferguson, the Atlantics were champions of the baseball world in that year, as they had previously been in 1864, 1865, and 1866. In fact, the Library of Congress collections contain a small photograph of the 1865 team with a printed mount, and the Baseball Hall of Fame has another small photograph of the Unions of Morrisania of 1866. But both are better described as cartes de visite, or calling cards, commissioned by the teams themselves for distribution to their close followers. What makes this card of “The Atlantic Nine” a true baseball card is its wide distribution to the public as a “trade card,” with its clear intent to promote the sale of products in some real trade, namely sporting goods. And yet  … recent research indicates it may not have been issued in 1868 but instead 1871. This wrinkle would make the 1869 Peck & Snyder card of the Cincinnati Red Stockings the first baseball card mass produced for sale.

I say “real trade” because today the sale of the cards themselves is a real trade, but it was not always so. Even in the 1940s and 1950s card manufacturers like Topps, Bowman, and Fleer used the cards to help sell the bubblegum, not the other way around. 

Trade cards, generally of the comic illustrative sort, continued to be the form which the baseball card would take until the mid-1880s, when the age of the baseball hero was dawning and chromolithographed cards of individual players came into being as promotional inserts in packs of small cigars. Before long cigarette manufacturers, too, jumped on the bandwagon and issued colored cards promoting such evocative brands as Gypsy Queen, Buchner Gold Coin, Old Judge, Dog’s Head, Mayo Cut Plug, Allen & Ginter, Duke of Durham, Newsboy, and other cheap smokes of an era gone by. The incredibly extensive Old Judge set—512 players, each in multiple poses—was not a printed set but consisted entirely of sepia-toned photographs. Even a century later collectors continue to find previously undocumented cards in this set, cataloged as N172.

Old Judge cards could be collected and redeemed for handsome larger premiums, referred to as “cabinet cards” (cataloged as N173). John Ward of the New York Giants is shown here in a Newsboy cabinet card and Jim “Deacon” McGuire in an Old Judge regular issue of 1887. McGuire wound up playing in twenty-six major league seasons, suiting up for his final game a century ago on May 18, 1912, at age forty-eight (and getting a hit). In that memorable game he was the catcher for the Detroit Tigers because their regular team was on strike, in support of Ty Cobb, who had been suspended by the league for attacking a heckler in the stands. (The toothless Tigers filled their lineup with recruits from the Philadelphia sandlots such as pitcher Aloysius Travers and lost to the A’s 24–2.)

***

Baseball card images from the period before World War II are not realistic, they are romantic … and that is the essence of baseball fandom. We preserve for ourselves the illusion that we could be down there on the field alongside our heroes (or, totemically, in place of them). These cards are magical tokens, permitting us to shuttle back and forth between fantasy and reality with utter safety; it’s just a game, after all.

Once photographs of our favorites ceased to be a novelty, trading card companies looked for inspiration to the painted cards of the past. Dick Perez created the long-running series of Diamond Stars for the Donruss company beginning in 1981. Topps and other companies revived the look and feel of vintage sets.

In the first decade of the last century, a golden age of baseball cards, candy manufacturers competed with cigarette companies for the hearts and minds of American youth. Let the names of the candy card sponsors roll off the tongue, and savor them: Nadja Caramels … Mello Mints … Colgan’s Violet Chips … Zeenuts … Texas Tommies … Juju Drums … Cracker Jack. The greatest of all candy sets was issued by the American Caramel Company from 1909 to 1911, and its most valuable rarity is the card of Mike Mitchell of Cincinnati.

The American Tobacco Company, a huge trust of interlocking manufacturers, issued not only the above-mentioned Turkey Reds but also the classic T206 set of cards (1909–11), the giant of tobacco issues and the set that includes the hobby’s most valuable card, the Honus Wagner. Listen to the roll call of just a few of the T206 producers: Sweet Caporal … Piedmont … Old Mill … Polar Bear … Hindu … Tolstoi … Cycle … American Beauty … Ty Cobb (yes, he was a subject of the front of the card and, in a handful of cases, the sponsoring tobacconist on the back).

In 1911 the trust added the Mecca folder series to its burgeoning roster of baseball hits, here depicted in the Gabby Street card which, when folded up, reveals battery mate Walter Johnson, sharing a pair of legs with his catcher. In that same year the trust issued its classic T205 set (Gold Borders). In the following year there were the Hassan triple folders (cleverly reproduced in the 1990s by Upper Deck with modern players).

By the 1920s the popularity of the cards among youngsters prompted the tobacco companies to back out of the baseball-card business, and candy and ice-cream manufacturers had the field to themselves, issuing such shabby yet appealing issues as the garishly colored strip cards and Frojoy’s grainy photo reproductions. The 1930s marked the end of the candy-caramel period and the beginning of the bubblegum phase, which lasted into the 1980s. The Goudey set of 1933 is the classic gum-card issue, its most prized card that of the retired Nap Lajoie, issued in limited numbers. That set was followed by another in 1934 featuring the “Lou Gehrig Says” subset of baseball tips. The four-player card of Pirates Paul Waner, brother Lloyd, Guy Bush, and Waite Hoyt had a piece of a much larger puzzle on the back. In the hobby this set has come to be known as the “4-in-1.”

***

It is the cards of the 1950s that forever linked my generation with its baseball idols. Author Luke Salisbury called them “cardboard madeleines,” à la Proust. Even today, on the dark side of midlife, I cannot hold a 1952 Topps card like the Robin Roberts card shown here without feeling, in a sensual way, the heat of a Bronx sidewalk, the thrill of fanning the cards to see “who I got,” the taste of a Mission orange soda, the smell and peculiar feel of the pink slab of bubblegum, and the thrill of flipping my hard-earned prizes toward the wall of our apartment house, hoping to win my pal’s Jackie Robinson card. 

I learned how to read by studying the backs of those baseball cards, but I suspect my story isn’t that unusual. Baseball cards were tickets permitting entry into neighborhood society and the larger American culture for many other immigrant boys, too. The other, more important arena for which these cards proved a ticket of admission was the world of my own imagination; what a marvel of compactness these cards were—the visage of a hero, the chronicle of his heroics, perhaps a tidbit of odd information or an amusing cartoon, a team logo, an autograph–and all on a piece of cardboard you could hold in your hand! I have sometimes thought the curriculum vitae of millions of American men, the trail of their occupational records, might start not with that first job out of high school or college, but here, in a loving gaze at a baseball card on a sidewalk on a hot summer afternoon.

The second World War shut down the baseball-card industry, but it came back strong in 1948 when the Leaf Company issued a set of 168 cards. Son we had the classic painted Bowman set of 1951, and the remarkable Bowman set of 1955, which pictured players inside a TV screen, thus commemorating the stormy marriage between baseball and television broadcasting. (Dig that line “Color TV” on the brass plate!) Bowman was fading as a brand, unable to sign the up-and-coming stars to contracts, and this quirky set proved the company’s last. Aside from historical sets from Fleer and regional issues for wieners or ice cream or gasoline, Topps came to dominate the field. The Brooklyn-based company issued wonderful cards during its more than two decades of dominance, but the hobby of card collecting didn’t skyrocket until new brands brought innovation and competition.

Here we see a Donruss card from 1981 featuring Reggie Jackson, the first complete set since the early 1950s not to bear the name of Topps … and not to include gum. In the next decade card manufacturers such as Upper Deck began to apply new technologies: impressive gold stamping and 3-D designs and die-cutting abound; hologram cards which, held to the light just so, depict the player in action for three and a half seconds; a card with an actual speck of dirt from Cal Ripken’s infield; and, most amazingly, a set of cards that had the smell of that old, brittle bubblegum that blessed the wrappers of our youth.

[This is the third and final part of Rob Edelman's article, commenced in this space two days ago.] By the mid-1910s, feature-length narrative films were dominating the marketplace. The stars of most of the earliest baseball-related features were not actors playing ballplayers but real-life major leaguers who in this era could be credibly cast as sanitized, fictionalized versions of themselves. Such baseball stars were ideal marquee names to lure in potential audiences. The first of the lot was Right Off the Bat (1915, Arrow), a five-reeler starring the recently retired Mike Donlin, who had appeared in vaudeville with, among others, his actress wife, Mabel Hite, and Marty McHale. Right Off the Bat purportedly charts Donlin’s ascent to major league stardom. Though devoted to baseball, he toils as a machinist because of his shaky financial situation. Even though he has saved his beloved Viola Bradley (Claire Mersereau) from drowning, Donlin is considered a poor marital prospect by her mother. He becomes a bush-league star; refuses to take a bribe to throw the championship game; is assaulted and locked in a room; arrives (with the aid of Viola) at the ballpark in time to score the winning run; and signs a New York Giants contract. Finally, he has earned the right to wed Viola.     

Given his theatrical background, Donlin was a natural for the movies. While he never became a star, he appeared in dozens of films—including a few that spotlighted baseball—until his death in 1933. But his celluloid “biography” is more melodramatic fiction than fact. Right Off the Bat is set, and filmed on location, in Winstead, Connecticut, with The New York Times reporting that the “championship Winstead baseball nine appears in the picture.” While Winstead is presented as Donlin’s hometown, the ballplayer actually hailed from Peoria, Illinois. Mabel Hite, Donlin’s first wife, was nothing like the Viola Bradley character. She died in 1912. His second wife, Rita Ross Donlin, appears in a supporting role, as Viola’s friend.     

Playing himself in Right Off the Bat is John McGraw, Donlin’s major league skipper. McGraw also appeared as himself in One Touch of Nature (1917, Edison), a five-reel comedy–drama based on a Peter B. Kyne baseball story with scenes filmed on location at the Polo Grounds. McGraw is depicted as being not only a fine manager but a fine man, with nary a hint of the legendary toughness that earned him the nickname Little Napoleon. The hero is William Vandervoort Cosgrove (John Drew Bennett, an actor who looks a bit long in the tooth to be playing a college boy “in the midst of his third year at Yale, where he is known by the vulgar appellation of ‘Battling Bill’…”). Cosgrove falls for Leonora O’Brien (Viola Cain), a plumber’s daughter who heads up a vaudeville dog act. This displeases his father, E. P. Cosgrove, an eminent pork packer, and his snooty mother. But Battling Bill’s dad is a baseball nut at heart, and he is delighted when his son is signed to play second base for the Giants. The story involves his reluctantly attending the World Series, where he is seated next to Leonora and her father. At the finale, “Battling Bill” crashes a home run—and everyone lives happily ever after.

In Somewhere in Georgia (1916, Sunbeam), based on a story by Grantland Rice and running six reels, Ty Cobb stars as a bank clerk who vies with a sniveling cashier for the love of their boss’s daughter. In typical fashion, he is scouted for the Detroit Tigers, makes the major leagues, is temporarily thwarted by some hooligans hired by his rival, and wins both the climactic game and the girl. According to Variety, the film features “the usual excitement [that] attends the baseball game in which Cobb cops the climax with his playing and wins the girl in the end. There’s a deep-dyed villain and the subsequent denouement at the finale, with Cobb stealing a kiss from his prospective wife behind a baseball glove.” The paper further noted that the film “has a good wholesome atmosphere and a real, live-blooded, cleanlimbed athlete for a hero.”

The Variety reviewer summed up the purpose of casting real-life ballplayers in movies by noting, “inasmuch as …Cobb is considered about the greatest ballplayer in the world, it goes without saying that [the film] is going to make a ten-strike with Young America. As expected, it is a production that aimed at one thing and that was to present the celebrated Ty Cobb in camera action and give the smalltown boys a chance to see ‘more of him’ … and save them the long Sunday excursion trips to some of the big league towns to see him play.”

Another period baseball legend, Babe Ruth, played a character simply known as “Babe” in Headin’ Home (1920, Yankee Photo Corp./States Rights), a five-reel comedy–drama. [ThisSeven years later his film name was lengthened to “Babe Dugan” for his part in the comedy Babe Comes Home (1927, First National). By the time the latter was released, Ruth’s off-the-field carousing had become such public knowledge that New York Times sportswriter/columnist John Kieran could casually refer to him as the “Playboy of Baseball” in a piece written the day after the Bambino hit his record-breaking 60th home run. Indeed, in Babe Comes Home, Ruth’s Babe Dugan is more reflective of the real Bambino: a baseball star with an affinity for dirtying his uniform with tobacco stains. But back in 1920, Ruth still could be cast as a clean-living, mother-loving all-American boy. In Headin’ Home he is a humble chap who resides with his mother and kid sister in the small town of Haverlock. This Babe passes his spare time by chopping down trees and fashioning them into baseball bats. He prefers quiet evenings enjoying his mother’s home cooking to attending town socials; his shyness prevents him from expressing his feelings to the girl he loves, Mildred Tobin (Ruth Taylor), a banker’s daughter. Along the way, he rescues Mildred from the clutches of a crook, becomes a home run–hitting baseball hero, sets Mildred’s playboy brother straight after he is suckered  by a vamp, and, at the finale, returns home a hero and belts a home run in front of the Haverlock population.

In other words, outside of his propensity for smashing four-baggers, the character played by the Babe in Headin’ Home is the polar opposite of the real Babe Ruth. And who was to question this depiction? The Los Angeles Times described the film as “a simple story of simple people and dealing with Ruth’s rise to fame as a baseball player…. The story is a happy blending of small-town lives and people and the big leagues [with Ruth playing] the overgrown country boy who has the habit of doing the wrong thing in the right way at the wrong time….” Noted Alva Taylor, reviewing the film in the Chicago Tribune, “For there must be countless boys, large as well as small, to whom Babe Ruth, master batsman, famous home run hitter, must be a wonderful man, encompassed by the aura of romance. It is for these hero worshippers that the biographical film, ‘Headin’ Home,’ was made, and they will love it.”

Just as Babe Ruth was becoming the ballplayer who defined the 1920s, Headin’ Home was the one baseball feature that, albeit modest in production, came to represent the mass-marketing of the sport. No mere movie theater could house it during its New York premiere. Fight promoter Tex Rickard reportedly paid $35,000 to book the film into Madison Square Garden, where it was shown for the week of September 19 to 26, 1920. Of an early screening, Variety reported, “Just as the crowds get up and leave the Polo Grounds [this was before the Babe “built” Yankee Stadium] satisfied, after watching the big slugger bury one in the top of the grandstand, just so they were satisfied at the Garden when Babe won the game for the home club after wandering through countless scenes dressed in street attire and toting a piece of hickory from which he was supposedly fashioning the bat that later on was to make him famous. There is a story running through the picture and so many minor characters that it would take a computing machine to record them all without the aid of a program. None of the latter were on sale, but everything else was, from Babe Ruth phonographic records to the Babe Ruth song, ‘Oh You Babe Ruth,’ which was sung and played by Lieut. J. Tim Bryan’s Black Devil Band, which accompanied the picture.”

The Variety scribe—unlike the Chicago Tribune’s Alva Taylor—may have turned thumbs down on Headin’ Home, but at least he understood the Babe’s appeal: “The picture has been thrown together to capitalize [on] Ruth’s tremendous popularity and as such it will do a success. The thousand people sat patiently through the dreary preliminary scenes waiting for their idol to reach his specialty which is the promulgation of home runs. This is an age of specialists and as a picture star Ruth qualifies as the greatest batsman that baseball has ever developed.”        

 *     *     *

Easily the best of the early baseball features spotlights nary a real ballplayer. Additionally, it serves as a textbook reflection of its era. The Busher (1919, Famous Players-Lasky), a five-reel comedy–drama, stars Charles Ray, then at his peak playing country bumpkins who, at the finale, transcend their oafishness, earn admiration from their peers, and win the heroine.  Prior to The Busher, Ray starred in The Pinch Hitter (1917, Triangle). Despite its title, however, this five-reel comedy is devoid of baseball until its second half. Ray plays Joel Parker, a gawky Vermont farm boy who enrolls in Williamson College. With his ill-fitting clothes and thrown-together suitcase, the droopy and forlorn Parker is mercilessly chided by his fellow students. He tries out for the school baseball team, but is athletically inept. The coach notes that “he is such a boob that he ought to bring us luck”—and so Parker is named to the team, but as its mascot. During an important game against Bensonhurst College, the Williamson pitcher injures his hand and is unable to come to bat in the ninth inning. Wouldn’t you know that the Williamson bench is depleted? Wouldn’t you know that the tying run leads off third base? Wouldn’t you know that Parker is ordered to grab a bat? Wouldn’t you know that, incredibly, he wallops the game-winning homer? Joel Parker, campus fool, is now Joel Parker, campus hero.             

In The Busher, Ray is appealing as Ben Harding, the “baseball pride of Brownsville,” a fireballing hurler who, when he pitches, has “got more curves than a stovepipe.” Harding soon is called to the major leagues. After being exposed to big-city life, he is transformed from rube to dandy. He becomes involved with a gold-digger and even snubs his neighbors and his girl, Mazie Palmer (Colleen Moore), when they come to see him play. Harding’s high living soon adversely affects his pitching, and he is released. The now penniless hurler returns to Brownsville and proclaims that he will never toss a baseball again. But when Brownsville is set to play Centerville in a game that “means everything to local pride,” Harding relents. He pitches his team to victory and hits the game-winning home run. His rehabilitation is complete. He no longer is the conceited, self-pitying jerk who has been tainted by the urban metropolis. More important, he has come to appreciate the love and dedication of Mazie and the simple, real, lasting values she represents; no amount of fame or money can replace love.

The New York Times described The Busher as “a baseball story that the small boy will rise up from his seat and shout about. So will his father and his sister, too. Also his mother, if she knows anything about bush leagues and big leagues and what it means for a wonderful pitcher to jump from one to the other, fall down in the big test, and then come back again for glory.” An ad for the film described it as “a baseball scream” in which “Charlie bats 1,000 and puts laugh after laugh right over the home plate.”

Whether these early baseball features centered on clearly fictional characters or purported to tell the stories of big-league luminaries, they were united by the same message: Baseball stars are honed from country boys. If a country boy was a clean-living youngster, he will be destined to win the Big Game with bottom-of-the-ninth heroics.

Within a decade after they were made, when America was well into the Roaring Twenties, films like The Busher, Headin’ Home, Right Off the Bat, and Somewhere in Georgia were considered laughably outdated—not so much for their clichéd ballfield heroics as for their small-town values. Nonetheless, a film like Slide, Kelly, Slide (1927, MGM), featuring William Haines as a boastful, Ruthian New York Yankees pitcher– slugger, is respectfully dedicated to “the great American game—Baseball—and to the memory of Frank Chance … Eddie Plank … Christy Mathewson, and their immortal legion.” [A snip is viewable at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IzY9nwODfh0.]

[SIDEBAR]

A majority of the motion pictures produced during the silent-film era no longer exist. Today, films are recycled for screening on television and released on DVD; decades ago, once a film completed its theatrical run and no longer was making money for its distributor, it was discarded—much like yesterday’s newspaper.

Some of the early films cited in this essay do survive. For example, prints of The Ball Game (1898), One Touch of Nature (1917), and Casey at the Bat (1922) are preserved at the Motion Picture, Broadcasting, and Recorded Sound Division of The Library of Congress. Over the Fence (1917), The Pinch Hitter (1917), and The Busher (1919), along with Hearst newsreel footage of an investigation involving New York Giants pitcher Rube Benton (1917), Captain Christy Mathewson arriving on board the SS Rotterdam (1918), Nick Altrock doing comedy skits (1919), and scenes with Babe Ruth (1920) and Chicago White Sox players (1920), are preserved at the UCLA Film and Television Archive. Prints of Over the Fence may be found at the Museum of Modern Art and the National Film Archive of the British Film Institute.

Film archivists Ted Larson and Rusty Casselton completed a 16mm restoration of Headin’ Home (1920) in the mid-1990s. A 35mm restoration by the Museum ofModern Art was made available in 2006.

Film collectors own 16mm prints of some of these titles, a number of which are available on VHS or DVD; in April 2007, Kino-on-Video released a DVD package that included the Larson-Casselton Headin’ Home restoration, The Busher, and a variety of baseball shorts. Additional baseball images exist on-line on the Prelinger Archives website, which features ephemeral (educational, industrial, advertising, and amateur) films.

Most of the other early baseball films are lost—more than likely forever.

— Rob Edelman

[This essay by film historian Rob Edelman continues from Part 1, which appeared in this space yesterday.] In the first motion pictures, the leading actors were not identified. However, audiences soon began demanding information about these performers—starting with their names. The studios initially refused to publicize them for fear that they would demand higher wages, but relented upon realizing their commercial potential. And so the star system was born. In 1910, Florence Lawrence, formerly known as the “Biograph Girl,” became the first American screen luminary to be known by name.

But before there were screenland celebrities, there were star major leaguers. Early on, motion-picture production companies figured they could attract audiences by filming real ballplayers in action. On September 15, 1902, the Washington Post reported: “‘Rube’ Waddell is to be perpetuated in the moving picture machine. The camera was focused upon him while in the act of pitching Thursday’s game, while Howell of the Baltimore team was at bat.” Waddell was not filmed to record his moving image for posterity. The account continued, “The pictures will be sent all over the country for the edification of the admirers of this great slant artist.”

Waddell’s two screen credits are Rube Waddell and the Champions Playing Ball with the Boston Team (1902, Lubin) and Game of Base Ball (1903, Lubin). In 1902, Waddell pitched for the Philadelphia Athletics. The “Howell” referred to in the Washington Post report likely is Harry Howell, who played for the Baltimore Orioles, the precursor of the New York Highlanders/Yankees. So the footage described in the report likely was included in Game of Base Ball, which, according to Lubin, “shows a game of Base Ball held between the victorious Athletic Club, of Philadelphia, the Champions of the season 1902–1903[,] and the Baltimore Club. The individual players are shown in their respective positions, principally the great ‘Rube’ Waddell, the famous pitcher.” Game of Base Ball was released in conjunction with Crowd Leaving Athletic Base Ball Grounds (1903, Lubin). It was noted in the Lubin film summary, “In order to make the foregoing picture [Game of Base Ball] complete, it is necessary to join the two, when you will not alone have a game of Base Ball played but will also have the crowd leaving the grounds and seeking the different conveyances to take them home.” The distributor closed the synopsis with the kind of spin that exists to this day in the motion-picture industry: “These two films are full of life and animation.”   

Christy Mathewson and the New York National League Team (1907, Winthrop) features a repeated sequence of Matty winding up and firing the ball. “Play Ball”—Opening Game, National League, N.Y. City, 1905—New York vs. Boston (1905, Edison) was produced, according to anEdison summary, “through the courtesy of Manager John McGraw of the New York Baseball Club….” The film consists of “a most interesting set of pictures of this noteworthy event.” These include a panoramic shot of the fans in attendance; the players arriving on the field in automobiles; the raising of the National League Pennant (the Giants were the NL champs the previous season, but refused to meet their American League counterparts, the Boston Pilgrims, in the World Series); a view of Mathewson first warming up and then retiring the first three Boston batters; and Mike Donlin, leading off for the Giants, belting a double and summarily scoring. The synopsis concluded, “We offer this picture as the finest ever taken of a similar subject.”

Enterprising major league executives also saw potential profits from filming their teams and players. A September 25, 1906, news item in the Washington Post reported, “President [Charles W.] Murphy, of the Cubs, is thinking of having moving pictures made of one of the world series games, and showing with [sic] the pictures around the country during the winter season. ‘I am looking up some of these concerns about taking such a picture,’ said he to-day. ‘For I believe there would be as much interest in such a show as there is in a prize-fight picture.’”

Murphy’s notion was transformed into reality in The World Series Baseball Games—White Sox and Cubs (1906, Selig Polyscope). Two years later, Essanay began filming the World Series and condensing its highlights into one- (and, later, two-) reelers that were advertised as the one and only “authorized” World Series films. A typical title is Pittsburgh-Detroit Ball Game (1909, Essanay), also known as The World’s Champions Baseball Series and World’s Championship Series at End of Series. [View a snip at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ld3LxjpJ1Pw]

According to the October 4, 1913, New York Times, “Within three hours after the last man is out each game in New York next week in the world’s baseball series between the Giants and the Athletics the fans who failed to see the battles on the diamond will be able to take in the game on the moving picture screens of Marcus Loew’s nineteen theaters in New York and Brooklyn. By an arrangement completed yesterday with Manager McGraw, Manager [Connie] Mack, and the National Commission, Loew obtained the rights to the films, paying $8,000 into the fund which will go to the players for the privilege. This sum was paid for theNew York City rights alone. The moving pictures will pay many times that amount for their rights. The cameras in the Polo Grounds will begin to take pictures early each afternoon, and just as soon as each 200 feet is reeled off it will be rushed to the developing and printing room. In this manner as early as 7 o’clock each evening after the game there will be a supply of films ready for showing at the theaters, and by the time the early reels have been thrown upon the screens the late films will have come out of the dark room.”

During World War I, the Chicago Tribune and Selig-Polyscope linked up to produce and release a “semi-weekly news pictorial service.” According to a December 26, 1915, Tribune article, the paper’s correspondents and war photographers had been “instructed to bend their energies toward securing news pictures first; so they may be presented in the Selig-Tribune first.” The resulting newsreels were not just battlefield-related. Amid the coverage of politicians inspecting troops, Sinn Fein riots in Dublin, and boy scouts building bridges, quite a few baseball-related newsreels, both staged and unstaged, were filmed. Throughout the following year, the Tribune hyped upcoming programs by printing their descriptions, accompanied by still photos. OnMarch 12, 1916, under the initially puzzling subheading “Mordecai Brown Nurse To Engine,” the paper described the content of an upcoming segment: “The ‘Cub’ stars are not missing anything en route toTampa where they are going into spring training quarters. The photograph shows young Mr. Brown pouring oil on the troubled [train] wheels….” In another spring-training newsreel, printed on March 29, “Cubs and Phillies Practice” spotlighted an exhibition game inSt. Petersburg. An April 9 edition, “‘Alexander the Great’ in the Air,” highlighted Grover Cleveland Alexander in a small airplane. “Presidential ‘Newlyweds’ at Ball Game,” from April 26, consisted of President and Mrs. Woodrow Wilson at the season opener in Washington, DC.

Back on March 14, the Tribune had run an article which described the filming of a newsreel made while the Chicago White Sox were traveling by train to their Mineral Springs, Kansas, spring-training site. “This was ‘movie day’ on the Sox special,” the paper reported. “The Selig-Tribune operator took a long series of poses atTopeka and at McFarland. He lined up the Sox in uniform on top of the coaches and they threw the ball back and forth while the train was moving. [Manager Clarence ‘Pants’] Rowland acted as fireman, shoveling the coal. It all went great until the Sox were supposed to miss their train and then run to get it. This picture will be natural, for the boys had to go at full speed. Their uniforms were soaking wet when they finished and it took a good share of the afternoon to cool off.”

By this time major leaguers were no longer confined to newsreels. They became on-screen actors in Hal Chase’s Home Run (1911, Kalem); the aforementioned His First Game, featuring Wally Pipp, and The Baseball Bug, with Chief Bender, Jack Coombs, Cy Morgan, and Rube Oldring; Baseball’s Peerless Leader (1913, Pathé), starring Frank Chance; Home Run Baker’s Double (1914, Kalem); and Love and Baseball (1914, Universal) and Matty’s Decision (1915, Universal), both featuring Christy Mathewson. At this time, one- and two-reel baseball films rarely were noted in the press or cited in advertising. The exceptions primarily were when a celebrated ballplayer might be hyped. For example, playing at the Panorama Theater on Chicago’s South Side on June 17, 1914, “in conjunction with an All Feature program,” was the “Kalem Sensational 2 Reel Baseball Drama Home Run Baker’s Double.” Mathewson’s Love and Baseball was described in an October 3, 1914, Chicago Tribune ad as being “In a Class by Itself.”

One early film that garnered a fair amount of press coverage was Breaking Into the Big League (1913, Kalem), partially shot at the New York Giants’ Marlin, Texas, spring-training camp, with the articles centering on the presence of John McGraw, Christy Mathewson, and other Giants. The Los Angeles Times described the film as “a drama with an intense appeal to lovers of baseball. Big-league players are shown in games and practice. The story concerns a young ballplayer, who makes a costly error that loses the pennant for his team. It also loses him his sweetheart. He goes into a troubled sleep and dreams of breaking into the big league….”

The first notable feature-length baseball films spotlighted real-life ballplayers. The economically named The Giants-White Sox World Tour (1914, Eclectic Film Co.), running six reels (approximately 60–75 minutes) is little more than a glorified travelogue. Variety described it as a “long reeled picture of the baseball players’ trip around the world the past winter … with here and there snatches of a baseball game played between the natives and the teams in foreign countries. The well-known ballplayers who went along are shown individually at different times, with Germany Schaefer always in the foreground whenever the camera was working…. A sort of story is attempted through ‘The greatest bug in the world,’ a baseball fan who is broke [and decides] to travel with the teams, upon reading the announcement of their going…. ‘Matty’ [Christy Mathewson] is there with his young son, and there are other famous players. The scenic and action views are interesting in a way….”

The fact that filmmakers were beginning to expand the cinematic language may be detected in the descriptions of two baseball actualities (factual films). A five-reeler titled 1915 World’s Championship Series was released through the States Rights protocol, common during the pre–Hollywood studio era, by which copyright holders sold prints of their films on a territorial basis to individuals who rented them to theaters. Describing this particular film of the 1915 World Series between the Boston Red Sox and Philadelphia Phillies, the American Film Institute Catalog, Feature Films, 1911-1920, notes that “Close-ups of all the players were taken [during the filming], and for the first time a camera was placed behind home plate in order to obtain good shots of the playing action, which included four home runs.” The AFI Catalog further reports that, in the four-reel-long World Series Games 1916, Boston vs. Brooklyn (1916, Selig Polyscope), “eight cameras captured plays from a number of angles, including views from the grandstands, the dugouts and the base lines, as well as presenting panoramic shots of the stadium and close-ups of the ball players. Also included are shots ofBoston fans parading after the game as disappointed Dodger rooters playfully throw cushions at them.”

The Baseball Revue of 1917 (1917, States Rights) is another important baseball actuality. This five-reel film was conceived by Marty McHale, a major league pitcher/vaudeville performer, and was produced by Athletic Feature Films, of which McHale was president and Tris Speaker vice president. McHale photographed all the major league teams, but almost half of the release print spotlighted the Chicago White Sox and New York Giants, who faced off in the 1917 World Series. The AFI Catalog lists the baseball personalities who appeared, many of whom were shown in close-up. They included many future Hall of Famers (from Home Run Baker to Honus Wagner) and such period figures as Benny Kauff, Eddie Cicotte, Smoky Joe Wood, Larry Doyle, Fielder Jones, Heinie Zimmerman, Buck Herzog, and Shoeless Joe Jackson. {View snips from the 1919 World Series at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BJNbO1Mbl2w.]

None of these early films were made to preserve history. They were instead motion-picture “product”—commodities to be marketed to the movie-going public. In fact, The Baseball Revue of 1917 was edited in a manner that allowed it to be released as one-reel shorts, as a series, or as a complete feature, contingent upon the priorities of individual exhibitors.

Tomorrow, Ty Cobb, John McGraw, Babe Ruth, and more, in the third and concluding part.

This week I am pleased to give Our Game over to one of my friends and esteemed colleagues, Rob Edelman. In three parts, this accomplished film historian will share with the readers of Our Game a splendid essay he contributed to the debut edition of Base Ball: A Journal of the Early Game, back in Spring 2007. Edelman is the author of Great Baseball Films and Baseball on the Web. His film/television-related books include Meet the Mertzes, a double-biography of I Love Lucy’s Vivian Vance and fabled baseball fan William Frawley, and Matthau: A Life—both co-authored with his wife, Audrey Kupferberg. He is a film commentator on WAMC (Northeast) Public Radio and a Contributing Editor of Leonard Maltin’s Movie Guide. His byline has appeared in Baseball and American Culture: Across the Diamond, Total Baseball, The Total Baseball Catalog, Baseball in the Classroom: Teaching America’s National Pastime, The Political Companion to American Film, and dozens of other books. He authored an essay on early baseball films for the DVD Reel Baseball: Baseball Films from the Silent Era, 1899-1926, and has been a juror at the National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum’s annual film festival. He is a lecturer at the University at Albany, where he teaches courses in film history.

With the kind permission of the journal’s publisher, McFarland, I will occasionally bring to your attention other outstanding works that heretofore have been unavailable to the broad readership interested in baseball history. 

Baseball Film to 1920

Rob Edelman 

Every motion picture is a time capsule, a moment in the life of a culture. But unless it is two minutes or ten hours long and non-narrative—in other words, decidedly non-commercial—a film is usually produced for one purpose: to make money. In this regard, a motion picture is no different from an automobile, a roll of bathroom tissue, or a can of beer. This profit motive also explains why, in the parlance of the business, individual films are referred to as “product.”

Motion pictures that feature baseball-related settings have been produced since the late 1890s and early 1900s, when movie-going was as novel as watching television was in 1950 or renting movies on videotape was in 1985. From the very beginning, baseball was depicted in motion pictures primarily because of the burgeoning popularity of the sport. It made sense to filmmakers that fans of the game would fork over their hard-earned nickels to gaze at comedies or dramas depicting speedballing hurlers, ninth-inning heroics, and likable underdogs triumphing against the odds. In particular, in this era before the advent of radio and television, motion pictures allowed moviegoers—especially those who lived outside the major league cities—to see and admire the baseball stars they only could read about in newspapers or hear about while chatting with their cronies at the corner barbershop. Such films generally were newsreels spotlighting major leaguers, or one- and two-reelers featuring ballplayers in what were little more than cameo appearances, or highly fictionalized “biographical” features in which scenarists transformed ballplayers into fairy-tale heroes. Whether in a story that was fact or fiction, however, seeing Ty Cobb or Babe Ruth up-close on a movie screen in 1917 or 1920 must have been a transcendent experience for the average baseball fan.

Despite their growing popularity, motion pictures still were dwarfed by vaudeville as the most popular form of mass entertainment. On November 8, 1908, the Washington Post described a “polite vaudeville” program, to be presented at “Chase’s theater.” The bill included “Lasky’s Viennese production, ‘The Love Waltz,’ with Alfred Kappeler and Audrey Maple…. Laddie Cliff, the English boy comedian…. Will H. Fox, fresh fromLondon triumphs, in his new single piano act; the Young American Five; the Five Jordans,” and so on. The final entertainment cited was a film: “‘The Baseball Fan’ by the American vitagraph.”

Yet the storylines found in the earliest baseball films, and the manner in which they portray ballplayers and fans, serve to mirror the now long-extinct American culture before 1920: a time of innocence, a pre–Jazz Age America that was a nation of small towns and small-town types. The prevailing view was that the simplicity of rural life was preferable to the corrupting ways of the metropolis. It was an era when filmmakers could celebrate a pastoral Americawhose foundation was Victorian morality, while emphasizing the notion that leaving the farm for the city meant going off in search of sin.

Whether on purpose or by accident, baseball-playing characters were depicted in such milieus—and their on-field exploits were blended into standard plotlines featuring plainspoken Good Guys who win their true love while fending off one-dimensionally evil villains. If baseball truly was America’s national pastime, such baseball players were ideal all-American heroes. Their honesty and good intentions aside, however, it was their on-field exploits that made them lastingly heroic. Before a new reality set in, that of flaming youth and bathtub gin, the Black Sox Scandal and the Roaring Twenties, baseball movies could lovingly—and believably—chart the comic antics of fans attempting to enjoy ballgames despite their bullying bosses or unsympathetic wives, or weave the stories of rural whammers or flamethrowers who overcome obstacles, perform storybook heroics, and win the love of the demure, true-blue heroine while spurning the entreaties of villains to cheat on the field.

*     *     *

 The earliest motion pictures, made before the turn of the century, were plotless. Audiences, fascinated by this new moving imagery, were satisfied to see representations of a train pulling into a railway station, a man and woman sharing a kiss—and an athlete running, jumping, boxing, or swinging a baseball bat.

Baseball on celluloid dates as far back as The Ball Game (1898, Edison), running 50 feet (approximately 35–40 seconds) and consisting of shots of an amateur team from Newark, New Jersey, battling a rival nine. [View at http://memory.loc.gov/cgi-bin/query/h?ammem/papr:@field(NUMBER+@band(awal+1317}))] That same year, American cavalrymen who soon were fighting in the Spanish–American War were captured on film playing baseball at a training base. The 50-foot-long Casey at the Bat (1899, Edison) was shot on the lawn of Thomas Edison’s estate in West Orange, New Jersey, and opens with a batter swinging wildly at a pitch and striking out. He and the other players and umpires brawl, with a jumble of bodies piling up at home plate. [View at http://www.fandor.com/films/casey_at_the_bat_1899.] (The early motion-picture companies were not based in Hollywood. For example, Edison’s motion-picture production and distribution arm—whose full name was the Edison Manufacturing Company before it was reorganized as Thomas A. Edison, Inc., in 1910—was located in New Jersey. This explains why Edison’s The Ball Game and Casey at the Bat were shot in the state.)

With the popularity of such landmark films as Life of an American Fireman (1903, Edison) and The Great Train Robbery (1903, Edison), audiences wanted to see films that featured narratives, however rudimentary or genre-driven. In Play Ball on the Beach (1906, Biograph), a typical early story-oriented baseball film, a bunch of ballplayers become angered at an umpire’s call.  Baseball blended with the Wild West in His Last Game (1909, Independent Motion Picture Company), about a baseball star on an all-Indian team who spurns a bribe from a pair of cowboy gamblers. [View at: http://www.fandor.com/films/his_last_game.]

Baseball and comedy were happily linked in a range of one- and two-reelers. Hearts and Diamonds (1914, Vitagraph) stars John Bunny, a corpulent comic actor who predates Charlie Chaplin, Buster Keaton, and Harold Lloyd as the cinema’s foremost silent comedian. Bunny plays the Widower Tupper, who starts his own ball team in order to impress the wealthy, baseball-loving Rachel Whipple (Flora Finch). [A snip of this may be seen at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hnGyY6PavOw.] In Spit-Ball Sadie (1915, Pathé) , also known as Lonesome Luke Becomes a Pitcher, Harold Lloyd, playing a character who was a variation of Chaplin’s Little Tramp, dresses in drag and joins an all-female team. In Over the Fence (1917, Pathé), Lloyd and Snub Pollard play rival tailors who plan to attend a game. In 1916–1917, Universal released a series of “Baseball Bill” one-reelers directed, written, and/or produced by and starring the comic Smilin’ Billy Mason, who previously had perfected a vaudeville routine as a one-person ball club. Not to be outdone, Selig (the early motion picture production company, and no relation to the current baseball commissioner) marketed the “Mudville” baseball comedy shorts in 1917.

Because youngsters are a fertile audience demographic, producers have fashioned movies for children since the industry’s infancy. And so baseball and boyhood come together in Shut Out in the 9th (1917, Edison), in which a pair of prepubescent lads laugh at the town sheriff after being ordered to cease their game of catch. They chide one of their contemporaries, a “sissy” who wouldn’t know a baseball bat from a tennis racket. After their team, the Greenpoint Giants, loses a spirited game to their rivals from Johnsville, the boys discover the opposite sex and compete for the affection of a pretty young miss from the big city.

The unabashed union of movies and commerce is reflected in Homerun Hawkins (circa 1920), one of the oddest silent-era baseball films. This filmed-in-Milwaukee kiddie pic charts the antics of Seckatary Hawkins, the star of a boys’ team scheduled to play the Pelhams in a championship fray—and it is loaded with pitches that have nothing to do with baseball. Local merchants sponsored the film’s production and their wares and emporiums are prominently displayed throughout, among them Gridley Ice Cream, the E.M. Jordan Buick Company, and Schusters Department Store, where Seckatary and his teammates purchase the “Schuster Home Run Special” that Sec will use to smack the game-winning round-tripper.

Not all early baseball films centered on ballplayers; quite a few portrayed the shenanigans of fans attempting to enjoy a ballgame. In How the Office Boy Saw the Ball Game (1906, Edison), the title character maneuvers to duck out of work for an afternoon at the ballpark, only to discover his boss occupying the adjoining seat. [View at: http://www.fandor.com/films/how_the_office_boy_saw_the_ball_game.] How Jones Saw the Baseball Game (1907, Lubin), also known as How Brown Saw the Baseball Game, features a similar storyline—only here, the main character imbibes a couple of highballs and, through trick photography, sees the players running the bases backwards. The Baseball Fan (1908, Essanay), written and directed by G.M. “Broncho Billy” Anderson, one of the movies’ first cowboy heroes, charts the comic escapades of a rabid fan who attempts to see the Chicago White Sox take on the New York Highlanders at Comiskey Park. Take Me Out to the Ball Game (1910, Essanay), also made by Anderson, tells of a baseball nut who manages to forget his wife at the ballpark. In Baseball, That’s All! (1910, Méliès), a fan lies to his boss so that he can attend a game. The Baseball Bug (1911, Thanhouser) is the story of a clerk who fantasizes that he’s a star hurler. Mr. and Mrs. Sidney Drew—he was the uncle of Ethel, Lionel, and John Barrymore—are featured in His First Game (1917, Metro), in which they go to a ballgame at New York’s Polo Grounds.

Given its popularity, Casey at the Bat was a natural for the movies. The 1899 Edison film borrowed the title, without any of the story elements, of Ernest Lawrence Thayer’s celebrated poem, which first was printed in the San Francisco Examiner on August 13, 1888. A more literal Casey at the Bat (1913, Vitagraph) featured the long-forgotten Harry T. Morey as Casey.

For 45 years beginning in 1889, DeWolf Hopper recited Casey at the Bat perhaps 10,000 times. The actor appeared in two very different Casey films. The second, produced in 1922, consists of Hopper floridly reciting the poem. It is a DeForest Phonofilm, which utilized the sound-on-film technology developed by Theodore Case and Lee DeForest. The earlier Casey at the Bat (1916, Triangle), is a dramatic expansion of the poem. Hopper, who then was in his fifties, played a grocery clerk who is devoted to his niece. This “baseball hero of Mudville” refuses to play in an important game against Frogtown because the girl has injured herself while climbing a tree. The yells of the fans convince Casey to relent. He strikes out in the ninth inning because he is distracted by a messenger, whom he thinks has arrived with bad tidings about the child.

Hopper’s age and oversized ego were sarcastically cited in a Los Angeles Times article written during the film’s production. “Hopper’s make-up as Casey is said to be attracting a great deal of attention and admiration…,” wrote Grace Kingsley. “He is practicing sincere baseball every morning, and says that if he gets tired of acting he may try for the big leagues.” The New York Times reported: “The comedian is enthusiastic about the possibilities of preserving Casey in cans which can be shipped to any part of the world on demand. It will save him a lot of traveling and enable him to enjoy his dinner more. Since he joined the Triangle forces last Fall he has been the champion diner-out of the studios, and rarely has returned to hisHollywood bungalow without describing the downfall of the mighty Casey.” [For Hopper reciting the ballad in 1922, see: http://www.fandor.com/films/casey_at_the_bat_1922.]

End of Part 1. Part 2 commences tomorrow, with Rube Waddell taking part in a film in 1902, World Series films hitting neighborhood screens  in 1906, and stars such as Christy Mathewson leaping from the newsreels to feature films.

In the previous post I featured a mid-1940s recollection of Casey Stengel’s self-identified greatest day in baseball, as told to Chicago Daily News reporter John Carmichael. Here is another from that wonderful series, as told to Jack Ryan by Mordecai Peter Centennial “Three-Finger” Brown. He was a seven-year-old Indiana farmboy when he accidentally put his right hand into his uncle’s corn grinder. His index finger was so badly damaged that it was amputated just below the knuckle. Because his index finger was barely a stub, he was forced to exert extra pressure on the ball with his mangled middle finger. Because of Brown’s unique grip, his curve dropped like a modern forkball, and it was his signature delivery.

He named his greatest day as the 1908 National League playoff contest dictated when the Giants and Brown’s Cubs concluded the regular season in a tie for the top spot, because the “Merkle Boner” game of September 23 could not be played to a conclusion. That game was tied 1–1 in the last of the ninth. With the Giants’ Moose McCormick on first and one out, rookie Fred Merkle shot a single to right that moved the runner to third. After another out, Al Bridwell singled to center, the winning run crossed the plate, and the Giants had extended their slim lead in the pennant race. Or had they?

Merkle, in the excitement, never bothered to touch second, instead running off the field to avoid the rush of fans storming out to celebrate. Somehow Cubs second baseman Johnny Evers got the ball (or some ball, at any rate) and stepped on second, showing the ump he had forced Merkle and the run didn’t count. Less than three weeks earlier the Cubs had tried to win a ruling on a similar force-out against the Pirates and were overruled.

Not this time. The umpires, Hank O’Day and Bob Emslie, declared the game a tie, as there was no way to clear the joyously cascading fans from the field. League president Harry Pulliam backed them up. The game was to be replayed if necessary to determine a pennant winner.

Now let Three Finger Brown tell the rest of the story.

When manager Frank “Husk” Chance led the Chicago Cubs team into New York the morning of October 8, 1908, to meet the Giants that afternoon to settle a tie for the National League pennant, I had a half-dozen “black hand” letters in my coat pocket. “We’ll kill you,” these letters said, “if you pitch and beat the Giants.”

Those letters and other threats had been reaching me ever since we had closed our regular season two days before in Pittsburgh. We’d beaten the Pirates in that final game for our 98th win of the year, and we had waited around for two days to see what the Giants would do in their last two games with Boston. They had to win ‘em to tie us for the National championship.

Well, the Giants did win those two to match our record of 98 wins and 55 losses, so a playoff was in order. I always thought that John McGraw used his great influence in National League affairs to dictate that the playoff  must be held on the Giants’ home field, the Polo Grounds.

I’d shown the “black hand” letters to manager Chance and to the Cubs owner, Charley Murphy. “Let me pitch,” I’d asked ‘em, “just to show those so-and-sos they can’t win with threats.”

Chance picked Jack Pfiester instead. Two weeks before, Pfiester had tangled with Christy Mathewson, McGraw’s great pitcher, and had beaten him on the play where young Fred Merkle, in failing to touch second on a hit, had made himself immortal for the “boner” play. Since Mathewson had been rested through the series with Boston and would go against us in the playoff, Chance decided to follow the Pfiester–Mathewson pitching pattern of the “boner” game. I had pitched just two days before as we won our final game of the schedule from Pittsburgh.

Matter of fact, I had started or relieved in eleven of our last fourteen games. Beyond that, I’d been in fourteen of the last nineteen games as we came roaring down the stretch, hot after the championship.

In our clubhouse meeting before the game, when Chance announced that Pfiester would pitch, we each picked out a New York player to work on. “Call ’em everything in the book,” Chance told us. We didn’t need much encouragement either.

My pet target, you might say, was McGraw. I’d been clouding up on him ever since I had come across his sly trick of taking rival pitchers aside and sort of softening them up by hinting that he had cooked up a deal to get that fellow with the Giants. He’d taken me aside for a little chat to that effect one time, hoping, I suppose, that in a tight spot against the Giants I’d figure I might as well go easy since I’d soon be over on McGraw’s side.

Sure, it was a cunning trick he had and I didn’t like it. So the day after he’d given me that line of talk, I walked up to him and said, “Skipper, I’m pitching for the Cubs this afternoon and I’m going to show you just what a helluva pitcher you’re trying to make a deal for.” I beat his Giants good  that afternoon. [The film underlying the 1907 flip book below may be viewed at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FzkyW7WcybU.]

But that was early in the season, and I want to tell you about this playoff game. It was played before what everybody said was the biggest crowd that had ever seen a baseball game. The whole city of New York, it seemed to us, was clear crazy with disappointment because we had taken that “Merkle boner” game from the Giants. The Polo Grounds quit selling tickets about one o’clock, and thousands who held tickets couldn’t force their way through the street mobs to the entrances. The umpires were an hour getting into the park. By game time there were thousands on the field in front of the bleachers, the stands were jammed with people standing and sitting in the aisles, and there were always little fights going on as ticket-holders tried to get to their seats.

The bluffs overhanging the Polo Grounds were black with people, as were the housetops and the telegraph poles. The elevated lines couldn’t run because of people who had climbed up and were sitting on the tracks.

The police couldn’t move them, and so the fire department came and tried driving them off with the hose, but they’d come back. Then the fire department had other work to do, for the mob outside the park set fire to the left field fence and was all set to come bursting through as soon as the flames weakened the boards enough.

Just before the game started, the crowd did break down another part of the fence, and the mounted police had to quit trampling the mob out in front of the park and come riding in to turn back this new drive. The crowds fought the police all the time, it seemed to us as we sat in our dugout. From the stands there was a steady roar of abuse. I never heard anybody or any set of men called as many foul names as the Giants’ fans called us that day, from the time we showed up till it was over.

We had just come out onto the field and were getting settled when Tom Needham, one of our utility men, came running up with the news that back in the clubhouse he’d overheard Muggsy McGraw laying a plot to beat us. He said the plot was for McGraw to cut our batting practice to about four minutes instead of the regular ten, and then, if we protested, to send his three toughest players, Turkey Mike Donlin, Iron Man McGinnity, and Cy Seymour, charging out to pick a fight. The wild-eyed fans would riot, and the blame would be put on us for starting it, so the game would be forfeited to the Giants.

Chance said to us, “Cross ‘em up. No matter when the bell rings to end practice, come right off the field. Don’t give any excuse to quarrel.”

We followed orders, but McGinnity tried to pick a fight with Chance anyway, and made a pass at him, but Husk stepped back, grinned, and wouldn’t fall for their little game.

I can still see Christy Mathewson making his lordly entrance. He’d always wait until about ten minutes before game time. Then he’d come from the clubhouse across the field in a long linen duster, like auto drivers wore in those days, and at every step the crowd would yell louder and louder. This day they split the air. I watched him enter as I went out to the bullpen, where I was to keep ready. Chance still insisted on starting Pfiester.

Mathewson put us down quick in our first time at bat, but when the Giants came up with the sky splitting as the crowd screamed, Pfiester hit Fred Tenney, walked Buck Herzog, fanned Roger Bresnahan, but Johnny Kling dropped the third strike and when Herzog broke for second, he nailed him. Then Turkey Mike Donlin doubled, scoring Tenney, and out beyond center field a fireman fell off a telegraph pole and broke his neck. Pfiester walked Cy Seymour, and then Chance motioned for me to come in. Two on base, two out.

Our warmup pen was out in right-center field, so I had to push and shove my way through the crowd on the outfield grass.

“Get the hell out of the way,” I bawled at ‘em as I plowed through. “Here’s where you ‘black hand’ guys get your chance. If I’m going to get killed, I sure know that I’ll die before a capacity crowd.”

Arthur Devlin was up—a low-average hitter, great fielder, but tough in the pinches. But I fanned him, and then you should have heard the names that flew around me as I walked to the bench.

I was about as good that day as I ever was in my life. That year I had won 29 and, what with relief work, had been in forty-three winning ballgames.

But in a way it was Husk Chance’s day.

That Chance had a stout heart in him. His first time at bat, it was in the second. The fans met him with a storm of hisses—not “boos” like you hear in modern baseball—but the old, vicious hiss that comes from real hatred.

Chance choked the hisses back down New York’s throat by singling with a loud crack of the bat. The ball came back to Mathewson. He looked at Bresnahan behind the bat, then wheeled and threw to first, catching Chance off guard. Chance slid. Tenney came down with the ball. Umpire Bill Klem threw up his arm. Husk was out!

Chance ripped and raved around, protesting. Most of us Cubs rushed out of the dugout. Solly Hofman called Klem so many names that Bill threw him out of the game.

The stands behind us went into panic, they were so tickled, and the roar was the wildest I ever heard when Matty went on to strike out Harry Steinfeldt and Del Howard.

Chance was grim when he came up again in the third. Joe Tinker had led off the inning by tripling over Cy Seymour’s head. We heard afterward that McGraw had warned Seymour that Tinker was apt to hit Mathewson hard, and to play way back. But Seymour didn’t. Kling singled Tinker home. I sacrificed Johnny to second. Jimmy Sheckard flied out, Johnny Evers walked, and Frank Schulte doubled. We had Matty wabbling, and then up came Chance, with the crowd howling. He answered them again with a double, and made it to second with a great slide that beat a great throw by Mike Donlin.

Four runs.

The Giants made their bid in the seventh. Art Devlin singled off me, and so did Moose McCormick. I tried to pitch too carefully to Bidwell and walked him. There was sure bedlam in the air as McGraw took out Mathewson and sent up the kid, Larry Doyle, to hit. Doyle hit a high foul close to the stand and as Kling went to catch it, the fans sailed derby hats—and bottles,    papers, everything to confuse him. But Kling had nerve and he caught it.

Every play, as I look back on it, was crucial. In the seventh after Tenney’s fly had scored Devlin, Buck Herzog rifled one on the ground to left, but Joe Tinker got one hand and one shin in front of it, blocked it, picked it up, and just by a flash caught Herzog, who made a wicked slide into first.

In the ninth a big fight broke out in the stands, and the game was held up until the police could throw in a cordon of bluecoats and stop it. It was as near to a lunatic asylum as I ever saw. As a matter of fact, the newspapers next day said seven men had been carted away, raving mad, from the park during the day. This was maybe exaggerated, but it doesn’t sound impossible to anyone who was there that day.

As the ninth ended with the Giants going out, one–two–three, we all ran for our lives, straight for the clubhouse with the pack at our heels. Some of our boys got caught by the mob and were beaten up some. Tinker, Howard and Sheckard were struck. Chance was hurt most of all. A Giant fan hit him in the throat and Husk’s voice was gone for a day or two of the World Series that followed.

Pfiester got slashed on the shoulder by a knife.

We made it to the dressing room and barricaded the door. Outside wild men were yelling for our blood—really. As the mob got bigger, the police came up and formed a line across the door. We read the next day that the cops had to pull their revolvers to hold them back. I couldn’t say as to that. We weren’t sticking our heads out to see.

As we changed clothes, too excited yet to put on one of those wild clubhouse pennant celebrations, the word came in that the Giants over in their dressing room were pretty low. We heard that old Cy Seymour was lying on the floor in there, bawling like a baby about Tinker’s triple.

When it was safe, we rode to our hotel in a patrol wagon, with two cops on the inside and four riding the running boards and the rear step. That night, when we left for Detroit and the World Series, we slipped out the back door and were escorted down the alley in back of our hotel by a swarm of policemen.

Last week I wrote about the New York Mets and, inevitably, Charles Dillon Stengel, whose profound summation of his life—“I’m a man that’s been up and down”—gave title to the story. This time I’d like to write about that same lefthanded dental-school dropout from Kansas City—the abbreviation of which gave name to the man.

Casey did not, as one might imagine, owe his sobriquet to the ballad “Casey at the Bat,” published two years before his birth. Yet that origin would have been apt, for Stengel is baseball’s literary giant, its James Joyce … no less than Yogi Berra may be said to be its philosopher king. To me, he is baseball’s most interesting figure, a protean artist of infinite riches.

For this column, let’s confine ourselves to his playing days, which began in the minors in 1910 and ended there in 1931, when he played in a handful of games while managing Toledo in the American Association. Stengel was a solid if unspectacular outfielder with the Dodgers, Pirates, Phillies, Giants, and Braves. A highlight of his early years took place on a Sunday at Ebbets Field, on May 25, 1919. Stengel had been traded to Pittsburgh before the 1918 season, but spent most of that season in the military. Returning to play in his spiritual home, Casey was well on his way to an 0–for–4 and had just made an inelegant play in the outfield. When he sauntered in from the field at the end of the sixth inning, his Pirates trailing by 5–0, the crowd “guyed him,” in the words of the New York Sun. Bowing to the grandstand, he politely doffed his cap, and out flew a sparrow that a spectator had handed to Stengel. The crowd convulsed in laughter even though he had flipped them the bird.

In 1923, as a platoon outfielder with the Giants, Stengel hit the first World Series home run in Yankee Stadium history, winning Game 1. He hit another to provide the only run in Game 3. His reward was to be traded to the last-place Boston Braves one month later.

Of his dash home in Game 1 Damon Runyon wrote,

This is the way old “Casey” Stengel ran, running his home run home, when two were out in the ninth and the score was tied and the ball was still bounding inside the Yankee yard.
This is the way–
His mouth wide open.
His warped old legs bending beneath him at every stride.
His arms flying back and forth like those of a man swimming the crawl stroke.
His flanks heaving, his breath whistling, his head far back.”

To us, Casey seems to have been born old, crusty and bandy-legged. Yet when he made his big-league debut with Brooklyn on September 17, 1912, the Eagle reported the following day:

It may be stated in the most polite circles that he did break in … with a loud, resounding-crash, such as has been made by few minor leaguers landing In the majors, Stengel is light-haired, hits and throws lefthanded, is fast on his feet and seems to have a good eye for fly balls. Against the miscellaneous collection of pitchers shoved into the fray by Pittsburg yesterday he made a record in five times at bat of four straight singles, followed by a base on balls, stole two bases and drove in two runs. He also gave every indication of being full of pep and self-confidence and promises to be a strong bidder for a regular job in the Brooklyn outfield. 

Fast on his feet! Full of pep! Breaking in with a bang! Below, in Casey’s own words, is the story of that debut, offered up in the early 1940s, before George Weiss brought him on to manage the Yankees.

One day in Kankakee, Illinois, in 1910 these two ballplayers—teammates of mine—were sitting on a bench watching me practice in the outfield. I’d haul down a flyball, hurl it into the infield, then toss my glove into the grass, take a run, and slide into the mitt. “He won’t be with us long,” one of them observed. “You mean he’s going up?” asked the other. “No,” replied the first, “there’s an institution here to take care of guys like that…!”

I was only practicing three things at once, like running, throwing and sliding. And I fooled them, because two years later, in September, I got off a train in New York, a brand-new suitcase in one hand and $95 in my pocket. The next day was my greatest in baseball. I was reporting to Brooklyn.

The bag was Kid Eberfeld’s idea. He was back from the majors and playing with us at Montgomery, Alabama, in the Southern League when manager Johnny Dobbs gave me the offer to join the Dodgers. The Kid and Mrs. Eberfeld came over to say goodby and good luck while I was packing. I had one of those cardboard valises … they’d last about a thousand miles if you got good weather, but if you ever got caught in the rain with one, you’d suddenly find yourself walking along with just a handle in your hand.

Well, they told me I couldn’t go to the big leagues with a thing like that and made me lay out $18 for a good one. I’d gone two and a half years to dental school and I was trying to save up enough tuition dough for another year. It cost about $150 plus more for instruments and everything, and I was short enough of cash without buying a bag. “You won’t come back,” said Eberfield. “Never mind the money. Forget about being a dentist.”

So I got to New York. It was in the evening and no use going to the park then, so I asked a cabdriver for a place to stay, and he drove me to the Longacre Hotel at 47th Street. I checked in and went down and sat in the lobby. I was afraid to go out, it was so dark, but finally I walked down to 46th Street and then hustled back, for fear I’d get lost. About twenty minutes later I went as far as 45th and back. I kept adding another block each trip and had been clear to 42nd Street and returned by midnight when I decided to turn in. The next morning I started for the park. Brooklyn played then at the old Washington Street grounds at Fifth Avenue and Third and with the help of an elevated and a streetcar I made it. The gateman found out what I wanted and waved toward the clubhouse. “Go on down there,” he said … and, as I walked away, he called after me, “You better be good.”

I’ll never forget walking into the locker room. There was a crap game going on in one corner. The only fellow who paid attention to me was Zack Wheat. He introduced me around. Nobody shook hands. Some grunted. A few said hello. I walked over to the game and decided maybe I ought to get in good with the boys by participating in their sport, so I fished out $20 and asked if I could shoot. Somebody said, “Sure,” and handed me the dice. I rolled ’em out. A hand reached for my 20 and a voice said, “Craps, busher,” and I never even got the bones back. I was about to reach for more money when I felt a tap on my shoulder and there was manager Bill Dahlen.

“Are you a crapshooter or a ballplayer, kid?” he asked. I told him I was a player and he said, “Well, get into a suit and on that field while you still have carfare.”

I hustled, believe me, and I’ve never touched dice since, either. I got to the bench and just sat there. I knew better than to pick up a bat and go to the plate. Elberfeld told me what happened to rookies who tried that. Finally Dahlen came over and said, “Let’s see you chase a few,” and I ran like hell for the outfield. Behind the fence was a big building with fire escapes all down one side and guys in shirtsleeves were parked on the steps, passing around pails of beer and getting set for the game.

I never expected to play, but just as the umpires came out, Dahlen told me to “Get in center.” Hub Northen, the regular center fielder, had been sick, and I guess they decided they might as well get me over with quick. My first time at bat we had a man on first and Dahlen gave me the bunt sign. The pitch wasn’t good and I let it go by. Claude Hendrix, the league’s leading pitcher, was working for Pittsburgh and George Gibson was catching. Hendrix threw another and I singled to right-center. When I got to the bench after the inning, Dahlen stopped me. “Didn’t you see the bunt sign?” he asked. I told him yes, but that down south we had the privilege of switching on the next pitch if we wanted to. “I don’t want you to carry too much responsibility, kid,” he said, “so I’ll run the team, and that way all you’ll have to worry about is fielding and hitting.” My ears were red when I got to center field.

Up on the fire escape the boys were having drinks on my hit and I could hear them speaking real favorably of me. I heard somebody holler, and it was Wheat telling me to move back. Hans Wagner was at the plate. He larruped one and I went way back and grabbed it. In the dugout Wheat said, “Better play deeper for him.” I thought of the catch I’d made and said to myself, “I can grab anything he can hit.” Two innings later he came up again and Wheat waved me back, but I wouldn’t go, and wham! old Hans peeled one off. The ball went by me like a beebee shot, and he was roosting on third when I caught up with it.

I got three more hits right in a row. The first time Hendrix had fed me a fastball, figuring why waste his best pitch, a spitter, on a busher. He was pretty mad by the time I combed two blows off his spitter and another off his hook. Once I was on first Dahlen gave me the steal sign and away I went. I beat Gibson’s throw, and Wagner just stood there, looking down at me. Never said a word. I stole two bases, and when I came up the fifth time we’d knocked Hendrix out and a lefthander was pitching for the Bucs.Pittsburgh’s manager Fred Clark hollered at me, “All-right, phenom, let’s see you cross over.” I was feeling cocky enough to do it so I stepped across the plate and stood hitting righthanded and I got a base on balls!

Two days later the Dodgers were playing the Cubs. I came to bat for the first time that day with nobody on. Cub catcher Jimmy Archer looked up to me and said, “So you’re the new Brooklyn star, huh? A basestealer, too, huh? Well, I hope you get on and go down.” I got on and, with two out, Dahlen gave me the green light. I was twenty feet from the bag when I saw Johnny Evers with the ball. I tried to slide around him, but no use. He really crowned me. As I lay there, he pulled up one pants leg. “Oh, tryin’ to spike me,” he growled, although I hadn’t even touched him. “I’ll stick this ball down your throat if you ever try it again, busher!”

My greatest day was over. And my real education had begun!

Last week I delivered the keynote speech at a Hofstra University conference marking the 50th anniversary of the New York Mets. This is a somewhat abbreviated version of that talk. When George Weiss hired Casey Stengel to become the manager of the expansion New York Mets in September 1961, the Ol’ Professor declared to reporters, “It’s a great honor for me to be joining the Knickerbockers.”

Now, Casey had been around New York baseball forever. He broke in as an outfielder with the Brooklyn Dodgers in 1912, starred with the New York Giants in the World Series of 1923, and created an unsurpassed record at the helm of the New York Yankees, only to be fired after losing the 1960 World Series in the final inning of the final game. But the Knickerbockers? Casey did not cavort with Alexander Cartwright and Doc Adams on the Elysian Fields of Hoboken before the Civil War, but in his misstep he was on to something.

Casey’s infant Mets owned the oldest name in New York baseball. Dating back to 1857, the height of the game’s amateur era, the first Metropolitan baseball club predated the Giants, Dodgers, or Yankees. Established as a professional nine in September 1880, the Mets and their one-armed pitcher, Hugh Daily, played baseball at a park known as the Polo Grounds because their Central Park field was initially leased for playing … polo. As champions of the American Association (at that time a major league), the 1884 Mets took part in baseball’s first world championship series (losing to the Providence Grays). Baseball ended at this first Polo Grounds when the city built 111th St. through center and right fields in the fall of 1888. The initial home of the expansion Mets was the fourth incarnation of these original Polo Grounds.

Casey’s links with the three New York ball clubs of the twentieth century were echoed by George Weiss’s selections in the expansion draft of October 10, 1961, when they relied heavily on experienced players. “The fans remember players like Gil Hodges, Don Zimmer, Roger Craig, and Gus Bell,” Weiss explained, “We have to give them players they know.” Weiss soon added other veterans to his roster: Frank Thomas, Richie Ashburn, Charlie Neal, Wilmer “Vinegar Bend” Mizell, Clem Labine. The original Mets were a stopgap measure, not a green bunch building for the future: the average age of the 1962 team would be thirty.

These graybeards—to whom my hero, Duke Snider, was added in 1963—were no longer the boys of summer but, in poet Dylan Thomas’s actual phrase, seldom recalled in this baseball context, the “boys of summer in their ruin.” The 1962 Mets finished in last place on merit, occupying the bottom rung in batting, pitching, and fielding statistics. Opponents outscored them by more than two runs per game. They won only one game in four and suffered a twentieth-century record 120 losses. But New York fans, deprived of National League baseball since the defection of the Dodgers and Giants to the West Coast four years earlier, found their ineptitude lovable. On this club, Rod Kanehl and Marv Throneberry were gods of a sort. The Mets drew nearly a million fans in their first year, a very respectable total at that time, and by their third season, having moved out of the decrepit Polo Grounds into brand-new Shea Stadium though still in last place, they were regularly outdrawing the pennant-bound Yankees.

Another link between the departed Brooklyn Dodgers and the fledgling, or revived, Mets was Branch Rickey—and through his signal achievement, Jackie Robinson. The departure of the Dodgers and Giants in 1958 had created a vacuum in New York and an increased hunger for baseball in new boomtowns like Houston, Atlanta, and Minneapolis. Rickey was nearly eighty but still possessed a keen nose for new opportunity. The great innovator who had already brought baseball the farm system and integration now created the Continental League, a paper league with paper franchises. Nonetheless, Rickey’s mirage worried Organized Baseball into expansion.

Two of the Continental League “franchises”—the future New York Mets and Houston Colt .45s—were admitted for 1962. The American League was authorized to commence its western foray one year earlier with the expansion-draft Los Angeles Angels and the Minnesota Twins (the latter being the transplanted Washington Senators, who were replaced in the nation’s capital by an ill-fated expansion team that is today’s Texas Rangers).

Nationwide in the 1960s, as pitchers pounded batters into near oblivion, fans drifted away. Attendance in the National League, which in 1966 reached 15 million, fell by 1968 to only 11.7 million. In fact, despite the addition of four new clubs in 1961-62, attendance in 1968 was only 3 million more than it had been in 1960. Critics charged that baseball was a geriatric vestige of an America that had vanished, a game too slow for a nation that was rushing toward the moon; its decline would only steepen, they claimed, as that more with-it national pastime, pro football, extended its mastery of the airwaves.

The owners acted quickly to restore the game’s balance between offense and defense, reducing the strike zone and lowering the pitcher’s mound. But the most important change may have been one that was introduced in 1965 and was only beginning to take effect: the amateur free-agent draft. Successful teams like the Yankees, Dodgers, Braves, and Cardinals had stayed successful because of their attention to scouting. Consistently they were able to garner more top prospects for their farm systems than clubs with less deep pockets or more volatile management. Now, dynasties—awe-inspiring but not healthy for the game—were suddenly rendered implausible. Now, baseball had a competitive balance that could produce a rotation of electrifying leaps to the top, like the ascension of the Boston Red Sox from ninth place in 1966 to the pennant the next, and the amazing rise of the New York Mets from the depths they had known to become world champions in 1969. Before then, skeptics were fond of proclaiming, “The Mets will win the pennant when men walk on the moon…”

I don’t know that any Mets success after that can equal the impossible thrills of that season. Not 1973, not 1986, not 2000, all of them years that ended with the Mets in the World Series. In truth, the Mets’ dark days as lovable losers and their periodic stretches of second-division slumber have obscured an amazing fact: they have appeared in more World Series than any of the expansion clubs. The disappointments of recent years have been magnified by the concurrent success of that other, unnamed franchise in the Bronx. But success in baseball or in “real life” tends to be cyclical. Late in his life, Casey was asked by a young reporter to sum up his life in the game.

“I’m a man that’s been up and down,” he replied. That’s a good summation of the Mets, and their fans, and common humanity.

Some deep-pocketed teams are able to stay in the pennant race year after year, masking the periodic downturns in their minor-league talent and fostering a general perception that they are “winners.” This sleight of hand deprives their fans of a basic American experience—the perception that success will come from hard work and patience more gratifyingly, if less reliably, than from privilege. An elite team breeds not hope, but instead expectation, which can be hard to satisfy and even harder to bear.

Hope is the key. It inflates us. It fulfills us. It makes us better fans, and we love the game and our club more deeply with each passing year. The tree does not grow to the sky; the top breaks off and the tree becomes wider and fuller. The limbs of disappointment are especially sturdy ones. Bart Giamatti wrote, echoing the poet Andrew Marvell, that the color of hope is green. In my experience it has been blue and orange.

All of you will recall Game Six of the 1986 World Series, when the prospect was so bleak that only a Mets fan might have hoped for a miracle. I was fortunate enough to attend that game (and last year’s Game Six, very nearly as great). But another game I attended still holds the most honored place in my memory. On September 20, 1973, the Mets were in a stumbling sort of pennant race with three teams, including their opponent that chilly evening, the Pittsburgh Pirates. With two outs and the game tied in the thirteenth inning, Richie Zisk was on first base. Dave Augustine lined a shot to left, over the head of Cleon Jones. The ball struck the very top of the wall, yet somehow stayed in play, miraculously popping into Cleon’s glove. He turned and threw a perfect relay to Wayne Garrett, who threw to Ron Hodges at the plate. Hodges blocked the plate perfectly and tagged Zisk for the third out. In the bottom of the inning, he singled home the winning run. I have watched baseball games for fifty-five years and I have never seen a play like it, before or since.

For this old boy, with more years behind than ahead, the Mets are still at life’s core. Not in the same dizzying way as when the Mets swept to implausible glory in 1969, filling my heart with joy and my mind with the certainty that anything, yes, anything could happen. No longer in the same warming way as seeing my sons become first players and then fans for life. They are grown now, scattered, yet baseball and the Mets remain a link for all of us. The game is what we talk about when we want to connect not only with our shared past but with each other as we are today.

The Mets are family. Tom Seaver and George Theodore, Darryl Strawberry and Jim Hickman—these old friends are now and then present at the dinner table; for us, ballgames of bygone days are stored in our hearts and retrieved like holiday snapshots.

Thank you, Mets.