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

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:

(YouTube link)

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.)

Bob Swift, the Tiger catcher, went to the pitcher’s mound and told pitcher Bob Cain to “keep it low.” Swift walked behind the plate and got down on his knees. Pitcher Cain was cracking up and, according to Swift, they were both “laughing so hard they could hardly go through the motions.”

Gaedel walked on four straight pitches. He ran down the first base line, stepped on the bag, tipped his hat to the roaring crowd, and ran off the field.

“Man, I felt like Babe Ruth,” Gaedel recalled, in a touching memory of his immortal moment. Jim Delsing ran onto the field to pinch-run for the departing Gaedel. The Tigers won the game 6-2.

The next day, American League president Will Harridge declared that Eddie Gaedel’s plate appearance would never be repeated and that his name would be stricken from baseball’s record book. He was right on the first count, but wrong on the second. Edward Carl “Eddie” Gaedel is immortalized in baseball’s record book: “1951, pinch-hitter, St. Louis Browns- 1 game, 1 plate appearance, 1 walk, and a perfect on-base percentage of 1.000.”

At 3’7″ and 65 pounds, he is both the shortest and the lightest ever batter in Major League history. Eddie was paid $100 for his brief but unforgettable at-bat, but he made $17,000 on TV appearances resulting from it. Eddie could have made a lot more money from his historic at-bat; the offers poured in, but he hated to travel, preferring to stay in Chicago.

In 1951, the Tigers finished the season in fifth place, while the Browns finished in their customary slot -dead last. In 1959, Eddie made his last public appearance, dressed as a Martian and appearing out of a flying saucer at Comiskey Park in Chicago. He presented his Martian ray gun to White Sox players Nellie Fox and Minie Minoso. The owner of the 1959 White Sox? Bill Veeck- who else?

Sadly, Eddie was brutally beaten up in a mugging/robbery two years later. (For most of his adult life, he had a chronic drinking problem and was known for getting into severe bar fights.) On June 8, 1961, he was found dead in his room by a family member. Somehow, after his savage beating, he had managed to make it back to his home. The Chicago Police Department refused to investigate the crime any further because of Eddie’s notorious reputation.

Bob Cain drove 300 miles to Chicago to make it to Eddie’s funeral. For the last ten years of his life, Eddie and Bob had exchanged Christmas cards. Cain was the only Major League player to attend the funeral. Bill Veeck didn’t make it, saying he was “too busy.”

In 1999, the sporting news voted Eddie Gaedel’s plate appearance as #1 on their list of “Unusual and Unforgettable Moments” in baseball history. Eddie Gaedel’s St. Louis Browns unforgettable number 1/8 uniform is in the Baseball Hall of Fame. His autograph now sells for more than Babe Ruth’s.

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

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

The Gesture’s Low Reaching Roots

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

Making the Five High

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.

Making A Good Thing Into A National Holiday

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.

Link via Deadspin

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

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.

Link

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

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

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

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

YouTube Link

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

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

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

The Black Sox Scandal

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.

Pete Rose Gambling Scandal

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

The Black Mist Scandal

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!

Link via Popular Science

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 ueue, submitted by josephfosco.

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