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★ Baseball

‘No, he's a gambler.’  Gatsby hesitated, then added cooly: ‘He's the man who fixed the World Series back in 1919.’

 

‘Fixed the World Series?’ I repeated.

 

The idea staggered me.  I remembered, of course, that the World Series had been fixed in 1919, but if I had thought of it at all I would have thought of it as something that merely happened, the end of an inevitable chain.  It never occurred to me that one man could start to play with the faith of fifty million people – with the singlemindedness of a burglar blowing a safe.  F Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby

 

 

I’m helplessly and permanently a Red Sox fan.  It was like first love ... You never forget.  It’s special.  It’s the first time I saw a ballpark.  I’d thought nothing would ever replace cricket.  Wow!  Fenway Park at 7 o’clock in the evening.  Oh, just magic beyond magic: never got over that.  Simon Schama

 

 

Who is this Baby Ruth?  And what does she do?  George Bernard Shaw

 

 

Baseball has the great advantage over cricket of being sooner ended.  George Bernard Shaw

 

 

It was deja vu all over again.  Yogi Berra

 

 

Ball-playing communicated such an impulse to our limbs and joints that there is nothing now heard of in our leisure hours but ball ball ball.  Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

 

 

The national game has become degraded ... A disfigured reputation may never be entirely repaired.  Once more abandon the bat, boys, if you cannot keep the game pure.  Henry Chadwick

 

 

I don’t think much about the theory stuff.  Miller Huggins

 

 

The fans were part of the game in those days.  They poured right out onto the field and argued with the players and the umpires.  Sort of hard to keep the game going sometimes to say the least.  Tommy Leach

 

 

Hard men ... Baseball was played with a ferocity, a king of life and death.  George Will

 

 

Jackie Robinson, who came before Martin Luther King, and began the consciousness-raising of whites and blacks that resulted in Martin Luther King’s career.  The heroism of Jackie Robinson playing the game requires such astonishing concentration, such equipoise ... Played with his intensity, under the pressures he felt, on the field from racism ... A credit to his race ... One of the great achievements of the human drama.  George Will, columnist

 

 

Baseball is a clean straight game.  William Howard Taft

 

 

Everybody that I know in the game of baseball uses the same stuff I use.  Mark McGwire

 

 

In 1909 a man named Charles Hercules Ebbets began secretly buying up adjacent parcels of land in the Flatbush section of Brooklyn ... The team was called The Trolley Dodgers, or just the Dodgers.  Ken Burns, Baseball: Our Game ***** PBS 1994

 

The bat is made of turned ash, less than forty-two inches long.  ibid.

 

The only game in which the defense has the ball.  ibid.

 

Americans have played baseball for more than two hundred years.  ibid.

 

An academy player named Abner Doubleday sat down and on the spot drew up the rules for a brand new game and called it baseball.  ibid.

 

By the time of the American Revolution there were many variations.  ibid.

 

Townball was by far the most popular.  ibid.

 

The game was considered far too violent for young ladies to play.  ibid.

 

Everyone started throwing the curved ball.  ibid.

 

The Knickerbocker Baseball Club believed there were big profits to be made in baseball, and in 1869 they assembled the very first professional team, the Cincinnati Red Stockings.  ibid.

 

Winning and the profits it promised was fast becoming the most important thing.  But outside the big cities baseball remained a game not a business.  ibid.  

 

Power was to be invested in the owners not the players.  ibid.

 

Louisville Greys of the new National League mysteriously lost seven games in a row ... An investigation revealed that gamblers had bought off four players.  ibid.

 

White prejudice in the north; Jim Crow laws in the south.  ibid.

 

Moses Fleetwood Walker became the first African-American to make it all the way to the Majors.  ibid.

 

 

But then divided itself in two, cleaned itself up and succeeded beyond anyone’s wildest dreams.  The World Series began.  Ken Burns, Baseball: Something Like a War  

 

He [Wagner] had a powerful build ... His legs were badly bowed but he had huge hands.  ibid.

 

Christy Mathewson – a pitcher with a record for clean play ... He was the perfect hero for his age ... The Christian gentlemen.  ibid.

 

Twenty-seven innings and not a single run.  The greatest pitching performance in World Series history.  ibid.

 

For African-Americans it remained the worst of times.  ibid.

 

Alta Weiss was a doctor’s daughter ... At seventeen she joined a men’s semi-professional team ... Thousands paid to see her play.  ibid.

 

In 1904 Waddell struck out 349 batters – a record for American League left-handers that still stands.  ibid.

 

Three weeks after his father was killed, on August 30th 1905, Ty Cobb played his first game for the Detroit Tigers.  ibid.

 

 

Baseball transformed the language.  Ken Burns, Baseball: The Faith of Fifty Million People

 

A hot dog cost a nickel.  ibid.

 

Ty Cobb and John McGraw still set the pace.  ibid.

 

Boston had won it 3-2 ... They had beaten the New York Giants.  ibid.

 

Ebbets Field opened to the public on April 5th 1913.  ibid.

 

They now formed a players’ fraternity.  ibid.

 

The Federal League ... the new league collapsed.  ibid.

 

The players were as powerless as they were before.  ibid.

 

Nearly every industry had a league.  ibid.

 

Women members demanded to play too.  ibid.

 

The Red Sox won the World Series that year beating the Chicago Cubs 4-2.  One of the series’ stars was the young pitcher Babe Ruth.  ibid.

 

 

During the 1920s two of Baseball’s greatest pitchers had one more moment of glory.  Ken Burns, Baseball: A National Heirloom

 

One man eclipsed them all: Babe Ruth.  ibid.

 

The ball hit Chapman in the temple, crushing the side of his skull.  He died the next morning.  ibid.

 

The era of the home-run hitter.  ibid.

 

Ruth liked to pitch but he loved to hit.  ibid.

 

No star had ever so dominated the game.  ibid.

 

He was the most conspicuous consumer of all.  ibid.

 

He drank bourbon and ginger ale before breakfast.  ibid.

 

The young player’s name was Lou Gehrig.  ibid.

 

 

In a time when more than ever America need heroes baseball still provided them.  Ken Burns, Baseball: Shadow Ball  

 

Over the years black baseball stars played white Major League stars at least 438 times in off-season exhibition games.  The whites won 129 of those post-season games; blacks won 309.  ibid.

 

In 1930 just months after the stock market crashed, Babe Ruth signed a two-year contract that paid him $80,000 a season.  ibid.

 

Gehrig had become the best hitter in the American League.  ibid.

 

On June 3rd 1932 Lou Gehrig ... hit four home runs in a single game.  ibid.

 

John Joseph McGraw ... After his death his wife found among his effects a list of all the black players he had secretly wished he could hire over the decades.  ibid.

 

The Yankees were back in the World Series in 1932 playing the Chicago Cubs.  ibid.

 

Black players excelled under conditions big leaguers never had to face.  ibid.

 

The Depression had devastated organised baseball.  ibid.

 

It was the very first all-star game and fittingly Babe Ruth was the hero.  ibid.

 

The formation of the first Japanese professional league.  ibid.

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