On Sunday, May 17, 1998 at Yankee Stadium, New York defeated the Minnesota Twins 4-0 as David Wells retired every batter he faced. The game took approximately two hours and forty minutes and was played in front of almost 50,000 fans. It was just the 13th perfect game pitched in modern Major League history.
Base-stealing has fallen into limbo and the thrills that go with it are no more. But it’ll return, as surely as I’m writing these words.
~Ty Cobb
Union Grounds, a ballpark located in Brooklyn, New York, hosted its first contest on May 15, 1862. Enclosed entirely by a fence, Union Grounds became the first ballpark to charge admission to watch the game. Non-paying spectators, meanwhile, could watch the game from embankments outside of the grounds (although, I imagine the view wasn’t as good). The Brooklyn Eagle described the ballpark:
The buildings occupied last winter are left standing, used pretty much for the same purposes as them.[sic] Near these a long wooden shed has been erected, capable of accommodating several hundred persons, and benches provided for the convenience of the fair sex… Several acres more have been added to the enclosure, which is fenced in with a board fence six or seven feet in height. On the southeast corner a large and commodious club house has been erected, containing accommodations for three clubs. The field is now almost a perfect level, covering at least some six acres of ground, all of which is well drained, rolled, and in a few weeks will be in splendid condition… Several flagstaffs have been put up, from which floated the banners of the clubs o’er shadowed by the nations’ ensign.
In case you missed it, the Chicago Cubs obliterated the St. Louis Cardinals a couple nights ago. I didn’t watch the entirety of the game, but I did check in on it periodically on the restaurant’s television, where we indulged in tacos the other night. Seeing the score go from 4-0 to 7-2 to 9-2 was a fairly surprising–and amusing–sight. This morning, I found even more amusement upon the discover of this short poem by Stuart Shea on Bardball.com.
~
Even Cubbie achievements
Can cause Cubbie blues.
They scored 17 runs–
Did they win or lose?
On May 13, 1952, pitcher Ron Necciai of the Class D Appalachian League’s Bristol Twins struck out 27 batters, becoming the only pitcher to do so in a nine-inning, professional league game. Four of the opposing Welch Miners hitters did reach base, via a walk, an error, a hit batsman, and a passed ball error on catcher Harry Dunlop. More astonishing, the nineteen-year-old Necciai pitched the game in spite of painful stomach ulcers, and the Twins won the game 7-0.
One wouldn’t think that the Yankees version of this song would require a scavenger hunt to find, but until today, it had hidden itself among the mix of elusive “Talkin’ Baseball” versions. But no more! Love ’em or hate ’em, this series would be wholly incomplete without the team from the Bronx.
For all “Talkin’ Baseball” videos in the collection, click here.
Because physical action is stressed in all spectator sports, some potential fans may be bored by the prospect of watching bodies run around on a playing surface. But in truth, sports – like all human endeavors – have both a mental and physical component, and the spectator who doesn’t understand what’s going on in the players’ heads is missing the point of the game. This is nowhere truer than in baseball, where the brute physical action in a three-hour game probably totals less than thirty minutes, but where the intervening time is solidly packed with intrigue, as the strategy changes from pitch to pitch.
~Thomas A. Bowden
Orioles first baseman Jim Gentile hit two grand slams in a game against the Twins on May 9, 1961, becoming only the fourth player in Major League history to do so. While he wasn’t the first to accomplish the feat, he was the first to do so in consecutive at-bats. The Orioles won the game 13-5.
On the recommendation of–well–several sources, I finally sat down and read Ball Four. Written by former Major League pitcher Jim Bouton, Ball Four shook the sports world upon its publication in 1970. Not only did it expose the not-so-admirable underbelly of the world of Major League Baseball, it revealed to fans of the game that professional ballplayers are far from perfect or superhuman.
Written in a diary format, the book details Bouton’s thoughts and observations as he journeyed through the 1969 season. And he doesn’t hold back. Through Bouton’s eyes, we discover the licentious nature of many ballplayers, the contrived nature of integration between black and white players at the time, the less-than-amiable relationships between players and managers, and the fickleness of a club’s attitudes on player performance. We learn about the anxiety players feel over the possibility of being traded, sent to the minors, or released. We also get to peer into a world of drug use, heavy drinking (particularly embodied by Bouton’s depiction of Mickey Mantle), and the condescending treatment of players by owners before the time of free agency.
In exploring the baseball world through his eyes, we learn a lot about Bouton himself as well. He discusses his mentality as a pitcher, particularly as a knuckleball pitcher, and his own personal takes on a variety of people and situations. Furthermore, we learn about Bouton’s personal life: about his marriage, his children, and his concerns about life after baseball.
All in all, I can see how this book created waves throughout the world of sports, and particularly in baseball. Up to this point, the idea of baseball as a “gentleman’s game” had been largely maintained, even in spite of events such as the Black Sox scandal in 1919. Mickey Mantle’s drinking had never received exposure in the press prior to Ball Four’s publication, and team management had always managed to protect its reputation as taking care of its players. Not only did Bouton expose the truth behind such things, he changed the rules regarding what a writer could and could not write about the game. Suddenly, virtually everything became fair game to a sports writer.
I must confess, at various points, while reading the book, I found myself thinking, “Okay, I get the point. How many more pages do I have?” It only takes a few chapters to get a “feel” for the book and the types of things that made it shocking. In retrospect, it’s easy for me, more than forty years later, to have this attitude about a book that really seems quite tame by today’s standards. Had I read it in the early 1970s, however, I have no doubt that my perception would have been drastically different. Like most fans who read it in the 1970s, I would have held onto every word, amazed by the secrets revealed in the book’s pages. One might even argue that Ball Four’s very existence made it possible for me to experience this kind of insensitivity to its more radical contents in the first place. In that sense, even today, we continue to experience the impact of this narrative on our views of the game.
The first game of what would become baseball’s fiercest rivalry took place on May 7, 1903 at Huntington Avenue Grounds in Boston. The Pilgrims won 6-2 over the Highlanders, as Hobe Ferris belted a home run and Chick Stahl hit two triples. Meanwhile, Highlanders pitcher Snake Wiltse gave up thirteen hits in the loss. Today, these two teams are known as the Boston Red Sox (the Pilgrims) and the New York Yankees (the Highlanders).
