For the first time in history, on May 13, 1929, a major league game featured both teams wearing numbers on the backs of their jerseys. The Indians played host to the Yankees at League Park in Cleveland, winning by a score of 4-3. The digits would become a permanent fixture on each club’s ensemble.
While this is far from a comprehensive collection of “lost” teams in baseball history, this short clip provides an interesting look at the St. Louis Browns, Boston Braves, and Philadelphia Athletics. Being the number two team in your own city is never an easy position to overcome.
If I didn’t make it in baseball, I won’t have made it workin’. I didn’t like to work.
~Yogi Berra
On May 9, 1888, while pitching against the Kansas City Cowboys, Elton “Icebox” Chamberlain of the Louisville Colonels pitched right-handed for the first seven innings of the game and left-handed for the last two innings. Louisville won the game by a score of 18–6, and the performance made Chamberlain the third major league pitcher to throw with both his left and right hands during the same game. The feat would not be repeated in the major leagues until Greg Harris switched arms for the ninth inning of a game in 1995.
The newspaper story covering the game was printed the next day in The Courier-Journal:
This piece by Carl Sandburg oozes with imagery, and I love it. Sandburg captures a moment in time in his description of the end of this long ballgame, called due to the impending sunset. He originally published this poem in his 1918 collection Cornhuskers.
*
I remember the Chillicothe ball players grappling the Rock Island
ball players in a sixteen-inning game ended by darkness.
And the shoulders of the Chillicothe players were a red smoke
against the sundown and the shoulders of the Rock Island
players were a yellow smoke against the sundown.
And the umpire’s voice was hoarse calling balls and strikes and outs
and the umpire’s throat fought in the dust for a song.
This video came up on my YouTube suggestions (surprised? nah…). If you’ve ever wondered what happened to the kids who played the in the movie The Sandlot, here’s a tiny glimpse at a few of their careers following the film.
There’s nothing cooler than a baseball glove. You put one on and all of a sudden it’s like you’re a wizard. People might be showering you with rockets or pelting you with eggs, but it doesn’t matter, because everything goes quiet inside the glove. Maybe a bat looks like a magic wand, but a glove feels like one.
~Jim Naughton, My Brother Stealing Second
Watching a Curious George clip takes me waaaay back into my childhood. Watching this as an adult viewer, I can’t help but notice that George is a bit of a ball hog and they certainly took some liberties with the rules about pinch running. But I would not have noticed these types of things as an eager six-year-old. And the Cubby Bears vs. the Tiger Babies make for some awfully cute team names.
