The thread for historical baseball media

[abc006]

I had this idea for a thread, basically a place to exchange interesting historical baseball stuff - be it photos, articles, videos, stats, observations, questions, links to other sites, anything at all interesting. Hopefully we can put together a nice little collection of... stuff. The players, thinkings, customs, settings, garb, anything at all. I guess it would be pretty much everything pre-2000 give or take a few years, anything not in the decade or so. If people think this is a good idea at all, I'll try to keep some sort of table of contents in the front page. Think of it as kind of like the high-rez image thread just not only for photos as I said, and not necessarily only for high-rez stuff specifically. If that makes any sense. Ok, maybe that's a bad analogy, but hopefully you've got the gist of it.

Anyway, I don't know if this will take off or not, but might as well see what you guys think or whatever, or if you have something to contribute at all to jump start it.

[table of contents]

italics = photo, bold = written word, underline = video, blue = other. Numbers in parenthesis, e.g. (2), indicate the number of times a photo of that player occurs on that page.

[Players]

Avila, Roberto - pg 2

Carlton, Steve - pg 1

Clemens, Roger - pg 1

Cobb, Ty - 2

Dent, Bucky - pg 1

Dimaggio, Joe - pg 1

Eckersly, Dennis - pg 1

Feller, Bob - pg 1

Gherig, Lou - pg 2

Gibson, Kurt - pg 1 (2)

Johnson, Walter - pg 1

Mantle, Mickey - pg 1

Paige, Satchel - pg 1

Ruth, Babe - pg 1 (2)

Walker, Moses Fleetwood - pg 2

Yastrzemski, Carl - 1

[ballparks]

Ebbets Field - pg 1

Fenway Park - pg 1, 1

Shibe Park - pg 2

Silver Lake, Ohio ballparks - pg 1

Tiger Stadium - 2

Yankee Stadium - pg 1

[Teams]

Boston Redstockings of 1874 - pg 2

Brooklyn Superbas in 1908 - pg 2

New York Metropolitans - pg 2

Pittsburgh Crawfords of 1932 - pg 2

White Sox of 1919 - pg 1

Other

Klem, William J. (Umpire) - pg 2

(I'm going to list in order of players or parks or whatever, rather than pages, so eventually something might look like "Babe Ruth - pg 1, 2, 6, 11".)

[links]

http://mipakaco-photos.stores.yahoo.net/index.html

http://www.old-picture.com/ (Lots of great photos, not all of prominent players - just search for "baseball" or anything else at the bottom)

http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/collections/ro.../jrgmabout.html

http://www.sportsgalleryweb.com/baseballphoto1.htm (you can always crop the border off these)

http://www.digitalballparks.com/

http://www.bracephoto.com/online_gallery.html (Some great photos here if they didn't have watermarks.)

And, of course, for specific images: http://www.google.com/images

[abc006]

I'll start out with the random photo of the hour, just so it's separate from the first post.

The 1935 San Francisco Seals, with Joe DiMaggio in the lower right.

[superciuc]

Well, Y4L knows everything about baseball history, ask everything you want and he'll answer correctly.

[Darkslide820]

Babe Ruth and Walter Johnson at an exhibition game in Anaheim, 1924

[abc006]

Fenway Park in 1942

One of the greatest ballparks ever created, Ebbets Field

The 1919 "Black Sox"

Babe Ruth pitching with the Yankees on the last day of the season

A small independent ballpark in Silver Lake, Ohio - notice the roller coaster in the background

Mickey Mantle's stance and grip

Bob Feller, left, and Satchel Paige on the right

[Darkslide820]

When did the green monster come to be?

[chwalton213]

if anyone has HBO they have been showing a documentary on the dodgers and jackie robinson last feww weeks. it was pretty interesting.

[chwalton213]

The Green Monster (often known simply as The Monster or The Wall) is the nickname of the 37-foot, two-inch (11.3 m) left field wall at Fenway Park, home to the Boston Red Sox baseball team.

Part of the original ballpark construction of 1912, the wall is made of wood, but was covered in tin and concrete in 1934, and then hard plastic in 1976. A manual scoreboard is set into the wall. Despite the name, the Green Monster was not painted green until 1947; before that it was covered with advertisements.

Duffy's Cliff

Duffy Lewis was famous for his ability to handle the Fenway outfieldFrom 1912 to 1933, there was a 10-foot-high mound that formed an incline in front of the Green Monster, extending from the left-field foul pole to the center field flag pole. As a result of the mound, a left fielder in Fenway Park had to play the entire territory running uphill. Boston's first star left fielder, Duffy Lewis, mastered the skill so well that the area became known as Duffy's Cliff. In 1934, Red Sox owner Tom Yawkey arranged to flatten the ground in left field so that Duffy's Cliff no longer existed and became part of the lore of Fenway Park.

Green Monster seating

In 1936, the Red Sox installed a 23-foot net above the Monster in order to protect the storefronts on adjoining Lansdowne Street from home run balls. The net remained until the 2002-03 offseason, when the team's new ownership constructed a new seating section atop the wall to accommodate 274 fans. Wildly popular, these "Monster seats" were part of a larger expansion plan for Fenway Park seating. The Red Sox later added a smaller seating section in 2005, dubbed the "Nation's Nest," located between the main seating section and the center field scoreboard.

The ladder

Comprising yet another quirk, a ladder is attached to the Green Monster, extending from near the upper-left portion of the scoreboard, 13 feet above ground, to the top of the wall. Previously, members of the grounds crew would use the ladder to retrieve home run balls from the netting hung above the wall. After the net was removed for the addition of the Monster seats, the ladder ceased to have any real function, yet it still remains in place as a historical relic.

[abc006]

I uploaded some random videos of some famous moments in baseball to youtube, with links here:

Kurt Gibson's dramatic homer of Eckersly

Bucky Dent's 3-run homer in 1978

Roger Clemens strikes out his twentieth in 1986

And one not so famous, just kind of random here:

Yaz hits a homer in the 1975 All-Star Game

[arossi12]

In the clip of Dent's HR, the bat hitting the ball sounds really weird. Other than that, I keep watching the Gibson HR and thinking it's gotta be one of the greatest plays ever.

[Darkslide820]

Was Yaz wearing a hat during that clip?!? I thought they were mandatory by then.

[abc006]

You're right, that is strange. Perhaps since it was an all-star game, he just didn't bring a helmet with him - he pinch hit in that at-bat, that was in the ... I'll have to check more with that video to see if the other players are doing that too.

[abc006]

I looked on the video, and everyone else is wearing helmets - probably Yaz just forgot his helmet or something.

[AstroEric]

How are you able to upload these videos, abc? I tried putting some on YouTube last night and they slapped me with a "terms of use violation" denial.

[HardcoreLegend]

Bob Gibson and Steve Carlton take in the 'sights' during Spring Training

[abc006]

How are you able to upload these videos, abc? I tried putting some on YouTube last night and they slapped me with a "terms of use violation" denial.

How recent where the videos? Did they maybe have a waterkmark from a tv networks? Other than that, I don't know. I wan't sure if they would allow my videos in the first place either, but they did. Dunno.

[abc006]

The 1874 Boston Redstockings

The 1932 Pittsburgh Crawfords

The Marx Brothers posing with Lou Gehrig

Umpire William J. Klem in 1914

Shibe Park in Philadelphia c. 1913

A Brooklyn baseball team (The Superbas?) in 1908

[AstroEric]

The vids were quite old, but they did have logos from ESPN Classics, I guess.

I'll direct link them and hope you guys don't crash the AstrosDaily server:

GREAT MOMENTS IN ASTROS HISTORY!

Endings of No-Hitters:

Nolan Ryan's 1981 no-hitter

Mike Scott clinches against division rivals SF Giants in 1986 no-hitter

The late Daryl Kile pitches an almost perfect game in 1993

Six Astros pitchers combine to no-hit the Yankees in 2003

Octavio Dotel strikes out four in one inning in above game

Great swings of the bat:

Had the Astros scored one more run in 1986, Billy Hatcher would've been our Carlton Fisk

[MrDudleyDoWright]

Is it true, that before the "New York Metropolitans" became the Mets in 1962, that there was a team called the Mets in the late 1880's?

[chwalton213]

New York Metropolitans (1883 - 1887) - 1 Pennant and 1 Playoff Appearance

Year League Record Finish

1887 Amer Assoc 44-89 (.331)

1886 Amer Assoc 53-82 (.393)

1885 Amer Assoc 44-64 (.407)

1884 Amer Assoc 75-32 (.701)

1883 Amer Assoc 54-42 (.562)

[abc006]

From http://mysite.verizon.net/brak2.0/mets1.htm

In 1882, the American Association was formed as a rival to the National League. It placed teams in many large cities, but not in the nation's largest, New York. The following year, the Metropolitans, which had formed in 1880 as an independent team, joined the league. The team originally had the same owners as the Giants, which joined the National League in 1883. The Mets were treated by their owners as secondary to the Giants, and struggled to survive until 1887. The links below lead to summaries of each of the Mets' AA seasons except the championship year of 1884, which is well covered by John O'Malley's article in the 1985 edition of SABR's The National Pastime. Mr. O'Malley has a fine article on the Metropolitan's first season of 1880 in the 1980 Baseball Research Journal, also published by SABR.

Check out the links to the specific seasons from that page too.

[HFLR]

Todd Jones delivers the final pitch at Tiger Stadium on September 27, 1999.

Ty Cobb making one of his infamous sharpened spike slides.

Roberto "Beto" Avila (México) The first ever latin player to win a batting championship (1954) he played 2 months with a broken thumb in that same season.

[Darkslide820]

Hah. That 1874 picture you put up has about half of the guys I'm making for my 1870's All-Decade team.

[chwalton213]

Moses Fleetwood Walker

October 7, 1857–May 11, 1924

Walker was born in Mount Pleasant, Ohio, the son of Dr. Moses W. Walker, the first African-American physician in Mount Pleasant. He enrolled in Oberlin College in 1878 and played on the college's first varsity baseball team in the spring of 1881. He then transferred to the University of Michigan law school the following fall. Walker played varsity baseball for Michigan in 1882.

Walker signed with the minor league Northwestern League Toledo Blue Stockings in 1883, in the days before catchers wore any equipment, even to the point of being bare-handed. Walker had his first encounter with future Hall of Famer Cap Anson that year, when Toledo played an exhibition game against the Chicago White Stockings on August 10, 1883. Anson refused to play with Walker on the field. Manager Charlie Morton played Walker, and told Anson the White Stockings would forfeit the gate receipts if they refused to play. Anson then agreed to play.

In 1884 Toledo joined the American Association, which was a major league at that time in competition with the National League. Walker made his major league baseball debut on May 1, 1884 versus the Louisville Eclipse. His brother, Welday Walker later joined him on the team, playing in 6 games.

Walker's teammate and star pitcher, Tony Mullane, stated Walker "was the best catcher I ever worked with, but I disliked a Negro and whenever I had to pitch to him I used to pitch anything I wanted without looking at his signals."

Walker suffered a season-ending injury in July, and Toledo ended the year going out of business. Walker returned to the minor leagues in 1885, and played in the Western League for Cleveland, which folded in June. He then played for Waterbury in the Eastern League though 1886.

In 1887 Walker moved to the International League Newark Little Giants. He caught for star pitcher George Stovey, forming the first known African-American battery. On July 14, 1887 the Chicago White Stockings played an exhibition game against the Little Giants. Contrary to some modern-day writers, Anson did not have a second encounter with Walker that day (Walker was apparently injured, having last played on July 11 and would not play again until July 26). But Stovey had been listed as the game's scheduled starting pitcher, in the Newark News of July 14. Only days after the game was it reported (in the Newark Sunday Call) that, "Stovey was expected to pitch in the Chicago game. It was announced on the ground that he was sulking, but it has since been given out that Anson objected to a colored man playing. If this be true, and the crowd had known it, Mr. Anson would have received hisses instead of the applause that was given him when he first stepped to the bat." On the morning of the day of game, International League owners had voted 6-to-4 to exclude African-American players from future contracts.

In the off-season, the International League modified its ban on black players, and Walker signed with the Syracuse, New York franchise for 1888. In September 1888, Walker did have his second incident with Anson. When Chicago was at Syracuse for an exhibition game, Anson refused to start the game when he saw Walker’s name on the scorecard as catcher. "Big Anson at once refused to play the game with Walker behind the bat on account of the Star catcher’s color," the Syracuse Herald said. Syracuse relented and someone else did the catching.

Walker remained in Syracuse until the team released him in July of 1889.

Shortly thereafter, the American Association and the National League both unofficially banned African-American players, making the adoption of Jim Crow in baseball complete. Baseball would remain segregated until 1946 when Jackie Robinson popularly "broke the color barrier" in professional baseball when he played for the Brooklyn Dodgers' minor league affiliate in Montreal.