Do you remember how we chose up sides for baseball games as kids? One captain would toss a bat to the other, whose grip would mark the starting point in a hand-over-hand matchup until just the knob showed. Then the one with a hold on the knob would have to twirl the bat over his head without dropping it … in order to get first choice of the assembled players.

On July 4, serendipitously, on July 4, the National and American Leagues reenacted that sandlot ritual, selecting the starters, pitchers, and reserves for the 96th edition of the All-Star Game. Ten days later, Major League Baseball will conduct its annual midseason classic in the nation’s birthplace, as its contribution to marking the nation’s semiquincentennial (that’s 250 years to you, bub).

Let’s look back to MLB’s first All-Star Games in 1933 — the one that took place on July 6 as well as the East-West Game of September 10. Because this essay is part of a historical series, we’ll also examine the variant ideas before then … from the “picked nines” before the Civil War to the baseball public’s continued interest in seeing the best against the best.

1933:

The 1933 All-Star game was Major League Baseball’s first, bookended by September’s East-West All-Star Game for the Negro Leagues. Baseball’s two grand old men — Connie Mack and John McGraw — were chosen to lead the American and National League squads. Lefty Gomez of the Yankees was the winning pitcher and the first player to drive in an All-Star run. But it was another grand old man — Babe Ruth who, at age 38, lined a two-run homer in the third inning to make the score 3–0.

This game reflected a brainstorm by Arch Ward of the Chicago Tribune. He had hit upon the idea of having a baseball game between stars from both leagues, as a sporting way to tie into that year’s “Century of Progress” exposition in the city. He saw that July 6 was an open date for all major-league clubs. Surely, Ward was connecting baseball people to the 1911 all-star benefit game on behalf of the family of Cleveland’s Addie Joss (see below), but maybe to a proposal by F.C. Lane in 1915, barely reported.

Two months later, on September 10, the Negro Leagues played their first East-West All-Star Game, also at Chicago’s Comiskey Park. It would go on to become, for Black baseball, a bigger draw and a more important event than the annual World Series. Larry Lester has described it as “the spirit and life of Negro League baseball, serving to entertain, educate, and ultimately provide a forum to integrate our national pastime many years later.”

Black fans could vote for their favorite players through newspapers including the Chicago Defender, Pittsburgh Courier, Kansas City Call, and Baltimore Afro-American. The significance was monumental, as Negro League legend Buck O’Neil remembered. “While the big leaguers left the choice of players up to the sportswriters, Gus [Greenlee] left it up to the fans. After reading about great players in the Defender and Courier for so many years, they could cut out that ballot in the black papers, send it in, and have a say.”

With just over a million votes cast, Oscar Charleston of the Pittsburgh Crawfords (East) received the most votes, 43,793, while pitcher Willie Foster of the Chicago American Giants (West) was runner-up with 40,637. Each was joined by six teammates; you can calculate the future Hall of Famers. (Satchel Paige remained in Bismarck, North Dakota, pitching for his integrated semipro team.) White newspapers largely ignored the game, including its outcome: a victory for the West by a score of 11–7 as Foster went all the way; Mule Suttles hit a home run. The East-West game at Comiskey Park reportedly outdrew the Cubs’ twin bill across town.

1911, 1915:

Although Ward’s idea and Greenlee’s, since followed, was to have two squads compete, there was an earlier notion: an all-star aggregation playing against a hometown squad. This model had characterized Organized Baseball’s first all-star game: the “All Leaguers” of the Class-D Hudson River circuit against first-place Poughkeepsie on August 17, 1903.

This practice echoed the “picked nine” practice launched in September 1860, when the touring Brooklyn Excelsiors played a group assembled from Philadelphia clubs. It also characterized the benefit game on behalf of the family of Cleveland pitcher Addie Joss, who had died earlier that season. Played on July 24, 1911, it raised $12‚914, more than twice his annual salary, for his widow and their two children.

More than 15,000 fans filled Cleveland’s League Park to see the astral squad play against the Naps. Each star wore the uniform of his home club except for Ty Cobb, who had to borrow a road jersey from a Cleveland player. The stars won by a score of 5–3 behind Smoky Joe Wood, Walter Johnson, and Russ Ford. Cy Young started for the locals and was the losing pitcher.

Of the players on the field, nine would be enshrined in the Baseball Hall of Fame. But Joss would, until his induction in 1978, find his own path blocked by the ten-year eligibility rule. He had been too sick to pitch even a single game in 1911, which might have secured his plaque.

For nine seasons Joss had been one of the best pitchers in the new American League, posting four 20-win seasons and tossing two no-hitters (one of them a perfect game) and seven one-hitters. In his classic perfecto during the heat of the 1908 pennant race, he topped Chicago’s Ed Walsh, who fanned 15.

Four years later, in December 1915, F.C. Lane pitched an idea to American and National League owners, in separate discussions. John Tener, NL president, addressed his crowd:

Gentlemen, this is Mr. Lane of the Baseball Magazine, who has on one or more occasions spoken to me about a matter which is in his mind, which he believes would be not only to the interest of the game but perhaps of interest to all of you in the increase of your receipts. His thought is that at or about the middle of the season you would stop the schedule or suspend the schedule for seven days while a picked team from the American and the National League would play in certain cities of the circuit.

Lane then took the podium:

I feel it would be of immense importance to the game outside of any advantage from the event itself, to have a big spectacular event in the middle of the season like this, simply because it would stimulate interest in the game…. The place of meeting was immaterial. This is not a local event. It is purely a league event. It is unlike the World’s Series. It is unlike anything else. It is a meeting of the two leagues, a meeting of the star players of the two leagues, a purely national event.

This is, of course, the Midsummer Classic we know today. One NL owner suggested that if the leagues suspended play during All-Star week, the regular season could be extended into October. This presented the problem of having to pay the players for another month beyond their contracts. A deflated F.C. Lane was thanked for his most interesting idea and escorted from the room.

1858:

So, to conclude, what was baseball’s first midseason all-star game? Some smarty-pants might point past 1933 to 1911, or even to 1903. But let’s go back to the prior century for a best-of-three match that began on July 20, 1858. A selection from the top clubs of New York played against those chosen from that rival city across the East River, Brooklyn. New York won, two games to one and, in a way, ushered in the age of covert professionalism. All three games were played in a stadium named for a racehorse, the Fashion Course.

In 2013, Citi Field hosted the All-Star Game, the first time the home of the Mets had held this honor since 1964, when the site had been a brand-new Shea Stadium. Yet 75 years before 1933, toward which we point to the first all-star game, there had been another, already forgotten. Its location, within walking distance of Citi Field (see map below), is today unknown to all but a handful of baseball experts.

Next week in this space we’ll offer a companion All-Star Game piece, “Base Ball: The Philadelphia Story,” going back to the 1830s,on up the Athletics and Phillies.

America’s National Game: 1933 was originally published in Our Game on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

On April 8, 1974, Henry Aaron broke Babe Ruth’s career record for home runs. What follows is a paean to Aaron but also a review of Ruth’s prior place atop all players in on-field performance. For “greatness,” however, some — myself included — have proposed Jackie Robinson as the epitome. Yet Aaron, despite the comparisons with Ruth, lived his life in the wake of Robinson.

Was Ruth greater than all who had preceded him? Yes. The question that arose in the 1970s: Was Aaron greater than Ruth?

In 1999, the 25th anniversary of Henry’s 715th homer, a “blue-ribbon panel” (on which I served) selected the 100 all-time greats from whom the fans, in a nationwide poll, would choose 25 to determine the All-Century Team. The outcome was fascinating, as much for who was out as who was in. Ruth, dead for half a century, pulled in the most votes, with 1,158,044, but Aaron trailed him by less than 1,300.

And yet, an asterisk attaches to Ruth. He hit against pitchers who threw complete games about half the time (today it is well under 1 percent), and thus faced the same delivery three, four, and five times a game. Ruth faced no relievers as they were used in Aaron’s day, let alone ours. Ruth never had to hit at night. African Americans never graced the same field as Ruth; had they done so, white players might have lost their places and the overall level of competition would have risen. Ruth may have been better than any baseball player ever was or will be; yet it defies reason to claim that his opposition was likewise better.

Who was Henry Aaron? Born in Mobile, Alabama in 1934, he signed with the Indianapolis Clowns of the Negro American League in 1952, to play shortstop for $200 a month. In the biography he wrote with Lonnie Wheeler, he recounted the day he left home, with sandwiches his mom made, and boarded the train:

It was the first time I had been around white people. After a while I got up the courage to walk up and down the aisle. I wanted to see what a dining car looked like, and I needed somebody to tell me where I wasn’t allowed to go. Then I sat back down, listened to those wheels carrying me farther away from home, and tried to talk myself out of getting off at the next stop and going back.

The truly competitive era of the Negro Leagues had ended with the integration of the majors and the demise of the Negro National League after 1948. The Clowns were a barnstorming outfit — the Harlem Globetrotters of baseball — never once during Aaron’s time with them playing in Indiana.

With the Clowns, Aaron recalled a meal before a Sunday rainout in Washington, DC.

We had breakfast while we were waiting for the rain to stop, and I can still envision sitting with the Clowns in a restaurant behind Griffith Stadium and hearing them break all the plates in the kitchen after we were finished eating. What a horrible sound. Even as a kid, the irony of it hit me: here we were in the capital in the land of freedom and equality, and they had to destroy the plates that had touched the forks that had been in the mouths of black men. If dogs had eaten off those plates, they’d have washed them.

In midseason the Clowns sold his contract to the Boston Braves, who sent him to the Class-C Northern League club in Eau Claire, Wisconsin. There he played 87 games, hitting .336 with nine home runs and 61 RBIs.

The following year Aaron was sent to Class-A Jacksonville to break the color line in the South Atlantic League. Moved from shortstop to second base, Aaron led that league in hitting, with a .362 average; in RBIs, 125; runs, 115; and hits, 208. He hit 22 home runs and struck out only 22 times.

Expected to play the 1954 season at either Toledo or Atlanta — he was hoping not to integrate another Southern league — Aaron was a courtesy invite to the Braves’ spring training (they had left Boston for Milwaukee in 1953). On Saturday, March 13, Bobby Thomson broke a leg. The next day Aaron started for the Braves in Thomson’s place in left field, soon moving to right.

Aaron’s debut season in Milwaukee was marked by only 13 homers. But 1957 was his breakout year. In late September, Aaron hit an extra-inning homer that clinched the pennant. “I galloped around the bases, and when I touched home plate the whole team was there to pick me up and carry me off the field…. I had always dreamed about a moment like Bobby Thomson had in ’51, and this was it.” The city set an attendance record and Aaron, who hit 44 homers, was named Most Valuable Player. The Braves became world champions, defeating the Yankees in seven games.

Although Aaron maintained his prowess, Milwaukee’s attendance plummeted. The team relocated to Atlanta in 1966; on Opening Day there, the biggest cheer came after the scoreboard flashed a message that said “April 12, 1861: First Shots Fired on Fort Sumter … April 12, 1966: The South Rises Again.”

Things changed forever for Aaron as he changed his focus: “I would be on trial in Atlanta, and I needed a decisive way to win over the white people before they thought of a reason to hate me.” He slugged 44 and 39 homers, respectively, in his first two years there. He was 34 years old and had 481 lifetime home runs, and neither he nor anyone else was thinking about Babe Ruth’s mark.

By 1972, however, reporters began asking about Ruth. Meanwhile, the FBI investigated death threats and a plot to kidnap Aaron’s daughter from her college dorm; the hate mail accelerated. Aaron finished 1973 with 40 homers, leaving him at 713.

The next year began with controversy. The Braves wanted to hold Aaron out of the lineup for their first three games in Cincinnati so he could tie or break Ruth’s record in Atlanta. After MLB’s Commissioner ordered them to play Aaron in at least two of the road games, Aaron hit homer 714 off Jack Billingham in his first at bat of the season. He sat out the second game, and in the third he struck out twice and grounded out once against Clay Kirby.

The Braves returned home and, on April 8, a crowd of 53,775 people showed up for the game — an Atlanta attendance record. In Aaron’s first at bat, the Dodgers’ Al Downing had walked him. The Braves were trailing, 3–1, in the fourth and Aaron was again at bat. With a man on first, Downing didn’t want to walk him again. Aaron deposited a low slider into the Braves’ bullpen in left field. As the fans cheered, Aaron’s mother embraced him at the plate. “I never knew my mother could hug so tight,” he said. She had feared someone might shoot him.

Vin Scully addressed the racial tension in his call of the home run:

What a marvelous moment for baseball; what a marvelous moment for Atlanta and the state of Georgia; what a marvelous moment for the country and the world. A Black man is getting a standing ovation in the Deep South for breaking a record of an all-time baseball idol. And it is a great moment for all of us, and particularly for Henry Aaron…. And for the first time in a long time, that poker face in Aaron shows the tremendous strain and relief of what it must have been like to live with for the past several months.

Henry Aaron later said, “I believed, and I still do, that there was a reason why I was chosen to break the record. It’s my task to carry on where Jackie Robinson left off.”

America’s National Game: 1974 was originally published in Our Game on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

In 1939 Baseball celebrated the 100th anniversary of its “invention” in Cooperstown, New York. On June 12 of that year the Hall of Fame and Museum, founded three years earlier, supplied a climax, opening its doors to the public. The Post Office issued a baseball stamp. Performers decked out as Knickerbockers played a game in chin whiskers. Wheaties gave Abner Doubleday a box. Players in the American and National Leagues wore a centennial patch all season long.

For me, Babe Ruth has always been a distant figure of lore and legend, and I love him because I love a good story, even when I know it to be false, as with “The Called Shot.” I love Davy Crockett and P.T. Barnum, too. I do not love Abner Doubleday, though I have come to understand why, long ago, he was chosen as our game’s founder.

The Mills Commission — named for its chief, Abraham G. Mills — labored for three years then, with detectable reluctance, anointed Doubleday, the Civil War hero, in 1908. The testimony of star witness Abner Graves had been critical: at age 5, he claimed to have seen the baseball diamond that Doubleday scratched out in the dirt at Elihu Phinney’s cow pasture; from that point on, Cooperstown’s boys began to play his new, organized game. The local Freeman’s Journal reprinted an article from the New York World on its front page under the headline “Home of Baseball: Game Originated in Cooperstown; Abner Doubleday, Afterward Major General, Its Originator — A Monument Suggested.” That turned out to be a field for which ground was broken in 1919.

Unknown at the time was Doubleday’s ascendancy in Madame Blavatsky’s Theosophical Society, an esoteric religion with few adherents. One of these would be Spalding’s second wife, who convinced her husband to move to Point Loma, the westernmost part of California and thus closest to the wisdom of Asia.

It has been easy to make Spalding out as the architect of the scheme by which Doubleday was named baseball’s inventor, but at some point during his Lomaland years the sporting-goods magnate may have become afflicted with early-onset dementia that left him in thrall to others, notably his wife. Two of his sons thought so and, after his death in 1915, sued Spalding’s widow for twisting his mind and his assets toward the interests of the Theosophists.

The heirs of Alexander Cartwright objected vigorously to the Mills Commission finding. After three decades’ obstinacy they won for their namesake a bronze plaque in the Hall of Fame. All Doubleday got was a field, a building, a creation myth, and an institution that endures. If baseball was not invented in Cooperstown, it should have been.

Baseball’s centennial patches gave national credence to the local legend. Federal grants from the Works Progress Administration were combined with Village of Cooperstown funds to expand Doubleday Field, add stands, and make it a gem. What other village of 2,300 inhabitants has a ballfield that seats 10,000?

On June 12, 1939, trainloads full of baseball legends and dignitaries emptied into the town. The Delaware & Hudson line reopened a long-abandoned right of way and ran a special passenger service into Cooperstown. More than 15,000 spectators crowded into the street in front of the museum for the presentations. Today, crowds that size and more are routine for Induction Day, but nothing like this had ever been seen in Cooperstown before.

One of the highlights of the day was the issuance of the commemorative postage stamp; postmaster general James A. Farley sold the first three-cent stamp to Judge Landis himself. One million stamps were sent to Cooperstown; nearly half were postmarked that very day. By intention, neither Doubleday nor Cartwright was depicted.

The idea for a baseball hall of fame to salute the game’s immortals wasn’t brand new: in 1901 New York University had opened a Hall of Fame for Great Americans, though it didn’t include any sports figures. Ford Frick suggested the concept of a baseball hall to go with the field and the museum; the first election came in 1936.

When the votes were tabulated, though, howls went up. Only five modern players had received enough votes, and none of the old-timers did. Cy Young received votes in both categories, but not enough in either. The first Hall of Fame plaques — for Ty Cobb, Babe Ruth, Walter Johnson, Honus Wagner, and Christy Mathewson — were displayed in December 1937, a time when Branch Rickey advised centennialists to get off their duffs:

This is a tremendous thing. You will have to wait one hundred years to get another chance to do this thing…. We ought to have in mind this is a great opportunity for Baseball to nationalize our sport…. Our chance of one hundred years is gone if we don’t grasp this opportunity in front of us, not when it gets by us.

Although not without squabbles, the voters seemed to straighten things out by the formal opening of the Hall in 1939, when 25 greats of the game were inducted. In 1936 the writers elected the “founding five”; failing to get the required 170 votes were not only Cy Young but also Nap Lajoie and Tris Speaker. All were elected the following year. Grover Cleveland Alexander made the cut in 1938 and George Sisler, Eddie Collins, Willie Keeler, and Lou Gehrig entered in 1939. By the time the Hall opened its doors on June 12, these players were joined by Morgan Bulkeley, George Wright, Connie Mack, John McGraw, Henry Chadwick, Charles Comiskey, Candy Cummings, Al Spalding, Ban Johnson, and the aforementioned Cartwright.

Fifty years later the sesquicentennial of baseball’s invention passed unnoted, and MLB has no intention of marking 2039 as the game’s bicentennial. What happened? Why do we flock to Cooperstown annually for Hall of Fame inductions if we know baseball was not invented there? It is a village served by no airport, no passenger train, no major highway; no one gets here by finding it on the way to there. Answer: by now the Hall of Fame has a history all its own.

While the precise origins of the game we call baseball can be debated (my friend David Block and I have done so, in our books and articles, as well as in person), we can state with certainty that it did not spring full-blown from the fertile mind of Abner Doubleday, or anyone else, in Cooperstown, or anyplace else. But the selection of this remote hamlet was based on just such a notion: that anything as glorious as baseball must have begun in one place, at one particular time, and must have been the brainstorm of some ingenious lad.

Given these premises, a creation myth was inevitable; all that remained was to determine its particulars. To the question, “How did baseball come to be,” evolution seemed an unsatisfactory answer — messy, purposeless, undramatic. It is at this point that the interests of Albert Spalding, Abner Doubleday, Alexander Cartwright, and the good people of Cooperstown intersect.

America’s National Game: 1939 was originally published in Our Game on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

To this point in the series we have reviewed the cross currents between Baseball and American life. Yet no closer relation may exist than that between man and wife when each is a celebrity.

Before Taylor and Travis, there was Marilyn and Joe .., and David Justice and Halle Berry, or Justin Verlander and Kate Upton and so many others, a mix of sport and cinema, and earlier diversions. This story of shooting-star couples goes back far earlier, at least to John Ward and Helen Dauvray (his teammate on the Giants, pitcher Tim Keefe, married her sister).

Let’s start with Joe and Marilyn, she in the centennial year of her birth as Norma Jeane Mortenson. DiMaggio, at 37, had retired after the 1951 campaign, at the peak of his fame, and met Monroe, 25, still on the rise in 1952. They would wed two years later, an unlikely pairing of one who projected heat — novelist Saul Bellow called it “incandescence under the skin” — with one whose cool demeanor was legendary.

In February 1954, as newlyweds on a trip in Japan, the bride took a detour to Korea to entertain the troops. Upon her return, Marilyn said: “It was so wonderful, Joe. You never heard such cheering.” He replied, “Yes, I have.”

The marriage lasted just nine months but captivated America. Of the break-up Oscar Levant said: “It proves that no man can be a success in two national pastimes.”

The marriage of Ward and Dauvray may be largely forgotten, but unlike Marilyn she came to love baseball as much as she did her mate, commissioning Gorham Silver to produce a loving cup (long since lost; see: http://bit.ly/3QuV9dr) for the winner of the 1887 World Series, as well as financing gold medals for each of the victorious Detroit Wolverines. The couple were soon seen bickering and, after some years of separation, they divorced.

Mike Donlin married vaudeville star Mabel Hite. He had been a hero with the champion New York Giants of 1905 when he married Hite the following year. Will Rogers recalled it as “the most popular wedding New York ever had.” The couple went on to form a successful vaudeville act together, appearing in the production Stealing Home. Their marriage lasted until Hite’s death of cancer at age 29 in 1912.

Rube Marquard married Blossom Seeley. A ragtime singer, she was by far the bigger star and breadwinner … until he won 19 straight games in 1912. Afterward they trod the boards in a skit featuring her composition “The Marquard Glide.” Tabloid romance ensued and they married in 1913, had a child, and divorced in 1920.

Joe Laurie, the famous vaudevillian, who saw Marquard’s act, remembered that he sang very well. The Sporting News, commenting on their follow-up, “The Suffragette Pitcher,” stated that as an actor, Marquard was one of the greatest living lefthanded pitchers.

One might even pair these baseball vaudevillians with Nora Bayes and Jack Norworth. She was already a Follies star when she married Jack Norworth, a fellow performer and, more significantly, lyricist of the game’s anthem, “Take Me Out to the Ball Game.”

What makes for these odd pairings of baseball and theater or song? It is not merely the wish of one impecunious partner to share in the income of the other, but instead that both were regarded, by polite society, as outcasts. In the years before 1920, those who had embarked on careers in baseball or the stage were shunned by respectable people who would neither sup nor stay with them at first-class establishments.

Reflecting their ancient origins in sport and theater, both were termed “players.” Baseballists were regarded as uncouth members of a lower caste, along with actors and card sharps and women of flexible virtue.

It is a story far older than baseball. In Rome the actors, or histriones, were always either freedmen, strangers, or slaves, and they were regarded with a combination of awe and contempt, no matter how well they were paid. In the later Empire, women took part in the performances, and at the Floralia, loosest of the Roman festivals, the spectators claimed it as their right that the female dancers play naked. (Recall Marilyn’s nude calendar photos.)

Let’s return to more recent times. Even before the famous weddings cited above, players and managers (especially John McGraw) had been doing vaudeville skits since the 1890s. Bill Hallman of the Phillies was perhaps the most prominent of these, as an accomplished song-and-dance man, though others tried their hand at drama or recitations, from Cap Anson and King Kelly to Rube Waddell and Babe Ruth.

Marty McHale, a pitcher for the Red Sox and Yankees who threw three consecutive no-hitters in college, and whom Variety dubbed “The Baseball Caruso,” recalled:

Damon Runyon once wrote a story about me, saying this fellow McHale, who is not the greatest ballplayer that ever lived, is probably the most versatile man who ever took up the game. This was in the 1920s, after I had left baseball. So Johnny Kieran of the New York Times asked Babe Ruth about it …listing my accomplishments until the Babe interrupted to say, “Well, I don’t know about all those things, but he was the best goddamn singer I ever heard!”

Christy Mathewson is credited as the co-playwright, with Rida Johnson Young, of The Girl and the Pennant, if that credit is to be believed. More plausible is the drama by yet another future Hall of Famer, Bud Fowler, entitled The Retired Black Planter, copyrighted in 1912 but written in 1894. Unlike Matty’s play, Fowler’s has never been performed. Hugh MacDougall found it and wrote to me:

At first a bit suspicious of its origin, on reading the “play” I am increasingly convinced that it is really from “Bud Fowler” (aka John W. Jackson), from such things as the extensive reference to Galveston, Texas (where Fowler once spent a winter directing a Black baseball team and trying unsuccessfully to organize a Black Texas Baseball League), to the extensive biblical references, and of course to the biracial implications of the text.

In conclusion, the story of baseball on the boards begins not with Ward, Donlin, Marquard or the others, but all the way back before Major League Baseball itself. In 1859, Brooklyn Excelsior left fielder Arthur Markham left the team to become an actor; he never looked back. After having a small part in an 1859 production of Richelieu that featured Edwin Booth, he began to focus his attention on acting, adopting the stage name of Frank Mordaunt. His Broadway credits lasted another 40 years, concluding with roles in the opening nights of Quo Vadis and Ben Hur.

America’s National Game: 1954 was originally published in Our Game on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

What makes a game great? Is it exposure, or reminiscence, or timing, or something else, like your first game with your dad (mine was May 12, 1957)? A game in May is not the same as one in October. One that you have seen, in person or on television, may not bear equal weight with one you have only read about. But the game of October 3, 1951 remains legendary because you have all heard Russ Hodges’ frantic call of Bobby Thomson’s pennant-deciding home run, and because this was the first time a network (NBC) had telecast a sporting event nationwide.

I wrote about this game 45 years ago, for a book called Baseball’s Ten Greatest Games. My editor discouraged me from including any nineteenth-century contests, or the game of June 14, 1870 would have been in there along with nine of the others, beginning with a game on September 30, 1907. Maybe it’s time to update my list to include, say, Game 6 of the 2011 World Series, or Game 7 of the 2016 Series, or the brilliant conclusion to last year’s exploits … but in any recounting, this third game of the National League playoffs nearly 75 years ago would make the cut … and might well retain my designation of it, way back when, as “The Greatest Game Ever Played.”

Of course, in the age of television the audience for a baseball game is no longer limited to the seating capacity of the park. In fact, morning damp held our game’s attendance to 34,320; the Polo Grounds had accommodated 88,228 paid spectators for a boxing match in 1923. For Game 6 of the 1975 Series, 62 million people could say, “I was there.”

Full game action, from first pitch to last, for Game 3 of the 1951 NL playoff is here: https://bit.ly/4dUMmt3. But for this column, I’ll lean upon the bottom of the ninth inning and then the national exposure it received.

Starting pitcher Don Newcombe, with a 4–1 lead, was running out of gas; manager Charlie Dressen sent him out for the ninth but alerted the bullpen to get some arms ready. Newk jammed Alvin Dark up and in but, with a protective, awkward swing, he looped a single to right. Next up was left-handed Don Mueller, like Dark hitless today, but he too singled.

Monte Irvin lifted a pop to Gil Hodges for the first out, then Whitey Lockman stroked the pitch down the left-field line for a double, scoring Dark and moving Mueller to third (after injury he was replaced by pinch runner Clint Hartung).

Dressen phoned his bullpen coach, Clyde Sukeforth. Carl Erskine and Ralph Branca had been warming up, but now Sukeforth tells him that while Erskine is bouncing his curve, Branca’s fastball looks good. Erskine would later say, “Whenever I’m asked what my best pitch was, I say, the curveball I bounced in the Polo Grounds bullpen.”

So as Newcombe walked off the mound, Branca came in. The batter was Bobby Thomson, with one man out and Willie Mays on deck. The thought crossed Dressen’s mind whether, with men on second and third, to walk the dangerous Thomson intentionally and pitch to Mays, the overanxious rookie who had struggled at the plate this afternoon. But Dressen did not put the potential winning run on base.

Strike one cut the plate. Lockman, perched on second, thought, “Oh, no, he’ll never get another pitch like that again.” And he was right. The next is not a strike but a “purpose pitch” designed to set Thomson up for a curveball away. But he cut at it, met it squarely, and the ball sailed out in a low arc to left. Dodger left fielder Andy Pafko raced to the wall at the 315-foot mark, hoping the liner would start to drop.

It did not. In the Miracle of Coogan’s Bluff, the Giants — who had trailed the Dodgers by 13.5 games on August 11 — won the pennant.

Walking by himself to the center-field clubhouse, feeling the complete weight of the Dodger collapse on his shoulders, was Ralph Branca, who forever after would be the goat of this incredible game, just as Bobby Thomson would be its hero. One pitch, one swing, and the 156 games that had gone before, and the countless opportunities for victory along the way, were all forgotten.

Next, let’s recall a day when radio was king and television a peasant. In 1946 the Yankees were the first club to have TV (DuMont, Channel 5) plus home and away radio live —thus ending road re-creations, which used Morse Code received in studio; a pencil smacked against a table resembled the crack of the bat. One year later, Americans owned just 17,000 television sets vs. 58 million radios. Yet by 1951 TV was in 10 million homes. Russ Hodges and Ernie Harwell split the series between the competing media — radio station WMCA and the independent television station WPIX-TV (Channel 11), which for Game 3 permitted the NBC simulcast, nationwide.

“We’d tossed a coin, and ole’ Russ was going to be stuck on the radio,” Ernie recalled. “So I was feeling a little sorry for Hodges. There were five radio broadcasts and I was gonna be on TV, and I thought that I had the plum assignment.”

Yet Harwell’s call, along with the kinescope of that first national telecast, has vanished. It is Hodges’ radio call that has survived, thanks to Laurence Goldberg, a restaurant waiter in Brooklyn who, leaving for work in the bottom of the ninth, asked his mother to hit the “record” button on his reel-to-reel contraption. Before the year ended, Chesterfield cigarettes released a record of “the most exciting moment in baseball history.”

At 3:58 the Giants, having scored a run, were still behind, 4–2, in the bottom of the ninth. Thomson awaited Branca’s two-on, one-out pitch.

“Branca throws. There’s a long drive!” Hodges shouted on WMCA. “It’s going to be, I believe! … The Giants win the pennant! The Giants win the pennant! The Giants win the pennant! The Giants win the pennant! Bobby Thomson hits into the lower deck of the left-field stands! The Giants win the pennant! And they’re going crazy! They are going crazy! Oh-ohhh!”

Hear that radio call, synchronized to film, at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WWIGfBQghJs.

America’s National Game: 1951 was originally published in Our Game on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

The outlook wasn’t brilliant for the Mudville nine that day … you know the rest, don’t you?

Last week we revisited 1908, the year of The Merkle Game, to write about “Take Me Out to the Ball Game.” Oddly — for like Merkle and all his confrères, “Casey at the Bat” commemorates failure — this week we return to 1888. That was the year of Spalding’s Tour, which registered hope for the American game to be played worldwide.

Casey is the poem’s hero and anti-hero, the “champion” for our aspirations who — like us, most of the time — fails. It struck me this week what a rich, layered word that is, tracing back to the Latin campus, which meant a flat plain or field.

“Champion” came to mean a “field of battle” then, as in campio, a combatant in the field. This evolved into a sort of gladiatorial combat, then a solo fighter on behalf of another person or cause. All these senses of “champion” link to hope, to a vicarious struggle, and to a happy return home. As with Odysseus, if we take respite at the bases — bays or byes, as bases were known in the early game — then the sea voyage may proceed.

On repeated hearings we mock Casey’s vainglory and bluster and, in the poet’s genius twist upon the classical paean, delight in his comeuppance. At first this ending comes as a surprise, as it did for the ballplayers in the audience when the ballad was first recited publicly, two months after its publication, on August 14, 1888. In later years Casey would be redeemed in parodies because America loves comeback stories, even for blowhards.

The poet was Ernest Lawrence Thayer, born into a prosperous family in Lawrence, Massachusetts; his father owned a woolens mill in Worcester County to which his son, after traversing the globe, would return. He had studied philosophy at Harvard, graduated magna cum laude, and served as editor of the Lampoon, whose business manager was, until his expulsion, William Randolph Hearst.

The junior Hearst was then given the ownership of a newspaper, the San Francisco Examiner, by his father who, with his Senatorial campaign over, no longer had need of it. Young Hearst invited three members of the Lampoon staff to help: Eugene “Genie” Lent, F. H. “Fatty” Briggs, and Ernest L. “Phinnie” Thayer. Thayer contributed a humor column and wrote ditties.

Returning east because of illness, Thayer mailed in “Casey at the Bat: A Ballad of the Republic, Sung in the Year 1888”; it ran in the Examiner on June 3. Hearst paid him the usual five bucks and the poem vanished … except that it had been clipped by the novelist Archibald Clavering Gunter, who kept it in his billfold as he — like Thayer, whose name he did not know — returned east.

Credit is not solely to Thayer who, despite decades of challenge to his authorship, wrote it; nor to DeWolf Hopper, who first recited it, breaking into Prince Methusalem, a “Hopperretta,” as it was then dubbed. It is to Gunter, who that morning as he read his newspaper for August 14, saw that the New York and Chicago baseball clubs were to be at Wallack’s Theater that night as Hopper’s guests. He gave the poem to his friend with the suggestion that he orate it. Hopper mastered the ballad in a couple of hours; as a baseball devotee he could visualize every line.

The two teams, headed by Cap Anson and Buck Ewing, were in the boxes, and during the show Hopper “pulled Casey on them,” in his own words and, as the Evening World reported: “The piece was entitled ‘Casey at the Bat,’ and if Hopper ever did credit to anything in his life he did to those verses.”

Let Hopper tell the story, from his 1927 autobiography, Once a Clown, Always a Clown:

I interpolated Casey in a scene in the second act…. It was, I presume, the first time the poem was recited in public…. On his debut Casey lifted this audience, composed largely of baseball players and fans, out of their seats. When I dropped my voice to B flat, below low C, at “the multitude was awed” [the poem in fact reads “the audience was awed”], I remember seeing Buck Ewing’s gallant mustachios give a single nervous twitch. And as the house, after a moment of startled silence, grasped the anticlimactic denouement, it shouted its glee…. They had expected, as anyone does upon hearing Casey for the first time, that the mighty batsman would slam the ball out of the lot, and a lesser bard would have had him do so, and thereby written merely a good sporting-page filler.

By 1889, King Kelly was taking to the boards to recite the poem (unsurprisingly renamed Kelly at the Bat, with Boston replacing Mudville), and many thought the poem had been written not only for him but also about him … if not by him. No poet came forth to dismiss such notions. Thayer was so shy that he kept quiet while deluded poets claimed to be the author or, like one-time Phillies pitcher Dan Casey, its inspiration.

It was not until December 1892, after Hopper had recited the poem during a performance of Wang at Worcester, that a note came to him asking him to come around to a club and meet the author of “Casey,” as yet unknown. Of course Hopper went, and was introduced to mill magnate Ernest L. Thayer. When the latter revived his poetical career with a few ditties in the New York Journal of 1896 — owned by his Harvard pal Hearst — he was identified as the man behind “Casey at the Bat.” He signed his name as “Phin.”

And yet, like so many fugitive poems such as Clement Moore’s “Twas the Night Before Christmas,” proprietary wrangles persisted. In 1902 Frederic Lawrence Knowles edited A Treasury of Humorous Poetry, including a version of “Casey at the Bat” which the anthologist credited to Joseph Quinlan Murphy. In 1904, Frank Wilstach, Hopper’s former press agent, began to circulate a story that in 1887, a year before Thayer, his roommate in Sioux City, Iowa, Will Valentine (conveniently dead in 1897), had written the poem.

Most persistent yet preposterous of the claimants was George Whitefield D’Vys, who claimed that his “Casey” had somehow been delivered to the editor of New York’s Sporting Times in the year before that publication commenced. As for his writing other poems in the stentorian style of “Casey,” well, Thayer’s schoolboy model (and that for D’Vys) was probably Macaulay’s “Horatius at the Bridge,” written in the same iambic heptameter.

I could go on, but let the true poet’s comment suffice: “The constant wrangling about the authorship, from which I have tried to keep aloof, has certainly filled me with disgust.”

Despite Thayer’s evident satire of not only baseball but also would-be heroes (and the Irish, who were kept out of Harvard), Donald Hall wrote: “When a few fans go home in the ninth inning, they depart not in discouragement but ‘in deep despair.’ The remaining five thousand illustrate a learned illusion: In his Essay on Man, Alexander Pope wrote that, ‘Hope springs eternal in the human breast….’”

America’s National Game: 1888, redux was originally published in Our Game on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

I wrote this for Douglas Alden’s year-long project on 1927 ten years ago to the day of its republication at Our Game.

As we read about Myles Thomas and the ’27 Yankees playing the Detroit Tigers without Ty Cobb — and the Philadelphia Athletics with Cobb in an A’s Uniform — it’s quite likely that more than a few will be wondering, “Why was Ty Cobb, the face of the Tigers franchise for 22 years, suddenly in 1927 playing for Connie Mack’s A’s?”

The answer to that question begins almost a decade before.

In the wake of the Black Sox Scandal of 1919, baseball replaced its three-man National Commission with a single Commissioner, Federal Judge Kenesaw Mountain Landis. The new commissioner meted out swift and certain justice to the Chicago White Sox players on March 13, 1921 — the day before they were to appear in court.

The Black Sox fixing of the World Series had been revealed to the public following a Cook County grand jury proceeding, barely six months before. Landis issued his permanent ban when he did — before their trial — placing the eight indicted Black Sox on baseball’s ineligible list because the new commissioner feared that an argument would be made that the men, as yet convicted of nothing, should be allowed to play for Chicago on Opening Day. His ban was thus preemptive: none of the eight could play in Organized Baseball, even if they were found not guilty, or if their case were to be appealed and relitigated.

On August 2, 1921, the Black Sox were acquitted in their hometown courtroom of all charges.

Immediately Landis declared, “Regardless of the verdict of juries, no player who throws a ballgame, no player that undertakes or promises to throw a ballgame, no player that sits in conference with a bunch of crooked players and gamblers where the ways and means of throwing a game are discussed and does not promptly tell his club about it, will ever play professional baseball.” The Commissioner’s words were mere window dressing, of course, as he had already banned the eight.

In the years thereafter Landis banished other players, many for infractions occurring before his onset as Commissioner. But then a ghost of unimaginable terror appeared, in the form of pitcher Hub “Dutch” Leonard, who accused two of the game’s biggest names — Ty Cobb and Tris Speaker — along with “Smoky” Joe Wood, of conspiring to fix the final game of the 1919 regular season between Detroit and Cleveland.

Hub “Dutch” Leonard

As fixes go, it wasn’t much. All that was at stake was third place: the Chicago White Sox had already won the pennant, Cleveland had already clinched second, but the Tigers and the Yankees were battling for third. For the players, a third-place finish was probably worth about $500 per player more than a fourth-place result, which meant finishing out of the money.

Before their final home game in 1919, the two Tigers, Cobb and Leonard, met under the grandstand at Detroit’s Navin Field, with their Cleveland Indians friends Speaker and Wood. According to Leonard, Speaker said the Tigers “didn’t have to worry about tomorrow’s game,” because the Indians, since they were already assured of a second place finish, would be happy to lay down against the Tigers. That would assure the Detroit players their $500 bonus. Further, the four decided they now had an opportunity to make some additional cash on the game.

Recounting the incident in his fine biography of Cobb, Charles Alexander writes that according to Leonard:

…the four agreed that they might as well bet some money on the game. Cobb was to put up $2,000, Leonard $1,500 and Speaker and Wood $1,000 each. Cobb suggested a park attendant named Fred West would be a good man to place the bets. But because Detroit was a 10–7 favorite and because the local bookmakers were unwilling to handle so much money, West only managed to get down $600 against the bookmakers’ $420 for three betting partners.

The public knew nothing of the fix until 1926, when Leonard sold to American League President Ban Johnson some incriminating letters that had been written to him by Cobb and Wood. Both Leonard and Johnson were men carrying serious grudges. Johnson, one of the grand poobahs of baseball, was still smarting over the diminution of his power since Landis had been made commissioner. Leonard was still upset about being placed on waivers by Cobb, who then traded Leonard to a minor-league club midway through the 1926 season.

Meanwhile, Cobb was upset as well. While the other conspirators were able to place small bets on the game, the Georgia Peach was unable to find a taker for his money in time before the game.

On October 23, 1919, from his home in Augusta, GA, Cobb had written to Leonard that he and Smoky Joe Wood “were considerably disappointed in our business proposition…. We completely fell down and of course felt badly over it.”

Later, Wood, who apparently handled the money, sent Leonard a certified check for $1,650. The amount represented Leonard’s $1,500 stake plus a third of the money won on the game, minus $30 paid to West — the parking attendant who had laid down the bets — for his services.

Smoky Joe Wood in his letter to Leonard wrote, “Cobb did not get up a cent…. If we ever get another chance like this, we’ll know enough to try and get [our bets] down early.”

So the last-minute attempt to add some pocket change was barely worth the effort, as Wood, Speaker, and Leonard made a few dollars while Cobb made none., despite his best intentions to be crooked. Possessing the letters as proof of their misdeeds, Ban Johnson strong-armed Cobb (the player-manager of the Tigers) and Speaker (the player-manager of the Indians) to resign from their posts.

“He was heartbroken and maintained his innocence,” Johnson later said of Cobb’s reaction. “I told him that, guilty or not, he was through in the American League.”

In November of 1926, Ty Cobb officially resigned as the Tigers manager. A month later, Speaker resigned as the Cleveland manager. Both of their ball clubs released them as players. (Wood had been out of baseball since 1922, and now was coaching at Yale.)

All of Ban Johnson’s machinations had been done in secret. As a result, the sudden resignations of Cobb — still a valuable asset as a player, even if his managerial acumen was in question — and Speaker — who for his part had led the Indians to a second place finish in ’26, only three games behind the powerful Yankees — led to a great deal of public speculation and rumors.

A fan’s letter of support

In releasing the news of their resignations, the commissioner said he would defer his decision on the accused until later in the winter. Meanwhile, Cobb and Speaker both hired lawyers, and the incident was threatening to mushroom into another Black Sox Scandal.

Landis was friendly with both disgraced heroes. He also was thoroughly sick of cleaning up pre-1920 messes, of which there appeared to be no end, as the game was rife with gambling before 1919. Indeed, there remains speculation that other World Series prior to the Black Sox of 1919 had been played on less than the up and up.

As Landis remarked off the record, “Won’t these Goddamn things that happened before I came into baseball ever stop coming up?” Fearing that they wouldn’t and that baseball would be stuck in an endless quagmire of ancient allegations, he established a five-year statute of limitations on baseball offenses, shutting Pandora’s box.

On January 27, 1927, Landis rendered a verdict and a summary of the case that was a slap in the face to Ban Johnson, ruling that Cobb, Speaker, and Wood “have not been, nor are they now, found guilty of fixing a ball game.”

Cobb and Speaker were returned to Detroit and Cleveland, whose owners no longer wanted them. The result was that they were made free agents — but only in the American League — thus constricting them to negotiations with only six clubs. Cobb signed with the Philadelphia Athletics and Speaker with Washington. Cobb, who was 40 years old, got a boost from his 1926 salary of $40,000 as player-manager to $50,000 as simply a player. Speaker, also with diminished duties at age 39, maintained his salary of $30,000 with Washington.

Why the raise for Cobb?

Especially considering that Cobb’s new employer in Philadelphia, Connie Mack, was well known for his parsimonious ways — rather than financially compete against baseball’s short-lived Federal League, Mack had sold off the star players of his great Athletics teams that had gone to the World Series four times in five years, between 1910 and 1914 — one might well suspect that the Commissioner’s Office kicked in some cash to pay Cobb’s salary, in the hopes of putting a lid on the whole sordid matter.

Summing up the episode, W.O. McGeehan of the New York Herald Tribune wrote:

First, they learn that two of the greatest synthetic heroes produced by the national pastime have been ousted for cause. Now they learn that there was no reason at all why they should have left the game excepting their personal differences with their owners.

In any event, the Commissioner’s decision was a popular one and, as McGeehan remarked, “Landis made the best of an unfortunate situation.”

Cobb & Speaker & Landis: Closing the Books was originally published in Our Game on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Only last week we regaled you with the Merkle Game and its aftermath, by no means the only notable baseball event that year. The Mills Commission had announced in March that Abner Doubleday was baseball’s inventor, an idea that eventually fell into disfavor with scholars and within MLB.

May 2, 1908 provided the launch of “Take Me Out to the Ball Game,” instantly baseball’s anthem, which preceded America’s adoption of “The Star Spangled Banner” by 23 years. So much has been written about the later twists and turns of “Take Me Out” — from Gene Kelly to Harry Caray and on — that for this column I will stick to its creation and the years immediately thereafter.

Reflect that “Take Me Out” is peaceable if not bucolic, while “The Star Spangled Banner” is a wartime anthem, written by Francis Scott Key after the defense of Fort McHenry in 1814. Not only were the SSB’s lyrics an answer to rockets’ red glare, they were set to the tune of an earlier drinking song (“To Anacreon in Heaven,” 1779). Whenever you sing “the land of the free, and the home of the brave” … you are secretly singing “the myrtle of Venus, with Bacchus’s vine.”

But I have grown distracted. Back to the old ball game.

Jack Norworth was an aspiring vaudeville performer and lyricist when, at age 21 in 1898, he married aspiring actress Louise Dresser. They made their vaudeville debuts together a year later. She would become the bigger star, earning $1750 a week, but he would win baseball immortality.

Fifty years after he wrote the words to “Take Me Out to the Ball Game,” Norworth told baseball writer Harold Rosenthal of The Sporting News that in April of 1908 he had been riding an elevated train in New York City when he spotted a sign that read “Ball Game Today — Polo Grounds.” (The Giants’ only home games that month were against Brooklyn, four games on April 22–25.) He claimed he had never been to an actual game but that he needed a song for his act at the Amphion Theater in Brooklyn, an 1880s opera house that had tilted to vaudeville and moving pictures.

Before the half-hour’s train ride was finished, the masterpiece sprung to life. He brought the lyrics to composer Albert Von Tilzer, who set them to music.

At that time, Norworth was locked in a dispute with his wife over the terms of their divorce. Meanwhile, he had been carrying on a romance with suffragette songstress Trixie Friganza (“No Wedding Bells for Me”) that had begun in 1907; her birth name was Delia O’Callahan, making her the likely inspiration for Katie Casey, the song’s Irish heroine. Unknown to Miss Frigaznza, she would soon be replaced in Norworth’s affections by Nora Bayes (born Rachel Goldberg), who had joined him as co-stars in Flo Ziegfeld’s Follies of 1908.

For Norworth, the song laid an egg at the Amphion; the audience sat on its hands. He reported back to Von Tilzer: “The song’s okay. Don’t worry. I was fumbling for the lyrics and I did it dead-panned. I’ll do better next time.”

Soon after Von Tilzer’s York Music Company copyrighted the song on May 2, Norworth could no longer do his song in the ninth slot at the Amphion; everyone was singing it. More than thirty vaudeville stars performed it at theaters and nickelodeons; each was featured on the cover of a different sheet music edition. Bayes and Norworth are represented on Von Tilzer’s sheet music (as is Trixie Friganza, whom Louise Dresser had once thought would be her estranged husband’s next wife).

On June 21 Bayes and Norworth married and became a songwriting couple — no longer for Von Tilzer’s York Music Company but through the Jerome Remick firm. Their most notable composition for Ziegfeld’s Follies of 1908 is “Shine On, Harvest Moon,” but they later tried to emulate the success of “Take Me Out to Ball Game” with “Let’s Get the Umpire’s Goat.”

Brilliantly, Von Tilzer contracted with DeWitt C. Wheeler to create magic-lantern slides of action at the Polo Grounds in early May 1908. These hand-colored song slides were intended to fill gaps between the acts in theaters, or the reels in cinemas.

The model for the fictional Katie Casey was Marie Murray, the same woman who had appeared in Edwin S. Porter’s 1903 films The Great Train Robbery and A Romance of the Rail. In the latter film she reprised her role in advertising as Phoebe Snow, whose white dress was unsullied because the Lackawanna Railroad had embraced anthracite.

The song was a smash, on the stage, in theaters, in sheet-music sales, and even in the song slides, which were sold at the Polo Grounds during a hot pennant race between the Cubs, the Giants, and the Pirates. But the first recorded version did not come out until August (by Harvey Hindermyer); then came a cylinder-roll version by Edwin Meeker in September; and perhaps the best of the three, on disc in October, by The Haydn Quartet (Harry MacDonough, John Bieling, S.H. Dudley, and William F. Hooley).

Copycat songs abounded, most notably George M. Cohan’s “Take Your Girl to the Ball Game.” His comparatively passive ditty was registered for copyright on May 8, six days after “Take Me Out to the Ball Game”; both were advertised in Variety’s weekly issue of May 2. Lantern slides for Cohan’s song were shot one month after Norworth’s (also by DeWitt C. Wheeler) at the Highlanders ballpark.

Other baseball songs seeking to capitalize upon Norworth’s success included “My Old Man Is Baseball Mad” by Albert Von Tilzer’s older brother, Harry, who had a separate music business.

Among the many rivals to “Take Me Out to the Ball Game,” besides Cohan’s:

“Come On Play Ball with Me Dearie,” 1909

“I Want to Go to the Ball Game,” 1909

“Back to the Bleachers for Mine,” 1910

“You’ve Made a Home Run with Me,” 1911

“I’ve Been Making a Grand Stand Play for You,” 1911

“That Marquard Glide,” 1912.

The Essanay Film Manufacturing Company came out with a motion picture in 1910 entitled “Take Me Out to the Ball Game.” Though it does not survive, we have a few still photographs and a plot synopsis that has nothing whatever to do with the song. Katie Casey (“Fanny”) was played by Neva Don Carlos, aided by a rambunctious pup.

Finally for now, in April 1958, the same month in which Jack Norworth told his story to Harold Rosenthal, he also appeared on the Ed Sullivan Show with four New York Yankees (Whitey Ford, Yogi Berra, Mickey Mantle, Bill Skowron). They and the audience sang “Take Me Out to the Ball Game.”

America’s National Game: 1908, redux was originally published in Our Game on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Baseball players have a hard life. Not superstars, I’m saying, but regular players, journeymen. They deal with continuous uncertainty. And these uncertainties are both separate and intertwined. Will my skills maintain and maybe improve? Can I go injury-free this season? Where will I play next year? Who wants my job now — and how much younger is he? How long can I last with my present salary?

We do have countless biographies, stories and legends about players’ lives. They are chronicled in a certain way, following established informational patterns. But we seldom see INTO players’ lives: their communications, their interactions with other players and with management. This is not surprising since such personal information seldom lands in the public record.

I mention this because an unpublished collection of letters, both personal and professional, gives an informative glimpse into the affairs of a late 19th-century ballplayer. I received the collection in the form of photocopies, most of which are still legible. The group came from a rare-book friend in Syracuse, New York — Bruce Johnson. That was thirty years ago. I finally transcribed the hand-written missives and have organized them chronologically to tell a story about Robert E. Burks. Unlike most archives of personal correspondence, all the documents were addressed TO Mr. Burks. We do not know exactly what Burks communicated to his friends, family members, or employers. But by reading the replies we can easily interpolate his inquiries and declarations.

I was both confused and amused by the baseball lingo along with the near-illiteracy of some of the writers. (I also noted the speed of the US Mail system ten years before the 20th millennium.) The chronology begins in 1884 with notices and inquiries from family members, including encouragement and local baseball news from Burks’s presumed hometown of Montgomery, Alabama.

PERSONAL CORRESPONDENCE

8/7/84 from brother WO Burks / WP Burks Hardware letterhead, Montgomery AL

Dear Bro -

I rec’d your welcome letter this morning. was very glad to hear from you. I will send your trunk this evening … the guys are getting in fine trim for Louisville. … Tell me if you are interested to stay over there the rest of the season, that is play ball the rest of the season. … W.O. Burks

5/2/85 from WO Burks, brother / WP Burks Hardware letterhead, Montgomery AL

Dear Bro -

I rec’d your welcome letter this morning and was truly glad to hear from you. I also read some papers yesterday, and glad to see that you are playing fine ball. I saw by the [box] score that you had the best score. I hope you will continue to make a fine score in all your games.… The Monty Greys and True Blues leave tomorrow morning for Mobile. We are in fine trim.… Col. Ruse has been betting on the Blues beating us now. There will be a large crowd at Mobile to see us drill. I guess there will be over 1000 there.… There are two 10 cent, 15 cent and 25 cent shows in town at present. neither is any good. WO Burks

8/24/88 from WO Burks, brother / WP Burks Hardware letterhead, Montgomery AL

Dear Bro —

The Georgetown BBC will play their games next week 28–29–30 and Sunday, if the law don’t object.… Monty is trying to get crazy about “BB” if you can get hold of the Engineer of today, 24, I will send your trunk to Louisville in care of the Montgomery Greys.… I will see the Louisvilles and Columbus play next Tuesday and Wednesday. I must close, hoping that the “Stars” will “down every team they tackle.” WO Burks

And a chiding from his father.

9/6/88 from WP Burks’s father / WP Burks Hardware letterhead Montgomery AL

My dear son -

… Will be glad to see you My Boy are OK. I will send you letters that I opened to see if I could hear from you and try to decide if I could [know] where you had disappeared to, as I had imagined all sorts of ways you could have been taken off.… WP Burks

PROFESSIONAL CORRESPONDENCE

The search for work begins in 1887. Burks is still in the deep South. This first message contains suspicious overtones.

3/19/87 Nashville Base Ball Association, Southern League

Dear Sir -

Mr. Bradly informed me that you telegraphed him you would report on Friday but later you telegraphed you were sick and could not report. Now let us hear by telegram when we may expect you or if we may expect you as we need you badly and must have you here. In hopes that you will without delay report here at once…. Very respectfully yours, Jos. P. Osborne, Sec + Treas

We do find Burks playing for Nashville in the Southern League in 1887, playing 61 games, hitting .290. He finished the season with Birmingham, also of the Southern, hitting .343. He then moved to St. Joseph in the Western League for the 1888 campaign, but the team disbanded midseason.

Player to player correspondence follows. Always looking for a job requires a flow of information.

7/18/87 from Ollie B. [presumably Ollie Beard, who played shortstop for Syracuse in 1887–1888], Hotel Candee, Syracuse

Glad to see you are doing so well. Now if you will practice at third base every chance you get so you get used to play the bag. I will get you up here with me where you can get about $1200 next year. Your friend, Ollie B.

12/7/87 from Jas. L. Clinton [presumably James Lawrence “Jim” Clinton, who played for Birmingham in 1887 at age 36 and whose league career began with the Brooklyn Eckfords in 1872], Brooklyn, NY

Old Stuff

Your letter to hand and contents noted. I have done as you asked me but could not fetch. They have there [sic] last season’s third baseman — first — right fielder — and pitcher. They want men that is well known in the profesh — if I had my way I would have given your man a chance for I believe him to be a good one as you say But Bob you know I have to please the bosses in some motions. Possibly I may have a chance after the season commences … I had letter from George Stallings. he says he expects to do well. Bob excuse this short note as I must away to N.Y. on business. Your true friend, Jas. L. Clinton

7/16/88 from VM Haynes, Selma AL

Dear Bob

Briggs spent Sunday with me and said you were in Montgomery — Bob this town is alive at present. Encampment going on and a great many of the Old Boys are here and if you will come I would be glad if you could run over tomorrow Tuesday. will try to make you have a great time — will meet you at the Depot. Also there will be great ball played here Tuesday. Wed. Thursday and no doubt you could make a good thing of it, as everyone here is stuck on your playing — event out to camp this week and witnessed a prize drill. of course, my company was first. VM Haynes

8/18/88 from Ed Bligh — Cincinnati — Walnut St Hotel

Friend Bob -

… I tell you this is a great city. I never saw such a place. talk about beer, why you could live on it here. I bet we could have some fun. … Morlic [maybe George Moolic of the 1886 Chicago White Stockings] is in town but I have not seen him in two days. I guess he is in a trance somewhere. He went to Dayton with the Shamrocks Club. he made nine or ten dollars and I suppose you know the rest.… I was out with Goldsby the other night — we beat them 4 to 3, 14 innings yesterday. What do you think of it — our team played 12 innings Saturday, 15 innings Sunday and 14 innings Tuesday. The people are getting the worth of their money.… Yours affectionately, Ed Bligh [big leaguer Edwin Forrest “Ned” Bligh, with the Reds in ’88].

[NOTE: From Sporting Life, Oct 31, 1888, SYRACUSE: “The sale of Beard leaves a gap in the Star infield that will be hard to fill, but already a number of names have been suggested. In looking over the list of valuable men for the position the attention of the directors is respectfully called to Bob Burks, of the Birmingham and New Orleans clubs of the Southern League. This player is said to be an unusu­ally strong man in the position. Olllie Beard speaks many words of praise for Burks and is satisfied that he would please the directors and give a good account of himself should he be secured.”]

8/29/88 from Wm. Stickney — Jackson, Michigan [he had played with Bob Burks, Ed Dundon, and Ollie Beard on the 1886 Acid Iron Earths club from Mobile]

Friend Bob -

Your letter was handed me this morning as I came down for breakfast. Must say you was quite a while answering — but I know how it is, traveling & different cities and the excitement it creates — keeps you guessing. About next season prospects are lovely and I can get you over to Manager Alberts who I played for last season — is going to have a team in Montreal Canada. he asked me not to sign with any one else and wants me to pick out some players for him also. Manager Woods of the Toledos also wants me to play 3rd for him. He says he will have the Syracuse Stars. he is an eastine (?) and a hustler. had the Washington team a while this spring…. I had my little finger broken yesterday. got hit by a batted ball on the foot. the hardest work I ever got in my life but am all service today! … Dundon [Ed Dundon, a mute pitcher] pitched his first game the other day and lost it. He is with Columbus. Ratsy Caldwell has been released by them. I got a letter from Ed Reader [maybe Icicle Reeder] asking me to get on here, but they would not sign him. he offered to play for one hundred a month. Dick pitched a game for us Saturday and won it. had as nice control as he was pitching every day. they wanted him to sign but he refused. he says he is going to wait til next year when his arm will be all right. … We leave here to-morrow night for Columbus to play five games during the Exposition. Regards, Wm. Stickney

8/29/88 from Jas. D. Curtis [Jim Curtiss, who batted .407 for Hastings in 1887] Rapid City, SD

Friend Bob —

How is this for the wild and wooly west? Do you think you would like it up in this country? I do very much. … I got froze out in Kansas City. I couldn’t fill Cartwright’s place (Ed Cartwright?) if I had favor. like this ‘Jenson’ they are all stuck on him in this City and he is such a favorite. He is a very nice fellow but can’t hit anything low and the pitchers are all onto him. he can play a good first base. I see your friend Stallings is going to offer the same terms … if he don’t send it to me I will be very disappointed in him for I always thought he was fair to me and the other players.... I know you good enough to know you are not suffering…. Since I left Hastings after the way I got treated in that City. lost what was coming to me — $177. and $75. more. Oh, but I am a sucker. Yours truly, Jas. D. Curtis

Letters from management and colleagues. Salary discussions and negotiations. The back and forth increases.

10/17/88 from Jas. E. Powell, Richmond, VA

Friend Bob

I will Except [sic] proposition but I will not since contract until 1st Nov. en [sic] fact can do nothing until then of wich [sic] the League meeting will be over and I will commence at once to secure my team for next season. so you will here [sic] from me in a few days and Enclosed Contract. wishing you Success and best regards. from your old friend, J.E. Powell [Jim Powell played for two big-league clubs in 1884–1885 and Sioux City in 1888]

1/2/89 from John C. Shelley, Stockton, Calif. — California League

R.E. Burks — Dear Sir -

I received yours of the 18th last evening and was very much disappointed as well as greatly surprised with its contents, as from the reputation which Harry Howard had given you, I had not the least doubt that you would be here and confidently counted on winning the pennant chiefly with Baker [Norm, AA, 1883, ’85, ’90], Whitehead [Milt, UA 1884], [Jim] Behan, [Will] Stickney, Howard and yourself. As the matter now stands if you have accepted money from Sioux City I do not suppose you will come and speaking as an individual and not a Secretary of this club I would strongly advise you not to leave them in the lurch. If you have accepted their money and they will release you by repaying it, while this Club as a Club cannot advance you any money, if the amount is a reasonable one I will lend it to you individually. If they will not release you as I said before you had better take the chances of any action on our part and go with them. So far as releasing you is concerned we will not do that but at the same time will not take any measures to injure you as a ball player or as a man and will not brand you as a contract breaker. The best that can be done for you at least is that you will not be ordered to report at present and perhaps before we call on you the club to which you are going may go up — a habit those minor league clubs of yours back East have — and then you can come. We want to be able to prevent your playing in any other club out here at any time before giving us a show. As you doubtless understand we are not under the National Agreement and any action we could possibly take would not affect your playing in the East. If you can get out of this trouble I think for your own sake you had better come. You are not tied down for life to be bought and sold like a prize pig but at the end of the season you can go where you please, the single exception being that no local manager will offer you any inducements till your home club is out of the market. We do not need the protection of any agreement to keep our men. They can jump up and go East any time they wish — we black list them so far as we are concerned and that is all. All the protection this league has ever required is that they treat their players and the certainty that they will get their pay. I received the contract with Stickney last evening and I am afraid now that he will not come either when he knows you are not coming. That will leave me in a very bad position indeed, I do not know positively that he will not be on hand but as you wanted to play with him the chances are that way. I wish you would see him and find positively if he is coming since you are not. And you know our season is much longer than yours and perhaps we may need you badly by the first of October or the middle of September — our rules being that we cannot engage an Eastern player who is not here by Oct 1st and if we do you can try to get away before the season ends and winds up with us. I hope you will meet with success wherever you play and will be pleased to hear from you occasionally. Respectfully John C Shelley

3/13/89 from J. W. Stokes, Worcester, Mass.

Dear Robt.

I came here via Boston and you can bet the trip on the steamer was rough … I am well pleased with W — it is the boss town and the girls with their rosy cheeks are immense, but I need you in my business. Can’t you come and play with the Worcesters. they are very much in need of players, short + 3B. I can play a better 3B than the fellow they have his name is Goodwyn. The players they have are Jno Meister (John Meister, Mets AA) 2B. T Campion 1B, Goodwyn 3B, Schefer (Ted Scheffler NL+ AA) LF, Innis CF, Moran SS, Lawrence Daniels (Law Daniels AA 87–88), Dick Conway P (AA + NL, 1886–1888), James Stafford (PL 90, NL 1893–1899), John Buckley (PL 90; or is it Jesse Burkett, HOFer who signed with Worcester in ’89?). You may know some of these fellows. Did Stickney pay with Wilkes-Barre last season or was it in N.Y. I had an idea asking the manager of this team to let me play 3d. His name is Burnhead [Walter Burnham]I will mention your name if you wish me. Send me some news. J.W. Stokes

[NOTE: From a SABR bio of Sioux City’s Ed Glenn: “Still only 28 years old as a new season approached, the ever-hopeful Glenn signed with the Sioux City (Iowa) Corn Huskers of the Western Association and turned in the one truly standout year of his professional career. He accomplished this despite a harrowing incident that almost brought an abrupt end to his season. In the seventh inning of a July 1 game against Milwaukee, Glenn and shortstop Bob Burks collided while pursuing a pop fly to short left. Glenn was knocked unconscious and taken from the field on a stretcher. He did not reawaken until the following morning, and was believed to have suffered serious internal injuries.”] See below.

6/14/89 from Wm. Stickney Stockton, CA

Friend Bob

I don’t recollect whether I owe you a letter or not but here goes all the same. Must say I am sorry about your eye hard luck but I guess you are not taking the care of yourself that you ought to a man has to be in good condition to play winning ball we have our two or three good men who would be Association Stars but for their habits instead of Tails in a rotten league like this. About you and Curtis coming out its just as I wrote you in my last I was talking with Hen Moore [Henry Moore, who in his only big-league season, 1884, hit .336] about a team next year + he seems to think you two could get on after the regular season is over That is play on the cooperative plan, … I will do all I can for both of you + Whitey will go. he knows Curtis + is quite a friend of his … I see the Southern League will have to give it up again they couldn’t support a league if they got players for nothing.… but I must say it takes the heart out of a man to see the way these eastern players get out. Regs Wm. Stickney

9/7/89 from SG Morton, Sec Western Assn of Base Ball Clubs letterhead

Dear Sir -

Telegram signed by yourself + other members of St Joseph club duly rec’d. The same has been referred to Chairman Bd Directors of Western Assn as per sec. 47 Constitution. You mention in telegram that you will write particulars the same. I have no record to date. The “Franchise” of the Club will protect players salaries without a doubt. … The Club has only four more games at home + 12 games abroad. The games abroad will net $1500 which will insure part of the salary. … My advice to the players is to act carefully in this matter + I have every reason to say you will be protected. let me hear from you more fully regarding amount salaries due players. Very Resp’y A.G. Morton. Sec.

10/18/89 from J.E. Powell, manager — Sioux City Base Ball Club letterhead

Friend Bob -

Your letter of the 15th at hand. … I am willing to accept your terms of five hundred per month. Six months contract but could not afford to pay you the amount due you by St Joseph.

11/19/89 from A.M. Thompson St Paul Base Ball Assn letterhead

Robt. Burks — Dear Sir -

Your letter came to me today … if I am not too late I accept your term(s) $1250.00 for the season of 6 months with $150.00 advance when you sign Contract. now answer at once by return mail and I will send money and and Contract. Kansas City will take St Joseph p[l]ace in the Western Association — they have left the American Association to come with us. Yours truly, A. M. Thompson

11/27/89 from A.M. Thompson (Andrew M Thompson, manager St. Paul, UA 1884) Pres + Sec’y — St Paul Base Ball Assn, 294 Congress

Mr. Robt E. Burks

Dear Sir -

Yours of late date at hand. Enclosed find contract — also note — please sign and return to me, and I will at once send you Draft for One Hundred Fifty dollars and then you send me contract all signed We always when we pay players advance money we take their note for the count — and when the player earns the money we return it to him. You will notice in the contract I have scratched out the money for uniforms — but all our players furnish their own shoes. Now you sign the note and send it at once to me, and I will send you the money $1500. About 3d base I have signed one his name is Jim Phillips [Ira B. Phillips]. he has a batting average of .334. I have also accepted terms of a 2d baseman. his name is Joe Cantillon. our team will be stronger in every way next season … I think the Western Association will be as strong as the American Assn. I have also signed James Glasscock brother of Jack Glasscock — he is great in the outfield. … Let me hear from you. A.M. Thompson

11/29/89 from Jas. D Curtis (Jim Curtiss) letterhead Denver Base Ball and Athletic Assn. Dave Rowe manager and sec’y

Friend Bob

Letter arrived yesterday and in it you said you were going to hold off until spring before signing And last night I got a Denver paper which contained all players signed by the Western Assn. And you were booked to go to St Paul. I am in hope you got your own lines. Am satisfied you did as I know you are a good one at making terms. Write me full particulars where you work. I have not signed yet and in no rush. I am working for VanFort [Van Horn store] — like it very well better than loafing and going up against the booze which would be very natural for me as I take to it like a fish to water. We are expecting to do great things next season. Would like to give you the names of the men which are a-going to sign. But am sworn to secrecy by Mgr Rowe [Dave Rowe]. But Bob we will be heard from next year. Say old man I have two sticks which Old Hoss won’t have the pleasure of breaking [Hoss Radbourn pitching inside?]. Had him limit for me out East — one 56 oz, the other 48 oz Both are to [sic] heavy. Got them oiled and up by the heater and Oh I want to make pitchers feel sick when I line them out.… I can’t hit as well as I did after going with Denver St Louis & Boston. Both were here Ryan and O’Brine [sic] Ryan of Chicago [Jimmy Ryan] and O’Brine of the Brooklyns [Darby O’Brien]. Baldwin of the Columbus club [Kid Baldwin 1884–1890 UA, AA, NL] was expected but got Full and bushed — so reported. Boston went to the coast and St Louis are going to leave in the AM for the South — New Orleans. They are going to play a week. Very truly yours, Jas. Curtis

12/16/89 from Harry Howard Stockton, CA

Friend Bob -

Evidently you will be surprised in receipt of this letter. But I am writing in the interest of the Stockton BBC. I presume you have received the letter written you by Mr Campbell or Shelley, the head people of this concern. They want me to point out to you the benefit you will derive from by coming out here. In the first place Bob they do not pay as large a salary as you can get out east, but the season is longer here and the season lasts eight months. so you can see this amounts to $1000. for the season. I am sure you can get $135 one thirty five by asking for it. They say they would pay that much. Bob $135 would amount to $1080. Say you got $175 in the east — it would amount to $1050 — less than you can get here. There is never a team busted in this league — they have always paid their dollars to the dollar — good as gold. Consequently there will be more money in it for you here. We only play two games a week as you will see by the papers, and it is one of the nicest towns I ever played in. The crowds at the games here are principally ladies and if a man tries to behave himself he can have anything he wants.… They say they want to pay big salaries, I don’t know what to say about that. But I believe they offered you $125 per month. … You will find as nice a crowd of boys as you can wish to meet … we will also have a good team. Baker and Stallings [George Stallings] as one battery Harper and Stockwell [Len Stockwell, NL 1879, AA 1884, NL 1890] as another. and on the bases Whitehead at 3rd — Behan 2nd — Selna first — Howard right field — Moon [Henry Moore? UA 1884] center … I presume you have heard of Whitehead [Milt, UA 1884]. Bob he is the king of them all at third — the only man I have ever seen who could touch him at that position is Denny [Jerry Denny]. Of course Denny has more experience but he can make a monkey of Jerry on ground balls. I never seen anything like him. Of course, you know Baker of Nashville fame. Selna is big greaser and a first class man on first … Write me and let me know what you think about it.

I am yours, Harry Howard

P.S. Bob would it be asking too much of you to write to Duffy [from Memphis of the Southern League? or Charlie Duffee, from Alabama and AA/NL 1889–1893?] and Behan and let them know how things stand here.

And finally, success.

12/25/89 from Jas. Curtis (Jim Curtiss), Denver Colo W.L. Van Horn letterhead

Friend Bob,

Will begin by wishing you a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year. And trying to excuse my lateness in answering last received from you. You will perhaps appreciate my tardiness when I explain that I have been working in a local store. That is what Van Horn has developed into. And to say I have to work hard is putting it mild. Will have worked every night until 12. About playing ball old man I see where your contract has been approved and now you are a full fledged member of the St Paul Club for 1890. Hope you will prove to be a profitable acquisition to the same. Rowe is not in a rush to sign players as yet. But Bob I am getting rather short and want a little stuff. We expect to have a winner in Colo. in 90. Would like to see a first to SPs (St Paul’s) second. Don’t think we are stuck on the flag, or we only want second or third. we expect Whilst and Flood here soon. And when they get here we will go to Glenwood Springs to get into harmony. Well goodby old friend. Hope to see you in 90. Always your friend, Jim

3/6/90 from A.M. Thompson , Pres & Sec — St. Paul Base Ball Assn.

Mr R.E. Burks

Dear Sir

I am doing a little advertising and working up the interest here. I wish you would send me your photograph by return mail as the Pictures of All the Players of the St Paul Club will be put in the St Paul papers &c. I would like you to be sure and be here not later than April 10th for practice. We are going to play some exhibition games with Minneapolis. Yours truly, A.M. Thompson

[NOTE: Finally, this, a continuing connection of Burks and Curtiss, from The Savannah Morning News (GA) on January 20, 1892.]

Bob Burks, Itinerant Minor Leaguer was originally published in Our Game on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

This week’s header references 1908 because it is distant, and because Fred Merkle’s blunder is somehow still famous. But the year could be 1889, or 1912, or 1941, or 1986 … or last year. Reflect upon how close Toronto came to victory, in the bottom of the ninth inning of Game 7 in the World Series, with the bases loaded, one out, and a force play at home plate.

The subject is eternal because it is so regrettably human. We grow up wanting to be the heroes of our own lives, but too often we fail and risk becoming villains, or worse: scapegoats for a broad-based feeling of betrayed expectations. In the seamless web of baseball’s history, Fred Snodgrass commiserates with Lonnie Johnson, Mickey Owen feels for umpire Bill Joyce, and Fred Merkle wraps a consoling arm around Bill Buckner.

Baseball binds America. Its rhythms and rituals resonate across the great divides of generation, politics, religion, and economics to connect our people as nothing else can. Finally, the verdict comes: we are fans because we never really stopped thinking of ourselves as players in this great national drama. In the words of Bruce Catton, baseball “celebrates the vicarious triumph. The spectator can identify himself completely with the player, and the epochal feat becomes, somehow, an achievement of his own.” Likewise, the epochal blunder.

Let’s first consider Merkle, the teenaged substitute for Fred Tenney at first base on September 23, 1908, whose baserunning mishap transformed a Giants’ win over Chicago into a draw. This cost the Giants a pennant and a World Series against Detroit.

On the morning of the 23rd, Tenney had come up lame. The teenaged Merkle, still shy of 100 at bats after two seasons as a reserve, was thrust into action. The Giants and Cubs were in a virtual tie for first, neither being even a half-game behind the other. The tilt at the Polo Grounds was tied 1–1 in the last of the ninth, as Jack Pfiester dueled Christy Mathewson. With the Giants’ Harry “Moose” McCormick on first and one out, Merkle shot a single to right that moved the runner to third. After another out, shortstop Al Bridwell singled to center; the winning run crossed the plate, and the Giants were in first place.

Or were they? Merkle, in accordance with baseball custom and practice, if not in strict accordance with the rules, never bothered to touch second, instead running toward the clubhouse to avoid the rush of fans storming onto the field in celebration. Somehow Cubs second baseman Johnny Evers got the ball and stepped on second, holding the ball aloft to show the two umpires that he had forced Merkle out and the run didn’t count. Three weeks earlier, on September 4, the Cubs had tried to win a ruling on a similar force-out against the Pirates but were shut down.

Given those precedents, who could blame Merkle? Everyone, as it turned out.

Reporting from the Polo Grounds that day, Charles Dryden of the Chicago Tribune wrote: “Minor league brains lost the Giants’ game today after they had it cleanly and fairly won by a score of 2 to 1. In the ninth round, Fred Merkle did a bonehead base-running stunt identical with the recent exhibition which Mr. [Warren] Gill, also a minor leaguer, gave at Pittsburgh three weeks ago. But this time [umpire Hank] O’Day had his eagle eye peeled, and the winning run which the Giants compiled in the ninth inning was tossed into the discard.”

It certainly was the fans’ impression that once McCormick crossed home plate, the game was over; New York had won, and an early newspaper account reflected that belief. But the umpires declared the game a draw, and the National League’s president called for it to be replayed only if the pennant was at stake. At season’s end, the teams were indeed tied for first place, each with a record of 98–55. Despite going 11–5 after the “Merkle Game,” the Giants lost three times in five days to Phillies lefthander Harry Coveleski, a late-September callup from a class-B minor league.

The play was called the Merkle Boner — meaning. at that time, not a male in a state of arousal but instead a dumb play. Westbrook Pegler, writing in 1947, stated: “One old baseball term that qualified as good Americanese is ‘boner.’ This is an abbreviation of ‘bonehead play.’ The first man to use this form was T. A. Dorgan, or Tad, the sport-page cartoonist of the Hearst papers who had a baseball character called Bonehead Barry, the bush league bear. We owe ‘bonehead’ and ‘boner’ to him.”

Only four years after Fred’s infamous play, another Giant became a scapegoat for life, dropping a fly ball in center field in the final half-inning of the final game of the 1912 World Series. The “Snodgrass Muff” did not cost the Giants the game, but it attached itself to his life forever.

Let’s retreat to the top of the tenth, when the Giants and Red Sox were tied at 1–1, eerily the same score as in the game when Merkle committed his blunder — once again with Christy Mathewson the unfortunate pitcher. After one out, New York’s Red Murray doubled and Merkle drove him home with a single. The goat of 1908 advanced to second as Tris Speaker bobbled the ball in center, but Joe Wood, who had come on in relief of starting pitcher Hugh Bedient, fanned Buck Herzog and got Chief Meyers on a comebacker.

Matty returned to the hill, intent on wrapping up the championship. As Snodgrass told Larry Ritter half a century later:

The first man up for Boston in the bottom of the 10th was Clyde Engle, who was pinch-hitting for Smoky Joe Wood. He hit a great big, lazy, high fly ball halfway between Red Murray in left field and me…. I yelled that I’d take it and waved Murray off, and — well — I dropped the darn thing. But instead of bunting [Engle to third for the tying run, Harry] Hooper cracked a drive way over my head. I made one of the greatest plays of my life on it, catching the ball over my shoulder while on the dead run in deep left center.

No one else recalled that catch, which had nearly doubled off Engle, standing at third base. Sixty-two years later, after a successful career in business, his New York Times obituary was headlined “Fred Snodgrass, 86, Dead; Ball Player Muffed 1912 Fly.”

The Red Sox went on to win that World Series in 1912, their second of five straight through 1918. Then they sold Babe Ruth to the Yankees and did not win again until 2004. They lost in seven games in 1946, 1967, 1975 and, in a scapegoating echo, 1986. Tied at the end of nine with Boston leading the Mets three games to two, the Red Sox scored two in the top of the tenth. The Mets mounted a rally with two out and none on, staving off defeat with several two-strike hits. Mookie Wilson’s roller then eluded first baseman Bill Buckner and the Mets won, going on to defeat Boston in Game 7.

Closers blow saves; infielders make errors on routine plays at awful times; cleanup hitters strike out with men on base; umpires miss calls, egregiously. Yes, playing the scapegoat is part of the tribal role for which baseball men sign on. Yes, this is the game you played when you were young … and from a safe distance it still looks easy. But No, you would not have done better in their place.

America’s National Game: 1908 was originally published in Our Game on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.