“Cap” Anson’s Age, by Richard L. Cary, Jr. (Hyder Ali)
This piece was written by one Richard Leander Cary, Jr., a well-known Chicago sportswriter who wrote principally about horse racing. Cary chose to scribble his musings under the name of an Indian warrior and long-ago Sultan of Mysore, Hyder Ali. And though Cary wasn’t usually much of a baseball writer, Cap Anson apparently caught his eye, and the piece below was published May 1, 1897, in Anson’s twenty-seventh major league season.
It is said that Anson responded to this poem (or, perhaps, to some other complaint about his age) by appearing in a game wearing a gray wig and a waist-long beard. It is also said that he knocked in the winning run of that contest.
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How old is Anson? Ask the stars
That glisten in the hair of Night
When day has drawn her golden bars
To shut the sunbeams from our sight;
The stars were present at his birth —
Were first to welcome him to earth.
How old is Anson? Ask the sun.
That’s seen him play a million times
Where silver rivers laughing run;
And in the tropics’ swelting climes
The sphinx has seen him play baseball
And heard him kick — but that is all.
How old is Anson? Rumor states
He played the game in Paradise,
Where Adam owned his vast estates —
But then such rumors “cut no ice,”
For rumors are but dying lies
That drift about beneath the skies.
How old is Anson? When the ark
First found once more a resting place
Old Noah, groping in the dark,
Discovered Anson on first base —
The grand old man had held it down
In spite of floods that came to drown.
How old is Anson? No one knows!
I saw him playing when a kid,
When I was wearing still short clothes,
And so my father’s father did;
The oldest veterans of them all,
As kids, saw Anson play ball.
