Tag Archives: Baseball

In Honor of Jackie Robinson

Today is baseball legend Jackie Robinson’s birthday, and being the serious fans we are about the sport (and by “we” I mean Vic – just check out the amazing amount of baseball related items we have in stock), we thought to bring some attention to this amazing athlete and activist and take a look at what he brought to the game… so to speak! Here are ten personal facts you might not have known about this amazing man.

1. Jackie Robinson was born in 1919 in relative poverty in Cairo, Georgia. He was the youngest of five children, and, his father leaving his mother just a year after he was born, he ended up being raised by a single mother… no small feat, especially at that time.

2. Jackie Robinson’s middle name is Roosevelt! The former president Theodore Roosevelt died just 25 days before his birth, and his middle name is how his parents honored the distinguished politician.

3. Robinson and his family moved to Pasadena, California early in his childhood, and it is while at school in Pasadena that his athletic abilities were first noted… mainly by his family! Robinson’s older brothers convinced him to take sports seriously, seeing his skills were unparalleled.

4. Jackie’s older brother Matthew, or “Mack” was himself an Olympic medalist! In the 1936 Summer Olympics Mack won the silver medal in track and field. He broke the 200 meter world record but so did gold medalist Jessie Owens. Mack was one of the brothers mentioned above that convinced Jackie to take athletics seriously.

5. While attending John Muir High School, Robinson played five sports and lettered in four: football, basketball, baseball and track. He also played on the tennis team!

6. In 1939 Robinson enrolled in UCLA after a couple years at Pasadena Junior College. During his time at UCLA, Robinson became the first student to win varsity letters in four sports – the same he’d been playing for so many years. Clearly even into his twenties Robinson was still excelling at every athletic activity he tried his hand at.

7. During his years at PJC and UCLA, Robinson created a stir a couple times when standing up for himself and others in the face of racism. While an acting second lieutenant in 1943 having been drafted after the outbreak of WWII, stationed in Fort Hood, Texas and a member of the 761st “Black Panthers” Tank Battalion, Robinson was taken into custody after refusing to move to the back of an army bus when traveling around the base. The absurd and highly racist legal proceedings following this incident kept Robinson from being deployed overseas with his battalion, and definitely played a major role in his interest in civil rights activism for the rest of his life.

8. In early 1945, Robinson was offered $400 a month to play major league baseball on the Kansas City Monarchs team. Though he was a fine player, Robinson was disheartened by the level of disorganization involved in the negro leagues of baseball. He was signed shortly thereafter to Brooklyn’s international league’s farm team – the Montreal Royals. Robinson suffered an unbelievable amount of comments and attacks in his rise in the leagues – more than most as he attempted to do what African Americans had not yet been afforded the opportunity to do. He played so well with the Royals that in 1946 he was drafted to the Brooklyn Dodgers… and in 1947 he became the first black athlete to play Major League baseball in the 20th century.

9. Just a few short years later, Robinson was chosen as the National League MVP in 1949. A year later, Robinson starred in a biographical film of his life, titled The Jackie Robinson Story! This film focuses on the abuse and hurdles Robinson faced, and depicts the baseball star with a calmness that other Hollywood stars might have killed for!

Jackie Robinson draws his family close to help him blow out a birthday candle in 1954. Jackie and his wife Rachel had 3 children and he was definitely a family man!

10. In 1955, Robinson helped lead his team, the Brooklyn Dodgers, to their World Series win. He had been with the team for a decade, and this win was his ultimate feat. The following year the Dodgers also won the National League pennant. In December 1956 Robinson was traded to the New York Giants, but he never played a game for the team. Robinson retired from the game in January of 1957. In 1962, Robinson became the first African American to be inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame.

We chose not to include Robinson’s baseball stats and figures… as those are easily found online and also because what we wanted to bring attention to was not only his talent on the field, but his amazing life. Robinson overcame more difficult situations and hurdles than you or I could ever imagine – and for that, and for his inexhaustible efforts as a civil rights activist, we thank him and honor him on his birthday. Happy Birthday, Jackie Robinson!

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L Frank Baum and the Hub City Nine

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L Frank Baum is best remembered as the author of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (1900), but writing was certainly not his first occupation. Baum was, like many men of his generation, a jack of all trades and a master of none; he’d pursued a number of careers–all with little success. He went to Aberdeen, South Dakota looking for a fresh start…only to find himself running a new baseball club, the Hub City Nine.

A Nascent Metropolis

When Baum arrived in Aberdeen in 1888, the town was rapidly growing, and it wasn’t much like the stereotypical frontier town. Founded in 1881, Aberdeen was populated not with farmers and cowboys, but with college educated citizens who’d come West for cheap land. They arrived by train and immediately set about reestablishing life as they’d known it back East. Aberdeen’s citizens went to local events in full dinner dress. They enjoyed champagne and other delicacies. By 1885, assessment reports show that there were 135 pianos for a town of 2,500 people. Electric lights were available the following year.

Baum and his family moved to Aberdeen because Baum’s wife, Maud desperately missed her family. Her brother, TC Gage, had already settled in Aberdeen, and her sisters lived relatively close by. Baum had read reports of the town’s burgeoning prosperity in the June 2, 1888 edition of the Aberdeen Daily News. Overly impressed, he wrote to his brother-in-law, “In your country, there is an opportunity to be somebody, to take a good position, and opportunities are constantly arising where an intelligent man may profit.” He confided that he planned to open a novelty store, “not a 5¢ store, but a Bazaar on the same style as the ‘Fair’ in Chicago…and keeping a line of goods especially saleable in that locality.”

Baum’s Bazaar

Baum opened up Baum’s Bazaar on October 1, 1888. Over 1,000 people attended the grand opening. He’d stocked up on all kinds of luxury goods, from amateur photography equipment to sporting goods. There was no shortage of interest in his wares: the Christmas crowd numbered over 1,200. On December 3, 1888, the Aberdeen Daily News reported, “Baum’s Bazaar is an [Aladdin’s] chamber of wonders and beauty.”

Aberdeen Gets a Baseball Club

As far as Baum was concerned, Aberdeen lacked only one important thing: a baseball team. Though Baum had never been a great athlete, he’d undoubtedly played the sport casually and watched local club teams play in upstate New York. However he encountered the game, Baum was an enthusiastic “crank,” as baseball fans were then called. As soon as he settled into Aberdeen, he went about rallying support to start a club team.

From the June 14, 1889 edition of ‘Aberdeen Daily News’

Baum reasoned that the sport would be great for the community and for his business; he hoped to sell plenty of Spalding sporting equipment during the baseball season. Meanwhile, larger cities like Omaha, St. Paul, Minneapolis, Des Moines, and Sioux City already had baseball teams. Getting a baseball club could put Aberdeen on the map in a new way. The Aberdeen Daily News spoke positively, saying “Nothing creates enthusiasm like base ball, and nothing will draw a crowd so continuously as the national game closely contested and honorably played.”

Baum convinced a group of Aberdeen businessmen that the city needed a baseball club. Baum so impressed the men with his enthusiasm, they named him secretary of the club and appointed him to the constitution and by-laws committee. They named the club the Hub City Nine, a reference to Aberdeen’s nickname as the Hub City because seven rail lines converged there. The first 210 shares sold at at $10 each in three days, and the remaining 90 sold shortly thereafter. Baum also spearheaded an effort to sell advertising space on the baseball field’s back fence.

The group was so industrious and successful in their fundraising, it drew the attention of nearby communities. In the Fargo Daily Argus, baseball club manager Con. Walker complained, “The citizens of Aberdeen contributed $3,000 to their base ball team this season. The Fargo people have done nothing for the club in the last two years.” Walker entreated the town to support the home team if they wanted the club to continue and flourish.

A Promising Start

Even an “official” baseball size was new in 1889!

Baum and the other board members believed that organizing a league was critical to their success, so Baum headed up efforts to organize the South Dakota League. When the league was formalized on June 7, 1889, all the participating teams contributed $100. The Hub City Nine also strove to legitimize itself further by adopting the National League Rules. At the time, the rules of baseball had yet to be normalized, and the National League, Western Association, and American Association all had different rules. The National League, founded in 1876, was the oldest and most powerful of these organizations.

When it came time to recruit players, the Hub City Nine offered $50 per month, plus room and board. To sweeten the pot, club president Jewett offered a box of cigars to the first man to hit a ball over the center field fence. Baum threw in another box for the player who hit the first home run. And local grocers Thompson and Kearney promised $25 to anyone who hit a ball into the “Hit Me for $25” box on the fence where they advertised.

The National League forbade gambling or selling liquor on the premises, along with holding games on Sundays. The Hub City Nine took these rules a step further because they wanted the games to be family- and (more importantly) female-friendly. Profanity was prohibited. Both players and spectators were to treat the opposing team with the utmost respect, and “no unseemly or ungentlemanly conduct [was] allowed on the ball grounds.”

On May 29, 1889, the Hub City Nine players gathered for their first practice. The event was free to attend, and a healthy number of spectators showed up to observe the proceedings. The first game, a warm-up against Redfield, sold over 1,000 tickets. There was not enough room in the stands to hold them all! Baum later managed to get the St. Paul Indians to come to town for a game. The club raised admission to 50 cents, from 25, and though people grumbled, they still purchased tickets for the game. The Milwaukee railroad ran three extra trains to bring the fans into town. The game brought sorely needed funds back to the club.

A Baseball Feud

Indeed, the Hub City Nine games were so popular, “half as many people perched on the fence and on buildings and elevations surrounding as there were in the enclosure,” according to the Aberdeen Daily News. The paper called this a “detestable practice.” Lester J. Ives, in particular, drew the ire of the paper’s editors. Ives’ house was directly across the street from the baseball field, and he would sell rooftop seats for a dime each. Ives was vilified in the local paper: “The antics of this individual…have thoroughly disgusted the people without exception. He is evidently a baseball crank–but of the hog species–without shame or self-respect.”

These interloping spectators robbed the club of vital revenue. So the club installed latticework on top of the fence. Ives responded by outfitting his roof with higher chairs. Infuriated, team manager Henry Marple threatened to turn the stream of a railroad hose on the unauthorized spectators. Finally, the club had to hang canvas over the latticework.Yet Baum came to Ives’ defense. In an article for the newspaper, he argued that “Mr. Ives is not so black as he has been painted” and said that he didn’t deserve insult. Thanks to Baum’s conciliatory efforts, the conflict was resolved by July 25, 1889: Ives agreed to give the club jurisdiction over his property during baseball games.

Short-Lived Success

That inaugural season, the Hub City Nine were the unofficial champions of the Dakotas; they defeated every team in North Dakota and South Dakota. Unfortunately the players still struggled to work as a team, and fans failed to show up in sufficient numbers. Although some of the Ives fans came and bought full-price tickets, the Hub City Nine games didn’t draw enough fans to keep their coffers full. The first season, the club lost about $1,000. Baum was perhaps most disappointed with the season’s outcome; he’d been convinced that Aberdeen could easily support a baseball club. Dejected, he said, “If we are to have a baseball team next year, I am of the opinion that someone else will have to do the work.”

Baum’s Bazaar suffered the same fate. After scarcely a year in business, Baum suffered the “temporary embarrassment” of handing his business over to his creditors. He purchased a newspaper and renamed it the Saturday Pioneer. While the citizens of Aberdeen enjoyed Baum’s writing, the newspaper also folded after only a year. Baum could not handle the stress of being a business owner, and his health suffered. He took a job in Chicago working for a newspaper. The move would set in motion a series of events that resulted in one of the most iconic and beloved stories of the twentieth century, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz.

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Rare Books about Baseball Are a Home Run!

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The first book devoted exclusively to the sport of baseball was The Base Ball Player’s Pocket Companion, published in Boston in 1859. Since then America’s love of baseball has continued to grow, establishing the sport as America’s pastime. Now baseball is also the most popular subject among collectors of rare books in sports. Because of the breadth of baseball literature, most collectors of rare baseball books narrow their focus to a specific aspect of the literature or sport.

Early History

The game of baseball has evolved considerably since its beginnings. Consider, for instance, that there were originally two sets of rules for baseball: one from Boston, and the other from New York. Thus books from baseball’s early history are often quite fascinating, detailing a sport that varies widely from the one we know today.

Beadle’s Dime Base-Ball Player

Spalding’s Base Ball Guide

Hidden Histories

The All-American Girls Professional Baseball League began during World War II and operated from 1943 to 1954. The history of this league and its players don’t receive much attention today, but the league was quite popular at the time. Meanwhile, both the Negro Leagues and African-American players were frequently overlooked; few books exist about either before the 1970’s. One notable exception is Sol White’s Official Base Ball Guide (1907), sometimes called the “holy grail” of baseball book collecting because it’s so scarce. It’s both challenging and engaging to build a collection around these hidden histories in baseball.

“Get that Nigger off the Field!”

Voices from the Great Black Baseball Leagues

Regional Leagues

As baseball’s popularity spread, smaller leagues began popping up all around the country. Although these leagues may not have boasted star players, they offered one means of local entertainment. Teams were sometimes formed around occupation or work location, as illustrated by the photograph of the New Almaden Quicksilver Mine Baseball Team.

New Almaden Quicksilver Mine Baseball Team

Official Baseball Program-Pacific Coast League, 1934 Season

Middle Atlantic League 25th Anniversary Souvenir Boo

Biographies and Autobiographies

In the early days, baseball players were frequently illiterate. Their autobiographies were therefore frequently ghostwritten. Both autobiographies and biographies were also “cleaned up”; they tended to be much more inaccurate than modern biographies, sanitizing the players’ lives to make them more acceptable to middle-class readers.

Mickey Mantle of the Yankees

Baseball Fiction

Likely the first novel primarily devoted to baseball was Noel Brooks’ Our Base Ball Club (1884). The genre has grown considerably. It includes dime novels, comic books, and modern first editions. Some collectors focus on a particular series, while others explore the limits of baseball fiction and collect a wider variety of examples.

The Big League

Double Curve Dan the Pitcher Detective

The Pick-Up Nine

How-To Guides

With the establishment of official rules and leagues, the art of playing baseball became much more standardized. That certainly didn’t mean that opinions never differed on the right form and approach for skills like pitching, batting, and fielding.

Spalding’s Baseball for Beginners

The Science of Baseball

Individual Teams

If you love to “root for the home team,” it makes sense to build your baseball collection around them. You’ll likely find a wealth of programs, statistics, and score cards. Some items, such as the New York Giants’ Press Radio TV from 1956, include a list of players, schedules, and statistics. A collection built around a single baseball team also encompasses biographies and memoirs from team players.

Press Radio 1956-Giants

New York Giants 1954 Training Season

Bibliographies

Regardless of your area of expertise, it’s important to learn all you can about the rare books of baseball, and about your specialization. And that means one thing: getting the right bibliography! A terrific place to start is David Block’s Baseball Before We Knew It: A Search for the Roots of the Game (1995). In addition to offering a great print history of the game, it also has a bibliography of pre-1850 books that treat baseball in some way. For baseball fiction, you’ll want Andy McCue’s Baseball by the Books (1991). And a more general bibliography is Myron Smith’s Baseball: A Comprehensive Bibliography (1986). Smith has since published supplements to include later material.

The Rare Books of Baseball

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This weekend kicks of the beginning of the 2013 Major League Baseball season. While the precise origins of the game remain dubious, the sport has gained a sure place as the most popular sport of focus among rare book collectors.

A Legendary Rivalry

Henry Chadwick (1824-1908) was a British-born journalist. A true baseball enthusiast, Chadwick launched one of the first newspaper columns devoted to baseball. He was also among the first to record baseball statistics as a means to evaluate individual players’ performance. In 1903, Chadwick wrote an article suggesting that baseball was a form of an English game called rounders. The game had similar rules and equipment, so the guess seemed plausible enough.

Enter Albert Spalding (1850-1915). A great pitcher from the 1870’s, Spalding was one of baseball’s greatest advocates. He owned the Chicago White Stockings and the National League of Professional Ball Clubs. In 1911, Spalding launched a massive campaign to make baseball the national pastime. He believed that baseball was a quintessentially American game–and was invented by Americans. Thus he vociferously disagreed with Chadwick’s assertion that baseball had British origins.

To settle the disagreement, Spalding appointed a committee whose mission was to uncover the origins of baseball. He selected Abraham Mills as the chairman. Mills was the National League’s president from 1882 to 1884. The task force, nicknamed the “Mills Commission,” ruled on December 30, 1907 that Abner Doubleday had invented baseball. Immediately a myth was born.

The Doubleday Myth

The Mills Commission based their ruling almost entirely on the testimony of one man: 71-year-old Abner Graves, a mining engineer who lived in Denver, Colorado. Graves responded to a “call for people who had knowledge of the game,” placed in Akron, Ohio’s Beacon Journal by Spalding. Graves claimed that he’d seen Doubleday draw a diagram of a baseball field back in 1839, during a schoolboy’s game. Graves sent his account to the Beacon Journal, which printed it with the headline “Abner Doubleday Invented Baseball.”

US Army general and Civil War hero Abner Doubleday was spuriously credited with creating baseball thanks to the Mills Commission.

Meanwhile Doubleday himself never claimed that he invented the sport. A US Army general and Civil War hero, Doubleday never once mentioned baseball in his extensive diaries. By the time the Mills Commission declared Doubleday the inventor of baseball, he’d already passed away. But that didn’t stop the myth from taking on a life of its own. Soon, Doubleday was even credited with introducing baseball to Mexico during the Mexican-American War.

Flaws in the Doubleday Myth

Unfortunately the Mills committee overlooked some critical information. First, Graves wasn’t the most reliable witness. He’d been only five years old in 1839 when he supposedly saw Doubleday diagram the baseball field. But the greatest flaw in Graves’ account was that Doubleday was not even in Cooperstown, New York in 1839.

Clearly Doubleday hadn’t invented baseball, but who had? America longed for an answer. In 1953, Congress named Andrew Cartwright the inventor of baseball, definitively debunking the Doubleday myth. Cartwright, a volunteer firefighter, had been a founding member of the New York Knickerbockers (est September 23, 1845). He’d been instrumental in making baseball more of a gentlemen’s sport. But modern scholars of baseball have also dismissed Cartwright as baseball’s inventor.

The New York Knickerbockers were the first organized baseball team. In 1953, Congress declared founding member Andrew Cartwright the inventor of baseball.

Historian and antiquarian David Block is the leading scholar on the history of baseball. His 2005 book, Baseball before We Knew It: A Search for the Roots of the Game, outlines the earliest mentions and illustrations of baseball in literature. The first known appearance of “base-ball” in print occurred in the 1744 edition of A Little Pretty Pocket-Book. And the first-known rules of baseball were printed in Spiele zur Erholung (1796). The German book that summarizes the rules of a game called “Ball mit Freystaten (oder das englische Base-ball),” which translates as “ball with free station (or English base-ball). Block illustrates the similarities between baseball and trapper ball He also notes that the first written account of rounders in England was in The Boy’s Own Book (1828).

Thus, neither Chadwick nor Spalding (nor the 1953 American Congress) was correct about baseball’s origins. The game had already existed for nearly a century before Doubleday, Cartwright, or any of their relative contemporaries could have “invented” it.

Collecting Rare Baseball Books

Baseball is by far the most popular game among collectors who specialize in a sport. This is due, in large part, to the mysterious origins of the sport. But there are also plenty of niches for collectors to focus on, from baseball’s early history, to regional leagues or specific teams, to baseball fiction.

Henry Chadwick, the sports writer who had questioned baseball’s origins, played a significant role in nationalizing the rules of baseball. He wrote Beadle’s Dime Base-Ball Player most years, from 1860 to 1881. The guide included not only rules for the game itself, but also guidelines for establishing baseball clubs and game statistics from the previous year. These guides were ubiquitous at the time, helping to spread interest in the game and normalize rules. But Chadwick’s guides have become exceptionally scarce, and they’re prized among collectors who specialize in baseball.

One of the earlier references to “base-ball” as a children’s game comes from Juvenile Pastimes; Or Girls’ and Boys’ Book of Sports (1849). References to the sport at this time are particularly uncommon. One of the 17 woodcuts in this book depicts two boys playing “base-ball,” making it a relatively early pictorial depiction of the game.

Baseball fiction has long been favored among collectors. Earlier baseball fiction was often published in serial form, though novels soon gained steam. One especially collectible title is Freddy and the Baseball Team from Mars (1955) by Walter R Brooks. The Freddy series itself is beloved among many collectors of modern first editions, as well.

Ephemera also remains attractive, especially to collectors who focus on individual teams. One particularly interesting piece of ephemera comes in the form of a poem by Barry Gifford. An avid Cubs fan, Gifford published “The Giants Are Going to Win the Pennant” on a Madrugada broadside. He compares the poet Jack Spicer to Ted Williams, one of the greatest baseball players of all time, whose “hits are in/the record books/waiting to be broken.”

As Americans’ love of baseball remains strong and the game continues to evolve, collectors of rare baseball books will undoubtedly have plenty of opportunities to expand their collections.