On August 31, 1935, 28-year-old rookie Vern Kennedy became the sixth rookie in major league history to throw a no-hitter. The White Sox pitcher dominated the Indians en route to a 5-0 victory at Comiskey Park. Helping his own cause, Kennedy also managed to stroke a three-run triple in the contest.
This is pretty incredible. Julien Neel created essentially a one-man barbershop quartet, performing all four voices of the quartet with the help of some basic recording equipment. Here he performs an impressive rendition of “Take Me Out to the Ballgame.”
Because Monday mornings are rough, and I’m due to post a few more of these. Enjoy!
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Manager: Our new infielder cost $10 million. I call him our “Wonder Player.”
Fan: Why’s that?
Manager: Every time he plays, I wonder why I bothered to get him.
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According to the Chicago Tribune, the following statistic was given in the press notes for the June 7 Chicago-Oakland game:
The Oakland Athletics are 32-0 in games in which they have scored more runs than their opponents.
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Dentist: Would you help me out? I’d like you to give a few of your loudest screams.
Patient: Why, Doc? It isn’t all that bad this time.
Dentist: Well, there are about twenty people in the waiting room right now, and I don’t want to miss the five o’clock Braves game on Channel Four.
Baseball is something more than a game to an American boy; it is his training field for life work. Destroy his faith in its squareness and honesty and you have destroyed something more; you have planted suspicion of all things in his heart.
~Kenesaw Mountain Landis
The Huffington Post published this interview with Tim Kurkjian a couple days ago, which I found an interesting read. The interview was initiated as a result of the publication of his latest book, I’m Fascinated By Sacrifice Flies – Inside The Game We All Love. I’ve not read the book, nor do I have cable television to watch ESPN, so I’m 
afraid I can’t speak to Kurkjian himself nor my impressions of him. But I did enjoy reading this interview.
He discusses the skill level involved in baseball as compared to other sports and the declining popularity of Major League Baseball as compared to the NFL or NASCAR. I particularly love how he advocates against parents and coaches pushing their kids to specialize in a single sport, bemoaning the decline of three-sport letter winners in high schools. He points out that “when we have 14 year old kids having Tommy John surgery, then something is really wrong with this picture.” I often think the same kind of thing when the Little League World Series comes on, wondering about the futures these kids have given the stress they put themselves through so young.
Most of all, I just love the fact that Kurkjian’s love for baseball shows through so clearly in this interview. People who have a passion for this game — as many of you reading this have — absolutely fascinate me. And I enjoy reading and hearing about the reasons people love it so much.
This is fun: a baseball cartoon, presumably from the 1930s. I can’t speak to the validity of the posted time period, but it certainly looks like an old bit of animation, for sure.
On August 22, 1917, Pirates’ outfielder Carson Bigbee set a major league record with eleven at-bats in a single game as the Pirates and Dodgers squared off for twenty-two innings. It is a record that has since been tied by thirteen others, but never broken.
What we have are good gray ballplayers, playing a good gray game and reading the good gray Wall Street Journal. They have been brainwashed, dry-cleaned and dehydrated!… Wake up the echoes at the Hall of Fame and you will find that baseball’s immortals were a rowdy and raucous group of men who would climb down off their plaques and go rampaging through Cooperstown, taking spoils…. Deplore it if you will, but Grover Cleveland Alexander drunk was a better pitcher than Grover Cleveland Alexander sober.
~Bill Veeck
This piece, published in 1988, reminds me of playing ball in the backyard with my brothers growing up. We didn’t have “real” baseball equipment for the longest time, so we improvised. A pitchfork handle would’ve been too big, but we broke the handle off a toy vacuum, and that worked well with a tennis ball.
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At the wall
we play suburban stickball,
bat with a pitchfork handle
my grandfather
cut from his garden.
We pitch
tennis balls
light
as crisp apples.
Strips of electrical
tape
mark the strike zone
against
red school brick.
Rob throws strikes.
I swing hard
and miss. Robbie is so much better than me.
But today
the sky is blue,
summer is in our bones,
and so many things don’t count yet.
Rickwood Field opened on August 18, 1910 in Birmingham, Alabama. It was the first concrete-and-steel ballpark in the minor leagues and would go on to become the oldest surviving professional baseball park in the country.
