Entries tagged with “baseball” from Patell and Waterman's History of New York
Here's something New York that's been lost: Knickerbocker Beer.Made by the Ruppert Brewery, Knickerbocker was the official beer of the New York Giants, a bit ironic given that Jacob Ruppert, a.k.a. "The Colonel," was the owner of the New York Yankees during the heyday of Ruth and Gehrig. The brewery was located at 92nd and Second, but it closed in the late 1960s. The Knickerbocker brand was acquired by another brewery, but discontinued during the 1970s. (The ad at left appeared in 1955.)
Our friend Betsy Bradley will be talking about Knickerbocker beer next Tuesday night, September 7, at Brooklyn's "Adult Education: A Useless Lecture Series." The theme for the night is "Beer Matters," and the panel takes place at Union Hall in Park Slope (702 Union Street at 5th Ave). The doors open at 7:30 p.m., the panel begins at 8:00 p.m. and there's a five-dollar cover charge.
Betsy's talk is called "Knickerbocker: Nativism, Prohibition, and the Rise of New York's Namesake Beer." Her co-panelists are Brendan I. Koerner ("The Madonna of Malternatives: Zima and the Challenges of Brand Reinvention"), Erica Shea and Stephen Valand ("Secrets of Brewing In the Modern New York Apartment"), and Bill Wander ("The Truth about McSorley's: Reenvisioning Joseph Mitchell's "Wonderful Saloon"). Click here for more detailed descriptions.
The ad below appeared in a 1957 New York Giants program. You can find some more great baseball-related beer ads here (including one for Rheingold, official beer of the New York Mets when I first started following them, another lost New York beverage.)
[Thanks to Amanda T. for the heads-up!]
Eighty years ago today, New York Yankees outfielder Babe Ruth became the first major league ballplayer to hit 500 home runs. He accomplished the feat at Cleveland's League Park in the second inning against pitcher Willis Hudlin. Ruth was 34 years old at the time, and the homer was his 30th of the season. The Indians won the game, however, beating the Yankees 6-5.
Ruth would hit his 600th homer 2 years and 10 days later; it would take him almost 3 more years to hit his 700th.
Two other players hit their 500th home runs while playing for the Yankees: Mickey Mantle in 1967 at the age of 36, and Alex Rodriguez in 2007 at the age of 32 (making him the youngest player to reach the milestone). Former Yankee Reggie Jackson hit his 500th after leaving the team to join the California Angels. The only player to hit his 500th home run while wearing a New York Mets uniform is Gary Sheffield, who hit his dinger earlier this year, becoming the 25th man to accomplish the feat and the only player whose 500th home run was also his first home run for a new team.
Here's an interesting tidbit about the year 1929, the Indians, and the Yankees. This was that major-league baseball players wore numbers on the backs of their jerseys. The Indians had experimented with numbers in 1916, with the players wearing numbers on their left sleeves, but they soon abandoned the practice. The Yankees were supposed to be the first team to have players wear numbers on the backs of their jerseys, but their home opener was rained out in 1929, so Cleveland got the honor. And it was a game between the Yankees and the Indians on May 13, 1929 that was the first to feature both teams wearing numbers. The practice was adopted by all major league teams by the mid-1930s. At the start, the numbers corresponded to the players' numbers in the batting order, so Ruth wore the number "3."
(By the way, if you like the photo of Ruth above, you can order your own museum-quality copy here from the Times.)
When I teach the novel, I suggest that Cahan is invoking a developing cultural mythology that links baseball both to individualism and Americanization. In 1886, Harper's magazine reported that "the fascination of the game has seized upon the American people, irrespective of age, sex, or other condition." Mark Twain declared that baseball was "the very symbol, the outward and visible expression of the drive and push and rush and struggle of the raging, tearing, booming nineteenth century."
In 1919, Hugh Fullerton, one of the nation's leading sportswriters, would write in the Atlanta Constitution that baseball "is the greatest single force working for Americanization. No other game appeals so much to the foreign born youngsters and nothing, not even the schools, teaches the American spirit so quickly, or inculcates the idea of sportsmanship or fair play thoroughly."
Much later in the twentieth century, the novelist Philip Roth would write an autobiographical sketch entitled "My Baseball Years," in which he described baseball as
this game that I loved with all my heart, not simply for the fun of playing it (fun was secondary, really), but for the mythic and aesthetic dimension it gave to an American boy's life -- particularly to one whose grandparents could hardly speak English. For someone whose roots in America were strong but only inches deep, and who had no experience, such as a Catholic child might, of an awesome hierarchy that was real and felt, baseball was a kind of secular church that reached into every class and region of the nations and bound millions upon millions of us together in common concerns, loyalties, rituals, enthusiasm, and antagonisms. Baseball made me understand what patriotism was about, at its best.
Another child of immigrants, A. Bartlett Giamatti, once president of Yale and later President of the National League, also extolled the Americanness of baseball. In a speech delivered before the Massachusetts Historical Society, Giamatti claimed that "baseball fits America so well because it embodies the interplay of individual and group that we love, and because it expresses our longing for the rule of law while licensing our resentment of law givers."Giamatti speculated that baseball had become America's national pastime because
we cherish as Americans a game wherein freedom and reunion are both possible. Baseball fulfills the promise America made itself to cherish the individual while recognizing the overarching claims of the group. It sends its players out in order to return again, allowing all the freedom to accomplish great things in a dangerous world. So baseball restates a version of America's promises every time it is played. The playing of the game is a restatement of the promises that we can all be free, that we can all succeed.Giamatti also stressed that at the heart of the game lies "the basic confrontation between two lone individuals. It is primitive in its starkness. A man on a hill prepares to throw a rock at a man slightly below him, not far away, who holds a club." Moreover, Giamatti asserts, because players are "sufficiently physically separated on the field . . . the individual cannot hide from responsibility in a crowd, as in football or Congress."For these reasons, Giamatti declares that "individual merit and self-reliance are the bed-rock of baseball."
Cahan thus uses baseball to serve as a marker of Jake's embrace of American individualism. The film Hester Street, which I'll discuss tomorrow, includes a wonderful scene of Jake playing ball with his son in Central Park, just after lecturing his greenhorn wife, Gitl, and their greenhorn friend Bernstein, about what it means to be an American.
The Chicago Cubs defeated the New York Mets last night, 9-5, clinching home field advantage throughout the National League playoffs and damaging the Mets' playoff hopes.
This morning's New York Times reminds us of a match-up between baseball clubs from Chicago and New York that took place one hundred years ago today in the old Polo Grounds in Harlem, which also adversely affected the New York team's playoff chances.
On September 23, 1908, the New York Giants had a one-game lead over the Chicago Cubs in the standings, and their game was tied 1-1 in the bottom of the ninth. With a man on first and two outs, nineteen-year-old Fred Merkle, the Giants' rookie first baseman, hit a single, sending the runner to third. The next batter hit a fastball over second base, a clear base hit, and the man on third scored, giving the game to the Giants. Had the ball not been hit out of the infield, Merkle could have been called out at second on a force play, but because the ball was hit out of the infield, Merkle didn't run all the way to second -- which was customary. But Johnny Evers, the Chicago second baseman, retrieved the ball, took it to second, argued that Merkle should be called out and the run nullified. The umpire at second refused to rule, but at 10:00 p.m. -- from the safety of his hotel room -- he ruled Merkle out.
To make a long story short, the game was ruled a tie; the Cubs and Giants ended the regular season tied, forcing a one-game playoff -- which Chicago won. They went on to defeat the Detroit Tigers in the World Series -- and that was the last World Series the club ever won. Make of that what you will.
Merkle went on to have a respectable 14-year career, but he never really lived down his "mistake" -- which, given the conventions in use at the time, wasn't really a mistake at all.
Kevin Baker's account in the Times is more detailed and a lot more vivid. Take a look.
And you can read the Times account of the game from one hundred years ago here.
This is a week of endings for New York baseball. The Yankees played their last game at Yankee Stadium last night and will move across the street to a new stadium next year. The Mets final season at Shea Stadium also seems also to be coming to its end, though (as of today) they remain in the hunt for both the division title and, failing that, a wild card berth. But when you have to start a rookie pitcher against the National League's best team (the Chicago Cubs, who have already clinched the Central Division title) and that rookie gives up a grand slam to a pitcher; and when the governor of New York, David Patterson, jokes about the unreliability of the Mets' relief pitchers ("The Mets bullpen is gonna kill me. It's not the Fed, it's not AIG, ...it's the Mets bullpen.") . . . well, perhaps the handwriting is on the wall.
So it might be a good time for New York fans to find some cheer by remembering the city's association with the beginnings of the game.
One hundred-sixty-five years ago today, on September 23, 1843, a bank clerk named Alexander Joy Cartwright (1820-1892) codified the constitution and by-laws of the New York Knickerbocker Base Ball Club. While still a member of Knickerbocker Engine Company No. 12 during the previous year, Cartwright had been playing regular games of "town ball" on a vacant lot in Manhattan. The by-laws for the New York Knickerbocker were signed by the team's Committee on By-Laws, which included Duncan Curry, the president; William Wheaton, the vice-president; and William Tucker, the secretary and treasurer. The by-laws also contained a set of 20 rules, written down by Cartwright, which were later published in pamphlet form. Many of the Knickerbockers had been members of the Gotham Base Ball Club, which had been formed in 1837, and it is thought that the Knickerbocker Club may have existed informally before its official founding moment.
Something close to baseball was being played in the New York area since at least 1823. In 2001, George A. Thompson Jr., a research librarian at NYU, discovered two newspaper accounts of a game played in April 1823 in New York City on a site just west of Broadway between what is now Eighth Street and Washington Place (largely occupied, appropriately enough, by buildings belonging to NYU). It seems that both the National Advocate and the New-York Gazette and General Advertiser had received the same letter from someone who had observed the game.
The Gazette summed up the letter in a paragraph that began: "We have received a communication in favor of the manly exercise of base ball." The Advocate published a longer account: "I was last Saturday much pleased in witnessing a company of active young men playing the manly and athletic game of 'base ball' at the Retreat in Broadway (Jones'). I am informed they are an organized association, and that a very interesting game will be played on Saturday next at the above place, to commence at half past 3 o'clock, P.M. Any person fond of witnessing this game may avail himself of seeing it played with consummate skill and wonderful dexterity." Thompson noted at the time that the letter contained no explanation of what "base ball" was, suggesting its author assumed that it would be familiar enough to newspaper readers.
It was Cartwright's rules, however, that ultimately distinguished "baseball," which became known as the "New York Game," from both "town ball" and another variant called "The Massachusetts Game." Cartwright's rules laid the foundation for modern baseball:three strikes to a batter, three outs to an inning, tags and force-outs in lieu of hitting a runner with a thrown ball, and the addition of an umpire. (Throwing the ball at a runner is still played in some schoolyard variants of baseball, and it's called "pegging.") The rules also established the idea of "fair" and "foul" territories; in town ball, the batter could run no matter where the ball was hit. You can find a listing of the rules in the Wikipedia entry for the New York Knickerbockers and more information about the team at 19thcbaseball.com.
The Knickerbockers eventually began to play their games in Hoboken, New Jersey at a place called Elysian Fields. What baseball historians refer to as "the first officially recorded game" took place at Elysian Fields on June 19, 1846. Cartwright's Knickerbockers lost to the New York Nine that day, 23-1, but in the end they prevailed: the game was played according to "Knickerbocker Rules," which were then widely imitated. Their style of play ultimately proved more popular than the variant played in Massachusetts.
So you see, as my father-in-law would put it, the New York Yankees and the Boston Red Sox come by their rivalry honestly.
Those of you who've heard Cyrus talk about growing up at the nexus of many cultures may also have heard me, on occasion, joke that Cyrus identifies, ethnically, as a Mets fan.
So I had to direct his (and your) attention today to the new Bowery Boys podcast on Shea Stadium.
Who are these Bowery Boys and how do they find the time to come up with such great material?
[/blog envy]
Yesterday's New York Times article about the Q train (and Bryan's post about it) reminded me of a famous comment made some eight years ago about the diversity of the ridership on New York's subways, in this case the 7 train.
The comment is a perfect illustration of Thomas Bender's point in the essay "New York as a Center of Difference" (from The Unfinished City [2007]) that New York's "historic cosmopolitanism" puts it odds with the cultural mythologies that have dominated Americans' understanding of what it means to be American. Bender identifies these as Puritanism and Jeffersonian agrarian and argues that neither can give positive cultural or political value to heterogeneity or conflict. Each in its own way is xenophobic, and that distances both of them from the conditions of modern life."
The comment is also a good illustration of the mindset that Thomas Frank describes in his study of contemporary U.S. conservatism, What's the Matter with Kansas (2004): "People in suburban Kansas City vituperate against the sinful cosmopolitan elite of New York and Washington, D.C.; people in rural Kansas vituperate against the sinful cosmopolitan elite of Topeka and suburban Kansas City."
The comment was made by major-league pitcher John Rocker, a native of Georgia, and (at the time) the closer for the Atlanta Braves. In an interview, Rocker told Sports Illustrated in the spring of 2000 that New York is "the most hectic, nerve-racking city. Imagine having to take the 7 Train to the ballpark, looking like you're riding through Beirut next to some kid with purple hair, next to some queer with AIDS, right next to some dude who just got out of jail for the fourth time, right next to some 20-year-old mom with four kids. It's depressing."
Rocker's views may well have represented the views held by a fair number of Americans about their fellow citizens in New York. Indeed, one salon.com writer wondered whether Rocker "merely an expression of the national id whose blurted-out comments represent the sinister opinions secretly held by all the rest of us?" Nevertheless, Rocker's comments were deemed offensive not only by New Yorkers, but also by Major League Baseball, which suspended Rocker for the rest of spring training and the first 28 games of the season (though the punishment was reduced on appeal to merely the first 14 games of the season).
Rocker never really lived down the controversy and (perhaps by coincidence) his pitching performance declined thereafter. By 2003, he was no longer playing major-league ball. Last year, he was implicated as a steroid user during an investigation into an Atlanta steroid ring.
You can learn more about Rocker's views (and order a "Speak English" T-shirt) from his website, http://www.johnrocker.net.
Never count the New York Yankees out. They have history and tradition on their side, not to mention a payroll that approaches $200 million, about three times that of their opponent in the American League Division Series, the Cleveland Indians. And tonight the bats came out of hiding, and the Yankees defeated the Indians 2-1, avoiding a sweep and earning the right to play another game.
Of course, as the Yankees discovered to their chagrin early last week in Cleveland, on any given night the $65 million payroll can defeat the $200 million payroll. But the bigger budget surely helps you to survive the grind of 162 games that gets you to the postseason. And you have to admire the team for refusing to give themselves up for dead in late May, when they were 14.5 games behind the Red Sox with a 21-29 record. Eventually they started to hit — a lot. And they found some bullpen help in their own minor league system, in the form of a fireballing 22-year-old named Joba Chamberlain, whose father was born on the Winnebago reservation in Nebraska.
Yup, it’s the Yankees, not the Indians, who have a Native American on their team. Not to mention one of the most famous Japanese sluggers in Hideki Matsui and an ace pitcher (Chien-Ming Wang), who hails from Taiwain, in addition to the usual complement of nationalities and ethnicities that you can find on a major league team these days. The Yankees have emulated not only New York's emphasis on big business, but the city's cosmopolitanism as well. And so has US baseball.
I’m not a Yankee fan, though I’m not a Yankee-hater either. It's just that it's often seemed a little like rooting for Microsoft. But maybe that's what most Americans think about New York City generally.
Context is everything. I started watching baseball as a third-grader in New York in the fall of 1969, so I became a Mets fan. I’ve been one ever since, through good times, bad times, and ugly times. I’ve even held myself personally responsible for some of those ugly times (this year included), as the result of a certain bargain I made during the sixth game of the 1986 World Series. I’ve written about that on my site patell.org in a piece called “The Crypto-History of the Historic Collapse of the New York Mets.”
Nevertheless, except for rare occasions like the 1986 season, the Mets toil in the shadow of the Yankees, one of the most famous franchises in all of sports and certainly the most storied team in US baseball history. Twenty-six World Series championships; thirty-nine American League pennants. Babe Ruth, Lou Gehrig, Joe DiMaggio, Mickey Mantle, Derek Jeter, A-Rod: a parade of some of the most famous names in baseball history.
So, given the way in which the history of major league baseball has been intertwined with the history of New York, why has baseball as an institution worked so hard to deny the urban roots of the professional game? George Will has described “the myth that Abner Doubleday invented the sport one fine day in 1839 in the farmer Phinney’s pasture at Cooperstown” as part of this “agreeable nonsense about baseball being an echo of our pastoral past.” Actually, writes Will, “the thing Doubleday helped begin was the Civil War. (He was stationed at Fort Sumter when the first shots were fired.) The New York Times obituary of Doubleday did not even mention baseball” (Men at Work
Until recently, baseball historians agreed that, although baseball is now believed to have evolved from the English game rounders, its modern form does have a founding moment: on June 19, 1846 a New York bank clerk named Alexander Joy Cartwright led his Knickerbocker Base Ball Club to Hoboken to play the New York Nine. The Knickerbockers lost that day, 23-1, but in the end (so the story goes) they prevailed: their elaborate rules for playing baseball were widely imitated, and their style of play ultimately proved more popular than the variant played in Massachusetts.
In fact, however, Cartwright probably did not “invent” baseball either. A box score and newspaper account from The New York Morning News describes “a friendly match of the time-honored game of Base” that was played on October 21, 1845 at the Elysian Fields “between eight members of the New York Ball Club and the same number of players from Brooklyn.” The account contains indications that something close to the modern game of baseball was being played by different groups throughout the New York area in the 1840s and that several innovations in the rules believed to have been made by Cartwright were already in use in 1845. What this discovery indicates is that baseball did not have “the clear founding moment” that most fans would like to believe it did.
Indeed, most baseball historians believe that a founding moment for the game will never be discovered because the game most likely evolved over time. The 1845 account was rediscovered in 1990 by Ted Widmer, a Harvard graduate student, who is now the director of the John Carter Brown Library at Brown University.
Eleven years later, a research librarian at NYU, George A. Thompson Jr., discovered two newspaper accounts of a game played in April 1823 in New York City on a site just west of Broadway between what is now Eighth Street and Washington Place (largely occupied, appropriately enough, by buildings belonging to NYU). It seems that both the National Advocate and the New-York Gazette and General Advertiser had had received the same letter from someone who had observed the game. The Gazette summed up the letter in a paragraph that began: “We have received a communication in favor of the manly exercise of base ball.” The Advocate published a longer account: “I was last Saturday much pleased in witnessing a company of active young men playing the manly and athletic game of ‘base ball’ at the Retreat in Broadway (Jones’). I am informed they are an organized association, and that a very interesting game will be played on Saturday next at the above place, to commence at half past 3 o’clock, P.M. Any person fond of witnessing this game may avail himself of seeing it played with consummate skill and wonderful dexterity.” Thompson noted at the time that the letter contained no explanation of what “base ball” was, suggesting its author assumed that it would be familiar enough to newspaper readers.
The association of pastoral imagery with baseball, which began with the denial of the sport’s urban origins through the substitution of Doubleday for Cartwright, continued as the nineteenth century progressed, despite the game’s clearly urban demographics: the sports historian Allen Guttmann notes that in 1897 “only three of the National League’s 168 players were from the rural South, while 31 men came from Massachusetts alone” and that the “early years of the game brought forth a disproportionate number of Irish-American and German-American city dwellers” (From Ritual to Record
All of which leads me to ask: what does it mean that our so-called national pastime is in fact an urban rather than a pastoral game, a sport whose institutional history is intricately intertwined with the history of New York City? I’m starting to think that all that “pastoral nonsense” isn’t all that “agreeable.” It seems to me to be complicit with a kind of Americanism that gets the country involved in quagmires. Perhaps it’s time we started embracing the urban roots of the American self — and the kind of cosmopolitan vision that the urban often makes possible.
Anyway, look for some baseball in our cultural history of New York City.
