Quote of the Day (Kevin Baker, on the First Baseball Parks, in the Cities)

“The first major-league parks, back in the nineteenth century, were little more than sandlots with rows of precarious wooden bleachers—one step up from those vacant, rock-strewn lots in Chelsea. Eventually they were ringed, frontier-style, with a stockade fence so the owners could monopolize what was going on inside—charge for admission and food sales; shake down or expel gamblers who dogged the game; expand the fan base to the growing middle class, to children, and even women. These changes were akin to Vegas going family—or to the incandescent cities of fire that rose along the sands of Coney Island during the same period, replacing the site of louche entertainments with the very first official amusement parks.”— Novelist, historian, and diehard baseball fan Kevin Baker, “At the Park,” Creative Nonfiction 34 (Anatomy of Baseball), 2008

It’s opening day. Play ball!

(The source of the image accompanying this post, by the way, is The Boston Public Library. The photo, dating from 1893, shows South End Grounds in Boston, where the Boston Red Stockings, Beaneaters, and Braves played from 1871 to 1914. Today, the site—at the intersection of Walpole Street, railroad tracks, and Columbus Avenue—is a parking lot between Northeastern University's Columbus Parking Garage and Ruggles Station of the Orange Line of the MBTA.)

Quote of the Day (Kevin Baker, on the Plight of the Demographically Deluded Dems)

“Today’s Democratic Party, with its finely calibrated, top-down fixes, does not offer anything so transformative [as the rural electrification provided with the New Deal, the G.I. Bill, and the civil-rights legislation of the 1960s]. It seems scared of its own shadow, which is probably why it keeps reassuring itself that its triumph is inevitable. It needs instead to fully acknowledge just how devastating the recession was for working people everywhere in America, and what a generation of largely flat wages did to their aspirations even before that. It needs to take on hard fights, even against powerful forces, like pharmaceutical and insurance companies that presume to tell us the limits of what our health care can be or energy companies that would tell us what the world’s climate can endure. It means carving out a place of respect for working men and women in our globalized, finance-driven world.”— Kevin Baker, “Delusions of the Democrats,” The New York Times, November 16, 2014

This Day in Baseball History (“Bonehead” Merkle Becomes Giant Scapegoat)

September 23, 1908—In one of the most contentious plays in the history of the national pastime, 19-year-old New York Giant Fred Merkle failed to touch second base before he left the field, expecting, as custom had it in those days, that the game was over. Instead, after mulling it over in a hotel room later that night, the umpire ruled that he had been tagged out by the Chicago Cubs’ Frank Chance.

The ruling nullified the run, leaving the contest all knotted up. In a subsequent playoff game the Cubs won, on their way to their last World Series—and Merkle would end up earning the nickname “Bonehead” for the rest of his playing days.

Bad luck hounded him, it seemed. Eventually, Merkle would make it to five World Series, as player or coach, but not one would he win. Even the one that looked, in retrospect like a sure thing—his stint as a coach with the 1926 New York Yankees—ended up as a loss.

Merkle was one of the first—but hardly the last—baseball players who could be likened to Coleridge’s Ancient Mariner in suffering from cruel fate. The following were also cursed, by their own fans as much as misfortune: Ralph Branca, Mark Littell, Calvin Schiraldi, Bill Buckner, and, in a particularly tragic case, California Angels relief pitcher Donnie Moore, who committed suicide three years after failing to gain the third strike that would have given his team the victory over the Boston Red Sox in the 1986 AL Championship Series.

For more details on the Merkle game and its denouement, I recommend the article in today’s New York Times by Kevin Baker (like yours truly, a Columbia College alum and Bergen County, N.J. product) or a social history I’ve already recommended in these pages, Cait Murphy’s Crazy ’08.