A Game of Inches: Who Cares Who Was First?
One of the questions you ask yourself a lot while compiling a nine-hundred-page
book of baseball firsts is: who really cares who was first? I tried to
address why I think it matters in the book’s
preface, but what really convinced me of the importance of the topic was how
many major figures felt the need to comment on it. And it was not just
that they
voiced their opinions, but that they did so with evident passion, often getting
very upset with anyone
who dared to disagree with them. Some of the arguments were compelling,
while others were silly and illogical, but all of them showed that the
underlying issue mattered deeply to them. And that in turn convinced me
that the book was a worthwhile project (even when it seemed to be consuming my
whole life).I included seven of my favorite comments on the issue as
epigraphs to the preface and the introduction of the book, but there were many
more that I wasn’t
able to include. What I find especially fascinating about them is how many
of these men were adamant that their own generation abounded in innovators, while other
generations lacked original thinkers. Here is a sample:
“Many plays
… have been ‘discovered’ about once a decade, and then neglected, if not
forgotten, until some other genius brought them into action. In the pioneer
days of the game, it seemed that if a player invented or evolved a play, the
others, instead of seizing upon it to use, gave him a kind of patent-right to it
… [Mike] Kelly, Tom McCarthy, [Fred] Pfeffer and others made plays their own
team mates did not comprehend, so if a play is called a ‘new’ play it is in the
sense that it probably has been rediscovered.” John J. Evers and Hugh S.
Fullerton’s Touching Second: The Science of Baseball (1910)
“Nothing new in the game this season up to date.
With an array of players from Maine to California scheming to work out winning
combinations and new moves to gain a point, I have not heard of a new trick,
with the campaign half over … I doubt very much if the players think about new
plays as much as they did a few years ago. I well remember how Charley Radbourn
while here in 1889 would go out and practice to make the ball bound over the
plate. After he got control so that he was able to try his scheme in a game the
umpires refused to allow the play, forcing him to send the ball over the plate
before touching the ground. Mike Kelley [sic] would sit for hours and talk over
schemes, often to find the umpires opposed to his ideas. It’s now a case of
copy the good things as far as they will work.” Tim Murnane, Washington Post,
July 24, 1904
“Correspondents with teams in the South running
short of guff, seem to have taken up the new play idea with unusual vigor. So
many new ruses apparently have been unearthed ‘that the sport will be changed
this summer.’ It’s like a new blow in pugilism, however. When the battle is on
the authors of something new forget their discoveries, and hand up the same old
thing.” A. R. Cratty, Sporting Life, April 21, 1906
“Some baseball curmudgeons insist that there is
nothing new under the sun and that the split-finger is just a fork ball with a
fancy name. Do not try to tell that to hitters.” George F. Will, Men At Work,
109
“It is unfortunate for the present-day brainy
captains and managers of the game that the men of twenty years ago – the
Comiskeys, Wards, Mike Kelleys [sic], Ewings and others – exhausted all the
ideas that any brain could invent in the strategy of base ball - and left to the
present-day captains nothing to discover, and they follow in the beaten paths of
the leaders in the game that have gone before them. Some of those present-day
managers who think they pull off something novel that they consider the creation
of their own, stumble on an old idea, rusty from disuse,” Ted Sullivan,
Sporting News, February 11, 1908
“There may be some doubt as to who discovered the
North Pole, but none whatsoever as to the boy who discovered and first brought
into practical use the curving of a base ball … ‘Did Shakespeare write Hamlet?’
‘Did Edison invent the kinetiscope?’ They surely did. Well, just as certain
did Arthur Cummings not only discover but was the first to make use of curved
pitching,” Tim Murnane, Sporting News, November 4, 1909
“ ‘Base ball is faster and more scientific for the
same reason that the other professions are. You might just as well ask why have
the newspapers improved? Why have railroads improved? Why have the telegraph
and telephone improved? And so on.’ Simply through the brain of the ball
players of the past. The men who have engineered these improvements were the
ball players of years ago. How many ball players of today are making
improvements not in newspapers, railroads, telegraph or telephones, but in the
game they are interested in? There is nothing new in the game today that was
not known 20, 30 or 40 years ago. One of the most ancient of chestnuts is being
worked with freedom these days, and that is, the ‘hide-the-ball’ trick.” William
M. Rankin, Sporting News, August 26, 1909
“The first few times that he tried [the
intentional walk] in Cleveland the bleachers jeered. It was a new move to
them. It will be found that the bleachers usually are quick to jeer anything
out of the ordinary in baseball.” Sporting News, December 2, 1920
“The only absolutely modern play is the
‘sacrifice,’ and considering how much that has done to kill base running,
diminish individual effort, and curtail the use of better though more risky
plays to accomplish the same purpose, the present generation is hardly to be
congratulated upon or commended for its one original contribution to the game.”
Sporting Life, July 8, 1905, likely by Francis Richter
“I cannot recall a single player who in the last
ten years has introduced anything new in the line of playing or has offered any
new suggestion that would really improve the game from a playing or a rule
making standpoint … There is not one trick in the game today that was not pulled
off twenty-five years ago. They bunted then; they used the hit and run; they
stole more bases and had better catchers. I will admit that the new school has
brought the squeeze play into the game. I will also admit that it is the
rottenest play in base ball when it fails. Furthermore it is an admission from
the player who makes it on his own accord that he cannot hit and when the
manager asks for it he shows that he has lost confidence in the hitting of the
player asked to squeeze.” Joe Cantillon, in the Minneapolis Journal,
reprinted in Sporting News, May 28, 1914
“When was an absolutely ‘new play’ brought out?
So many seasons have passed that the time has been forgotten.” W. A. Calhoun,
Sporting Life, December 15, 1900
“In [the] ranks [of championship teams] usually is
found some fighting, aggressive player who, refusing to stop at the set rules,
thinks out and tries out new plays or new ways of making plays, tests his
theories and keeps all the others stirred up. It is these men who discover the
new plays.” John J. Evers and Hugh S. Fullerton’s Touching Second: The
Science of Baseball (1910), 197 |
