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If you ever opened a pouch of Big League Chew and pretended you were a baseball player chewing tobacco, then you’ll enjoy the story behind it. Yesterday was the anniversary of the date in 1979 that the first batch of the bubblegum was shredded up by two baseball players, Rob Nelson and Jim Bouton of the Portland Mavericks, who didn’t chew tobacco.
As Rob recalled, in January of 1979 he found a homemade bubble gum kit from an article in People magazine, and he “ordered a bunch, from a company out of Arlington, Texas.” He baked those first batches of bubble gum in the kitchen of the Maverick’s bat boy, Todd Field. [Trivia: Todd is now a renowned Hollywood film director.] From there, he cut up the gum with a pizza knife, and then mocked up a package to see how a rough prototype might look, so they would have something to show. For those early samples, they emptied out foil tobacco pouches, and the gum went in – creating what was probably the very first pouches of shredded bubble gum.
And that’s just the beginning of the story. Yesterday was also the launch of the blog CollectingCandy, on which this is the very first post. Included are lots of retro package designs. Link -via Metafilter
The newest members of the Baseball Hall of Fame are to be announced today. I found out that no player has ever been inducted with 100% of the votes tallied. But there have been 27 players who got 90% or more of the votes cast. How many of those players can you name? I could only name ten, and that was with a list of Hall-of-Famers and my husband’s help! Maybe you can beat the current average of 39%. Link
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The Florida Marlins are now the Miami Marlins. The baseball team got a new logo to go with their new name. They are also getting a new ballpark. But what’s that structure over behind the center field wall? It’s a home run celebration feature. When the Marlins score a home run, this is going to light up like this:
It’s supposed to have a lot of sound, too. As Grant Brisbee of Baseball Nation says,
We’re not here just to make fun of the Marlins.
Except when we have no choice. Which, again, it looks like we don’t. There’s no way around this one, again.
Link -via Metafilter
If
they build it, will they come? Mike and Denise Stillman are betting on
it: the couple, longtime fans of the movie "Field of Dreams,"
have just bought the Iowa farm where movie was shot and plan to turn it
into baseball fields.
The Stillmans said they plan to preserve the iconic diamond while building about a dozen other fields and an indoor training dome on the 193-acre property, turning the land into a Midwestern hub for youth baseball and softball practice and tournaments.
"It's the right time for this," said Denise Stillman, 39, a healthcare business consultant. "We just know that it's going to be a huge success."
The Stillmans said about 65,000 people visit the site near Dyersville every year, playing catch or running the bases on the same field where the ghosts of past ballplayers emerged from the cornstalks to play ball in the movie, which starred Kevin Costner and James Earl Jones.
Link (Photo: Field of Dreams in Dubuque County, Iowa/Wikipedia)
Neatorama presents a guest post from actor, comedian, and voiceover artist Eddie Deezen. Visit Eddie at his website.
Tens of thousands of games have been played in the history of Major League Baseball. But on August 19th, 1951, the strangest baseball at-bat ever recorded took place in Sportsman’s Park in St. Louis. It was on that day, sixty years ago, that a 3’7″ player came to bat.
Edward Carl Gaedel was born on June 8, 1925. His parents and siblings were all of normal stature, but Eddie, for some unknown reason, just stopped growing sometime during his term in elementary school. According to his sister, “He cried a lot because people used to bother him. He’d come home swearing.”
As an adult, Eddie found work as a mascot for Mercury Records and during World War II Eddie had found employment as a riveter (his stature made it easy for him to crawl inside the wings of planes). By 1951, Eddie was working as a bartender at “The Midget Club,” a bar in Chicago that employed only little people.
In 1951, Bill Veeck was the colorful owner of the St. Louis Browns, the worst team in baseball. Veeck was known for thinking up wild publicity stunts to help draw crowds in to come and watch the pathetic, perennial cellar-dwelling Browns.
The original idea of a little person batting in a baseball game had been used in a 1941 short story (no pun intended) by James Thurber called “You Could Look It Up” (Veeck always denied the story was his inspiration).
In mid-August of 1951, Bill Veeck gave his car keys to the Brown’s public relations man, Jay Edson. Edson was told to go to the given address in Chicago and pick up a guy called Eddie Gaedel. “He’s a midget,” said Veeck.
“A midget?” inquired Edson, slightly surprised.
“Yes,” intoned Veeck.
Gaedel was picked up at his Chicago address, driven to St. Louis, and smuggled into the Chase hotel, wrapped in a blanket. A double-header was scheduled between the Browns and the Detroit Tigers the next day. The crowd of 18,369 had been promised “a festival of surprises” by Veeck.
Between games, Eddie popped out of a giant plastic cake, in celebration of the 50th anniversary of the American League and in celebration of the Falstaff brewery. Gaedel’s appearance brought happy laughter from the crowd, who at the time had no idea of the strange baseball history soon to be made. In the bottom of the first inning of game two, the surprised crowd looked on as St. Louis manager Zach Taylor sent Eddie Gaedel up to pinch-hit for lead-off batter Frank Saucier.
Eddie came to the on-deck circle swinging three toy bats. He tossed two to the side and walked to the plate carrying his toy bat, the smallest bat ever to be used in a Major League baseball game. Gaedel wore a borrowed batboy’s uniform which sported the number 1/8. The crowd, at first surprised, was quiet, then burst into raucous laughter.
Ed Hurley, the home plate umpire, was duly shown Gaedel’s contract (legally signed a few days earlier and wired to Major League offices) and Eddie stood at the plate, in a slight batter’s crouch. Before he came to the plate, Gaedel had been warned solemnly by Bill Veeck that he’d have a rifle aimed at his head and if he dared swing, he’d pull the trigger. (In Thurber’s short story, the LP had swung on ball four and grounded out, ending the game.)
more …
Yesterday, the first pitch in a game between the San Diego Padres and the Kansas City Royals was thrown by a performer from the Cirque du Soleil:
Decked out in a vibrant costume, Gabryel Nogueira da Silva threw out a gravity-defying first pitch that should have John Wall signing up for tee-ball tryouts following his hideous one-hopper at Nats Park.
Watch as da Silva performs a 360-degree backflip on the mound…and then throws a strike for what has to be the best ceremonial first pitch ever.
Link -via The Hairpin
Vaudeville makes a modern comeback! Tuesday’s game between Clemson and Davidson was delayed by rain, so the players jumped into the gap to keep the fans amused. -via Metafilter
Sportswriter Hirotada Ototake threw out the ceremonial first pitch at yesterday’s game between Seibu and Rakuten in Japan. Ototake was born without arms or legs, but lives a normal life and works as an advocate for the disabled in his spare time. The speech he gives before the pitch is a dedication to the people of Tohoku, a region of Japan that was hard-hit by the earthquake and tsunami. Read more at Japan Probe. Link -via The Daily What
Why is a curveball so hard to hit? Some say it presents an optical illusion to the batter. Others say it really does curve. Lyman Briggs of the National Bureau of Standards aimed to settle the matter.
This was a period when the question of whether the curve ball actually curved was hotly debated. Among the true believers was St. Louis Cardinals pitcher Dizzy Dean. “Ball can’t curve?” he famously declared during the 1930s. “Shucks, get behind a tree and I’ll hit you with an optical illusion.” But anecdotes aren’t a substitute for scientific data. So once Briggs officially retired, he decided to do the experiments to settle the matter. And he was well-connected enough to enlist the aid of the pitching staff of the Washington Senators and their manager, Cookie Lavagetto, to do so. It wasn’t just a question of baseball, either: the question related to NIST’s ongoing research into ballistics and projectiles: the rate of spin is related to how much the ball (or projectile) is deflected at different speeds. Apparently the NSB (now NIST) conducted lots of experiments with golf balls and baseballs; one of Briggs’ publications was a 1945 paper entitled, “Methods for Measuring the Coefficient of Restitution and the Spin of the Ball.”
Read how Briggs designed experiments to find out exactly how much of a curve there is to a curveball at Cocktail Physics. Link
Comments Off Did you know the third Thursday of every April is National High Five Day? That would be April 21 this year. While the best way to celebrate High Five Day is simply to give out your fair share of celebratory slaps, it can also help to know your history and when it comes to the high five, that history is actually rather recent.
Long before the high five, there was the low five, although, at the time it was known as “giving skin” and “slapping skin.” The low five started way back in the jazz age and while there seems to be no detailed record of how it was started, it was a fairly popular gesture amongst jazz musicians. This was immortalized throughout history when Al Jolson gives a low five in the 1927 film The Jazz Singer.
The 1941 Abbot and Costello film In the Navy takes note of this with the Andrews Sisters song, “Gimme Some Skin, My Friend.”
Slapping five continued to be a popular gesture in the African American culture and you can see black characters slapping hands in movies all the way up to blaxploitation films from the seventies
Image via Outsports
The high five that most people credit as the first took place in 1977. It was exchanged between Dusty Baker and Glen Burke at a Los Angeles Dodgers game. Burke gave Baker a raised hand to slap in celebration after Baker scored a home run.
Murray State University basketball player Lamont Sleets has challenged this story though, claiming that he developed the gesture while playing on his college team in the 1960’s. This isn’t the only high five challenge between basketball and baseball players. A number of basketballers claim to have started using the term “high five” during their 1979/1980 season. University of Louisville baseball player Derek Smith disputes this though and claims that he is the originator of the term.
No matter who originated or named it though, the gesture was an immediate success in sports circles as soon as Baker and Burke’s slap was seen around the country. It was soon being used by teams across the country, most notably the 1980 Louisville Cardinals basketball team, who high fived each other throughout their run for the title and helped bring it to the forefront of American consciousness.
Image via bgubitz [Wikipedia]
By 1980, the noun “high five” was in the Oxford English Dictionary and by 1981, it was added as a verb as well.
In the eighties, the gesture took on a life of its own and it seemed like every sitcom character was high fiving someone at least once per episode. It isn’t surprising that the high five took a dive in popularity through the nineties and popular culture tried to cleanse itself of the over saturation of the gesture. Even so, the high five has always continued to have its fans and in 2002, three University of Virginia Students decided to give the high five its due.
The three students decided they wanted to start their own holiday and they agreed that honoring the lost art of the high five would be the perfect reason to celebrate. The ultimate goal of the holiday was to better people’s days by giving high fives to strangers, who might then be inspired to give high fives to others. While the headquarters of the holiday started on the university campus, it quickly spread thanks to the power of the internet.
By 2005, the idea had gained enough momentum that the City of San Diego actually agreed to recognize National High Five Day as an official city celebration. (Being a long-term resident of America’s Finest City, I admit that I was highly upset that I had never heard of the city’s decree until I started writing this article.)
So now that you know about National High Five Day and about the gesture’s respectable origin story, it is up to you, dear readers to spread the word, and the skin. Share your support of high fives on April 21 and every day. Just remember to do it sparingly. After all, an overused high five is worse than no high five at all and we don’t want this great cultural connection to fade away every again.
Sources: Wikipedia, High Five Me, National High Five Project
High school baseball player Caleb Walker of Tupelo, Mississippi, really didn’t have a chance of making it to home. But as you can see, he outwitted the catcher in a very clever move.
When a bat used at a Major League Baseball game gets cracked or otherwise rendered unusable, it’s not just chucked in the garbage. Oh no! They are made into souvenirs, like this bottle opener. Each one has a unique hologram number that lets you look up what game the bat was used in -sort of a modern certificate of authenticity. Link
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If you think that all you need to pitch a baseball are an arm and a ball, you’d be half-right. As Tom Willis proved, you actually don’t need any arm:
He’s Tom Willis, and he’s a San Diego-based motivational speaker who has made it his goal to throw out the first ball at every major league baseball stadium.
So far, he’s up to nine — including eight this year — and will add No. 10 to his resume when he throws the first pitch for the Texas Rangers on Sept. 30.
What makes Willis extraordinary? He doesn’t have any arms, just a small left hand with two fingers that aren’t very strong.
A foul ball is coming straight at you and your girlfriend. Do you:
a) Man up and try to catch it before it hits your lady?
b) Choose the better part of valor and duck the foul ball?
Here’s the video clip that earned the man the unenviable nickname: THE BAILER. Link [embedded YouTube clip]
Why, I envision wedding bells already.
Masato Akamatsu of the Hiroshima Carp has earned the nickname of “Spider-Man” for climbing a wall to snag an out at a recent baseball game in Japan. Watch the video of this amazing catch.
via Urlesque
The following article is reprinted from The Best of Uncle John’ Bathroom Reader.
According to traditional baseball lore, our national pastime was invented by Abner Doubleday, in Cooperstown, New York. Was it? Not even close. Here’s the story.
Baseball Team circa 1870s
THE MISSION
At the turn of the century, baseball was becoming a popular pastime …and a booming business. Albert G. Spalding, a wealthy sporting goods dealer, realized that the American public would be more loyal to a sport that had its origins in the U.S. than one with roots in Europe. So it became his mission to sell baseball to Americans as a completely American game.
THE COMMISSION
In 1905, Spalding created the Special Baseball Commission to establish the origin of baseball “in some comprehensive and authoritative way, for all time.” He appointed six cronies to serve on it: Alfred J. Reach, head of another sporting goods company; A.G. Mills, the third president of the National League; Morgan G. Bulkely, first president of the National League; George Wright, a businessman; and Arthur P. Gorman, a senator who died before the study was completed. James Sullivan, president of an amateur athletic union, functioned as secretary for the commission.
In 1907, the commission issued its report, which it called “The Official Baseball Guide of 1906-1907.” One member, A.G. Mills, declared confidentially that it “should forever set at rest the question as to the origin of baseball.” But the truth was, they had done almost no research. Their files contained just three letters-one from Henry Chadwick, an Englishman who had helped popularize baseball; one from Spalding himself; and one from James Ward, a friend and supporter of Spalding.
THE “ROUNDERS CONTINGENT”
In his letter, Chadwick pointed out the obvious similarities between baseball and a game called “rounders”, a popular sport in England as well as colonial America. Rounders was played on a diamond with a base in each corner. A “striker” with a bat would stand behind the fourth base and try to to hit balls thrown by a “pecker”. If he hit the ball fair, the striker could earn a run by “rounding” the bases. If the striker missed the ball three times, or if his hit was caught before touching the ground, he was “out”. After a certain number of outs, the offensive and defensive teams switched. Ring a bell? It didn’t with Spalding and his men. The commission, which selected Chadwick’s letter to represent the “rounder’s contingent”, quickly dismissed it, because Chadwick was born in England.
THE “AMERICAN CONTINGENT”
In deference to Spalding, James Ward supported the theory of American origin, though his letter stated that “all exact information upon the origin of Base-Ball must, in the vary nature of things, be unobtainable.” His testimony amounted to no more than a friendly opinion.
In his own letter, Spalding argued vehemently that baseball had been created by Abner Doubleday in 1839 in Cooperstown, New York. “The game of Base-Ball,” he said, “is entirely of American origin, and has no relation to, or connection with, any game of any other country.” On what evidence did he base his argument? On the letter of a mystery man named Abner Graves, a mining engineer from Denver, who, Spalding said, recalled Doubleday inventing the game 68 years earlier (Graves was over 80 years old when he gave his account).
CREATING HISTORY
In his report, Spalding stated that Graves “was present when Doubleday first outlined with a stick in the dirt the present diamond-shaped field Base-Ball field, including the location of the players on the field, memorandum of the rules of his new game, which he named Base-Ball.”
However, none of this romantic imagery was actually in the Graves letter-no stick and no “crude pencil diagram of the rules.” Spalding made the whole thing up. Nor was Graves present at the first game, as Spalding claimed. Graves stated in his letter, “I do not know, nor is it possible to know, on what spot the first games was played according to Doubleday’s plan.” Graves’s letter simply recounted the rules of the game and how he though Doubleday “improved” an already existing game called “Town Ball”. Spalding cleverly embellished and promoted the old miner’s tale to make it the stuff of legends.
Spalding was also clever enough to know that Doubleday, a famous Civil War general, was “legend material” and would be an effective marketing tool in selling the myth. “It certainly appeals to an American’s pride to have had the great national game of Base-Ball created and named by a Major General in the United States Army,” wrote Spalding.
DOUBLEDAY AND BASEBALL
In fact, no record anywhere associated Doubleday with baseball before 1905. Circumstantial evidence indicates that the Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown probably should be somewhere else.
*Doubleday entered West Point on September 1, 1838, and was never in Cooperstown in 1839.
*Doubleday’s obituary in The New York Times on January 28, 1893, didn’t mention a thing about baseball.
*Doubleday was a writer, but never wrote about the sport he supposedly invented. In a letter about his sporting life, Doubleday reminisced, “In my outdoor sports, I was addicted to topographical work, and even as a boy amused myself by making maps of the country.” No mention of baseball.
________________________________
The article above is reprinted with permission from The Best of Uncle John’s Bathroom Reader.
Since 1988, the Bathroom Reader Institute had published a series of popular books containing irresistible bits of trivia and obscure yet fascinating facts.
If you like Neatorama, you’ll love the Bathroom Reader Institute’s books – go ahead and check ‘em out!
Attention baseball fans! Today’s Lunchtime Quiz at mental_floss is a bit different from what you are used to, but there’s a prize involved just for looking. In the quiz, Gar Ryness, the Batting Stance Guy, imitates the batting stances of some famous players. You select which player from a field of six for each video presented. I didn’t even try, since I knew I would fail miserably. Let us know how you fared! Link
Injuries to baseball players cost that industry millions of dollars every year. Northeastern University engineering students Marcus Moche, Alexandra Morgan and David Schmidt designed a shirt that measures the physical performance of pitchers. They think that their project could be used by coaches in the dugout to monitor the players’ fatigue and strain, informing them when pitchers are close to injuring themselves:
“No single device for measuring the quality of pitching mechanics currently exists, so we have proposed a shirt that is lightweight and can be worn during bullpen sessions or exhibition games,” said Moche. “The shirt can be used to show when a player becomes fatigued and his mechanics worsen, through a display of real-time information on a monitor in the dugout.”
Pitchers become more susceptible to injury when they lose consistency in their mechanics—the physics of how they throw the baseball, pitch after pitch.
Video at the link.
Link via Make | Photo: Northeastern University, Lauren McFalls
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Spring means baseball time! To celebrate, try your hand and eye at today’s Lunchtime Quiz at mental_floss. You’ll be given one letter from a Major League Baseball team logo, and you tell us what team it is (don’t include the city). Some may be past versions of the logo, and some may be tilted, just to make things interesting. I got two right out of 13, ha! I’m sure some of the answers I put in were football teams. Surely, you will do better. Link
The following is an article from Uncle John’s Giant 10th Anniversary Bathroom Reader.
Like
the Coyote and Road Runner, the CIA was obsessively trying to kill Fidel
Castro in the 1960s. But like Coyote, they just couldn't seem to do it.
Was it because Castro was so wiley … or because the CIA was so incompetent?
Here are some examples of how the anti-Castro super spies spent their time
(and our money).
CONCOCTING WEIRD PLOTS
Seven plots against Castro that the CIA actually considered.
1. Use agents in Cuba to spread rumors that the second coming of Christ
is imminent and that Castro is the anti-Christ.
2. Surprise him at the beach with an exploding conch shell.
3. Put thallium salts in his shoes or cigars during an appearance on
"The David Susskind show," to make his beard and hair fall
out.
4. Put itching powder in his scuba suit and LSD in his mouthpiece so
he would be driven crazy and drown
5. Offer him exploding cigars designed to blow his head off.
6. Shoot him with a TV camera that has a machine gun inside.
7. Spray his broadcasting studio with hallucinogens.
EMBARGOING BASEBALLS
In its war against Fidel Castro during the 1960s, the CIA literally tried
to play hardball politics. "The CIA tried to cut off the supply
of baseballs to Cuba. Agents persuaded suppliers in other countries not
ship them. (U.S. baseballs were already banned by the trade embargo the
U.S. had declared.)" The bizarre embargo was effective. Some balls
got through, "but the supply was so limited that the government
had to ask fans to throw foul balls and home runs back onto the field
for continued play.
- Jonathan Kwitny, Endless Enemies
How
out-of-control was the CIA in its anti-Castro frenzy? They even took Ian
Fleming's jokes seriously. This anecdote from Deadly Secrets
"Fleming
was staying at the house of British newsman Henry Brandon. The next day
CIA director Allen Dulles called Brandon to speak to Fleming. Brandon
said his guest had already left Washington. Dulles expressed great regret.
He had heard about Fleming's terrific ideas for doing in Castro and was
sorry he wouldn't be able to discuss them with him in person.
"It is testimony to the resounding good sense exercised by the
CIA during the Secret War that all three Fleming's spoof ideas were
in one form or another attempted---or at least seriously considered."
__________
Reprinted with permission from Uncle John's Giant 10th Anniversary Bathroom Reader, which comes packed with 504 pages of great stories.
Since 1988, the Bathroom Reader Institute had published a series of popular books containing irresistible bits of trivia and obscure yet fascinating facts.
If you like Neatorama, you'll love the Bathroom Reader Institute's books - check 'em out!
Artist Peter Schuyff, among other activities, carves baseball bats. When asked about the origins of this idea, he wrote:
The whole thing started with carving sticks on my walks. I’ve made long walks in New Guinea, the Amazon, Burma, jungles, I like jungles. At the end of the day there’s not much to do and I started carving sticks while staring off somewhere. Sometimes in the morning I’d climb a tree, bore a hole and put the stick in it. They were about the size of pencils and when I got back to New York I’d carve pencils in front of the television. It was weeks before I left for Vancouver, and in New Guinea I didn’t have much to do. When I got to Vancouver I saw straight away logs and totem poles
Link via DudeCraft | Interview with the Artist
A couple of weeks ago I posted about the robot that plays volleyball. Add this to the growing list of sporting droids: a robot that can pitch a fastball to another machine that can hit (although that looks like an easy play by the short stop… I bet the mad scientists are working on that one now). Will the Singularity take place in a sports arena?
Sportswriter Wright Thompson tried out the “Legends” section at the new Yankee Stadium. The seats originally went for $2,500. Now they are mostly empty, even though the price has dropped to $1,250. In telling the story of how such an exclusive luxury section came to be, Thompson relates the changes in baseball with the state of the economy.
A recent poll discovered an unsettling trend emerging for the first time. American families whose household income is $75,000 or less now have zero dollars of discretionary income. According to Luker, that means about 75 percent of the country can never responsibly afford to go to a live professional sporting event. Franchises want them to be fans, to buy the gear and pull for their teams and watch the telecasts the leagues are paid billions for. But they don’t need them to come to their stadiums. There are, right now, plenty of rich people who love games. The prices reflect that. The reason sporting events cost so much now, Luker’s research shows, is because they are designed to be affordable only to those making $150,000 or more a year.
This wasn’t always true. Ten years ago, it was cheaper to go to a baseball game than to a movie in half of the big league markets (take away parking at the game, and it was cheaper in every market). Today, there isn’t a single city in America where it costs less to go to a major league game than to a movie. Everywhere we turn, we see examples of the collapsing middle class. This is where that issue lives in the world of sports, and it has predictable consequences.
You don’t have to be a baseball fan to relate to this story of a business choosing short-term profits over long-term growth. Link -via Metafilter
(image credit: Julie Jacobson)
Hey baseball fans! As we head into post-season play, test your memory of past World Series with today’s Lunchtime Quiz at mental_floss. Do you know how many World Series titles each of twelve players earned? Keep in mind that some went all the way with more than one team. I scored 7 of 12, so any real baseball fan should beat that! Link
For kids with xeroderma pigmentosum, sunshine is deadly. UV rays cause them to develop cancerous tumors. They stay inside and covered, except for rare occasions late at night. Patients travel to Camp Sundown in New York to meet others with the condition and enjoy activities designed to accommodate their needs. This year, those activities included a major league baseball game at Yankee Stadium.
Because they couldn’t leave until the sun was almost down, and because it was a three-hour drive, they knew they’d be able to see only the last couple of innings of the game. But then it rained, causing a more-than-two-hour rain delay. While the rest of the crowd cursed, the campers rejoiced. How lucky can you get? The bus arrived just before the first pitch. “It was almost like the game was waiting for them to show up,” Yankees GM Brian Cashman said. “That kind of gave us goosebumps.”
To get the kids out of the bus and into their VIP suite for the game, Yankees media-relations director Jason Zillo — the man who dreamed up the whole night — had to take them on a rat’s route of back staircases and tunnels to avoid any fluorescent lights. After the Yankees beat the A’s 6-3, the stadium lights had to be dimmed to 30 percent. Once they were, all the kids came running onto the field with smiles that could’ve lit up the Bronx.
“It’s cool to be part of this,” said [Yankee player A.J.] Burnett, whom Zillo forced to leave at 3:15. “And it’s kind of mind-boggling. I can’t imagine if I couldn’t take my children outside.”
The Yankees partied and played baseball with the campers until they had to leave at 3:30 AM to beat the sunrise. Link -via YesButNoButYes
Today marks the anniversary of baseball’s infamous Pine Tar Incident, one of the most notorious cases of rule-breaking in MLB history. But it’s definitely not the only case, not by a longshot. Here are a few controversial moments in baseball (without steroids, no less), starting with the Pine Tar Incident.
On July 24, 1983, the Royals were losing to the Yankees at Yankee Stadium, 4-3 at the top of the ninth with two outs and a runner on first. Much to the chagrin of the Yankees, George Brett hit a home run and turned the tables so that the Royals were now a run ahead of the Bronx Bombers. Except there was a problem: Yankees Manager Billy Martin sprinted out of the dugout to confer with the home plate ump before Brett had even completed his run. After some debate, the umpire laid the bat across home plate, seeming to confirm something, then pointed at Brett with the bat and signaled that he was out. Brett burst out of the dugout “like his pants were on fire,” according to MLB.com (he totally does – check out the video below) and had to be physically restrained from tackling the umpire.
It turned out that he had used an excess of pine tar on his bat. Pine tar is allowed – it’s sticky and allows for better grip – but only up to 18 inches from the end of the bat. Any more than that is illegal, but that rule is very seldom invoked – it’s kind of like those silly, obscure laws in small towns that declare things like, “Llamas are not allowed in bars after 1 a.m.” The rule, apparently, has less to do with batter advantage and more to do with the fact that the pine tar would mess up the ball if the two came into contact, causing too many balls to be used per game. It was a rule nonetheless, and Brett was called out, nullifying both runs and giving the win to the Yanks. The Royals protested and the A.L. President decided to overturn the out. On August 18th, the game resumed with the score 5-4, Royals, in the top of the ninth. No miracles occurred – the next batter struck out, and then the Royals’ pitcher struck out all three Yankees who tried to hit off of him in the bottom of the ninth. The game ended with the Royals win and the infamous bat now rests in the Baseball Hall of Fame. Here’s that video – it’s dispersed throughout the 37-second clip of George Brett moments, but you’ll have no problem discerning which clips I’m talking about.
Photo from Jamestown Distributors
Now we travel way back to the 1919 World Series. Well, let’s travel back to just before the 1919 World Series. The Chicago White Sox were the best team in baseball at the time – or at least in the top two. However, they were also some of the worst-paid players. Charles Comiskey was notoriously stingy with his bankroll – he even promised the Sox a “big bonus” if they won the pennant, and when they did, he gave them a “bonus” of a case of crappy champagne.
After making some extra money by giving insider tips to a small-time gambler named Joseph Sullivan, Sox player Chick Gandil decided to really supplement his meager salary by offering to throw the World Series for $100,000. It wasn’t too difficult for Gandil to recruit other players for the scheme – many of them held personal grudges against Comiskey, not just for the small paychecks, but for reneging on bonuses and promises as well. In the end, at least eight White Sox players were in on the deal: Eddie Cicotte, Oscar “Happy” Felsch, Arnold “Chick” Gandil, “Shoeless” Joe Jackson, Fred McMullin, Charles “Swede” Risberg, George “Buck” Weaver and Claude “Lefty” Williams. But things went awry, as they tend to in schemes like this. The gamblers didn’t pay the amounts they were supposed to pay after the Sox lost the first couple of games, and the players began to wonder if they had been had. It made sense to them that they should play to win the Series, because if they won, they would at least receive a $5,000 bonus from Comiskey. The Sox won the third game, but then lost the fourth and fifth. By today’s standards, four wins for the Reds would equal a title, but in 1919, the World Series was best out of nine games, not best out of seven. The Sox weren’t down and out just yet. They rallied to win games six and seven, giving them three wins and the Reds four. This greatly angered Arnold Rothstein, a gambler who had invested quite a bit of money on the Sox losing. He sent one of his “associates” to scare a little sense into Sox pitcher Lefty Williams. He said if Lefty didn’t start doing his part to throw the games, he and his wife were going to run into a little trouble. This threat was sufficient enough to scare Lefty into submission, and he made sure to throw poor and mediocre pitches all night. The Reds won handily, 10-5, and took the Series.
An investigation of the allegations got under way in September 1920 and two players, Eddie Cicotte and Shoeless Joe Jackson, confessed that they had helped throw the games (they later took back their confessions, and the signed documents ‘mysteriously’ disappeared). The eight players who were implicated were banned from baseball for life. The players who were found innocent were awarded $1,500 checks from Comiskey in the fall of 1920, which must have been quite the kick in the teeth to those who had participated in the scandal because he wasn’t paying them fairly.
Shoeless Joe Jackson’s level of involvement in the whole thing has since been disputed – he recanted his confession and maintained for the rest of his life that he was innocent. All of the players involved backed him up, saying that he had never attended any of the logistics meetings and refused to take the initial payment to entice him to throw the games. It’s still highly debated to this day. Photo from PascalMarco.com.
Finally, in his 2004 autobiography, Pete admitted that he had, in fact, bet on sports – including baseball – while he played and managed. He swore that he had never bet against the Reds and only bet on them because he loved the team so much and loyal and believed in his team. He has applied for reinstatement, but to no avail so far.
Photo from Inside Athletics
Corrupt players isn’t just an American trend. From 1969-1971, it was revealed that several really big Japanese baseball stars had accepted bribes from an organized crime family to throw various games. On October 7, 1969, somebody blew the whistle on Nishitetsu Lions pitcher Masayuki Nagayasu, who, as it turned out, had been purposely throwing easy pitches to opposing teams. Nagayasu sang like a canary, telling officials that not only did he take the bribes, the three other pitchers on the team took bribes, and so did the catcher and two infielders. All of them were suspended from play with two of them eventually being reinstated; Nagayasu was banned from the game for life.
Then, in April of 1970, an auto racer let it be known that a few prominent men had been in on a scheme to try to fix auto races: pitchers from two baseball teams and a member of the yakuza (organized crime). Another investigation was soon undertaken, which unearthed all sorts of dirty little secrets: by the end of the year, at least three more players had been banned for life, several had been arrested for the auto-racing incident, and more had received suspensions or benching for illegal gambling, driving without a license and having suspiciously close relationships with the yakuza. This whole series of incidents was known as the Black Mist that fell over Japanese baseball.
Drug busts of the ’80s? Corked bats? Women’s fertility drugs? What do you think is the most scandalous baseball moment? Share it in the comments!
NASA has created a map of Aldrin and Armstrong’s journeys on the surface of the moon to the scale of a baseball diamond. It helps put their activities at the landing site in perspective. Also, we know “Who’s on first?” It was Buzz Aldrin.
Link via Popular Science
A curveball will slowly shift by a couple of feet at most, but to the batter it seems to suddenly jump several feet. Watch this animation of the Best Visual Illusion of the Year winner to experience how this occurs.
In baseball, a curveball creates a physical effect and a perceptual puzzle. The physical effect (the curve) arises because the ball’s rotation leads to a deflection in the ball’s path. The perceptual puzzle arises because the deflection is actually gradual but is often perceived as an abrupt change in direction (the break). Our illusions suggest that the perceived “break” may be caused by the transition from the central visual system to the peripheral visual system. Like a curveball, the spinning disks in the illusions appear to abruptly change direction when an observer switches from foveal to peripheral viewing.
Link – via josephfosco
From the Upcoming 
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The Hanshin Tigers baseball club won the Japan Series for the first and (so far) only time in 1985. Fans in Dotonbori celebrated by jumping into the local river. The story goes that the crowd called out the names of the players, and a fan who most resembled each player jumped in. However, no one looked like star player and Oklahoma native Randy Bass {wiki}. So the crowd tossed in a life-size statue of Colonel Sanders taken from a KFC outlet. The statue was lost in the river, and the Hanshin Tigers sunk into a slump. Urban lore says the Tigers performance is due to the lost statue.
Fast forward to 2009. Divers looking for unexploded bombs found the Colonel Tuesday night.
The upper body of the statue was discovered at around 4 p.m. about 200 meters away from where it plunged into the water in 1985. When the figure was being pulled up by the crane on a salvage barge, construction workers could be heard to say, “It looks like a corpse.” However, when Tigers fans such as the riverside project foreman saw the statue, they exclaimed, “It’s the Colonel!” Passersby also stopped in their tracks to take in the scene.
With the media and locals looking on, divers began their search for the lower body at around 8:50 Wednesday morning, and discovered the right hand some minutes later. About 10 minutes after that, the diver’s voice burst from a speaker on the salvage barge, saying, “It’s the lower body. There’s no mistake about it,” bringing on a cheer from reporters and workers alike.
Is the “Curse of the Colonel” over for the Tigers? Link -via Fark
