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My Other Research Interests
TELLING THE STORIES OF UNSUNG FIGURES
I'll bet you didn't know that in 1894 the National League hired the world record
holder in the 100 yard dash as an umpire! There was only one umpire in those
days, so this industrious man would start off behind the plate to call balls and strike and
whenever a ball was put in play he would beat the batter to first base to call
him safe or out. Imagine how demoralizing that must have been for the poor
batter, especially if he was called out! If the play was a bang-bang one,
this amazing umpire might even slide in
ahead of the batter to be sure
to get the call right. Click
here
for the amazing story.
Imagine if the Red Sox were short-handed and asked actor Ben Affleck to come
out of the stands and fill in in left field during an actual major league game
in the middle of a pennant race.
Of course the opposing team would take every possible chance to run on his arm,
but imagine if Affleck then threw out two base-runners. Couldn't possibly
happen, right? Actually it did -- click
here
to read my account of Harry Corson Clarke.
Did you know that a National League club signed Hawaiian Barney Joy in
1907, but that his signing ignited a firestorm of controversy about baseball's
unofficial but very real color barrier and
Joy decided to stay in Hawaii?
Here
is that story.
As you can tell, I love trying to tell the stories of forgotten figures in baseball history.
Some of them were heroic, some merely quirky, while still others were ordinary people
who found themselves in an extraordinary situation. But each of them
fascinated me for one reason or another and convinced me that their stories were
unsung. Fortunately for them, I didn't try to pay musical tribute to them,
but instead wrote profiles of three dozen of them as part of the
BioProject of the Society for
American Baseball Research. There's
William
Gray, for example, who invented the first standard chest protector -- and
the pay telephone! And
Hank
Grampp, the first man to work exclusively as a batting practice pitcher.
And
Mary Shane, the first woman to broadcast major league games. And
Eddie
Bennett, crippled in infancy and then orphaned, but whose fame as the
Yankees batboy during Babe Ruth's heyday became so great that Warren Buffett cited Bennett as
his "managerial model." Then there's the
man who
was hired as a major league manager in midseason because his future
brother-in-law was the owner and blithely told the press that he planned to
study baseball when the season ended, and the
first
pitcher to turn his back to the batter during his windup, and the
man who
was warming up for his major league debut
when he got hit in the face with a ball and left to get stitches after half
an inning of what would prove to be his only professional game, the
Civil
War veteran who made his major league debut in 1888, the
African-American who sued to try to get the chance to pitch in the
segregated Cotton States League in 1953, and so on. These stories sound
too incredible to be true but all of them really happened. I felt
privileged to have the chance to tell their stories and done my best to do justice to
do so faithfully. If you want to read more biographies like them, use the links on the right side of
any of the pieces to get to any of the others profiles I've written.
"MISSING" BALLPLAYERS
One of the projects that fascinates me is trying to find "missing" major
league ballplayers. We don't actually send out search parties to look for
them, since most of the "missing" players played in the nineteenth or early
twentieth century and can safely be assumed to have been dead for many decades
at least. But what I and other interested members of the Society for
American Baseball Research try to do is to determine what happened to any major
leaguer whose date and place of death is unknown. It's an odd pursuit to
be sure, but the search can be fascinating. One of my books,
Level Playing Fields, came directly
out of one such hunt, as did many of the biographies described above and
the discovery of William Edward White described below. When I became involved in the project in
the early 1990s, we had over 500 "missing" players and we've now whittled it
down to less than 300. We'll never find all of them, but we're never going
to stop trying either. To learn more about the research we're doing on
missing ballplayers, click here.
WILLIAM EDWARD WHITE
One of the "missing" ballplayers I worked on was a seemingly nondescript man
named William Edward White, who played one game in the National League in 1879.
Imagine our amazement then when it became clear that White was in fact the first
African-American to play major league baseball. I traveled down to Georgia
to do more research on him and the story was revealed in a front page Wall
Street Journal article written by Stefan Fatsis, which in turn was picked up by the wire services and
led to prominent coverage in Sports Illustrated and many other media
outlets. Regrettably, White's final resting place is still unknown,
although I traveled to Springfield, Illinois, and checked the death certificates
of every William White who died in Illinois between 1917 and 1940. At some
point, I'll probably write an article on White's life but I still don't know an
awful lot more about him than was the case when the Wall Street Journal
article appeared.
BASEBALL TERMINOLOGY
Given my love of words and of baseball history, baseball's rich language is a
natural subject for me to delve into. I've submitted many entries for the
forthcoming third edition of Dickson's Baseball Dictionary, which will be
published in the spring of 2009. I've also published articles on such baseball terms as "Charley horse," "bunt," "Yannigan,"
"second guesser," and many others. At the 2003 SABR convention, I gave a
talk that questioned the theory that fan was a shortened version of fanatic.
You can read a summary of that talk
here, but please
note that it's a bit rough because those were my notes for the talk rather than
a finished article.
HOW I DO RESEARCH
Almost all of my research used to be done at libraries and archives, by
scrolling through microfilm. Now a significant proportion of it can be
done over the internet, but I still spend a good deal of time in libraries and
archives. Please click here if you want
to learn more.
OTHER PUBLISHED WORKS
I've published many articles on a variety of subjects (well, okay, almost all
on baseball). Click
here for a
list.
INQUISITIVE FANS
Click here to read samples of the
often bizarre questions that early twentieth-century fans asked of sportswriters.
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