They don't write 'em like this anymore...

Just ran across this write-up of a ballgame from 1917. An ordinary game in the dog days of August between the Reds and the Giants, Hod Eller coming in to slam the door on the Giants and their pitcher Slim Sallee. It's the write-up itself that gets me: what verve, what punch! ("wild and woolly tactics", "hilarious home runs" (what is a hilarious home run?), balls being peppered and plastered) This is what is missing in today's summaries. Sure we have stats out the wazoo (and I'm all for them -- stats, not wazoos), but this is the baseballl I love in this article.

Bill

http://query.nytimes.com/mem/archive-free/pdf?res=9C03E2DE123FE433A25751C2A96E9C946696D6CF

Great stuff!! Thanks for posting.

Fascinating! A great lead paragraph combining interesting background with breaking news--very unlike in today's sports writing where reporters seemingly compete with each other to see how far they can get into the story before mentioning the score! Of course, that kind of modern writing is pretty essential when virtually everyone reading the story already knows the score before the paper was published.

It used to be the same (at the NY Times at least) with obituaries, where obit writers were rumored to have daily bets on how much they could write before actually reporting that their subjects had died.

I confess that I enjoyed reading the sports section of the morning paper (and the afternoon one as well) a heck of a lot more when I was a kid than I do now. The sports section in the only remaining daily paper here (San Diego) is filled with two or three columnists sucking their thumbs instead of reporting, a bunch of feature stories on such things as high school volleyball players, horse and motor racing and local college athletes I'm not interested in -- and extremely little about national events (such as college and pro basketball and hockey) that I am interested in. Worse yet, the baseball box scores are now printed in the smallest agate type I've ever seen, requiring a magnifying glass (and I have 20-20 vision) to read.

Pardon the rant, but I miss stories about Slim Sallee's failure to win an 11th straight game and the kind of colorful writing that the unidentified Times reporter so capably produced.

Thank you, Tom, for giving us insight into why and how an unidentified writer (a stringer?) for the Times touches us one hundred years after the game. Christy Mathewson is identified by three monikers ("Matty", "The Big Six", "The Old Master") and we get the impression that he still commands the respect of the New York audience.

Your comment about how we already know the score before reading reminded me of when I first moved to France 30 years ago. No internet and the only connection to MLB was through the International Herald Tribune. My friend and I used to split the days we would buy the paper (funds were low), and then proceed to read the line scores (not even box scores), inning by inning, trying to figure out how the result came about using clues in the one or two line summaries. Our experience reinforced the idea that baseball in the mind is certainly a greater game than baseball on the screen. (For a wonderful children's book -- all you dads and grandpas out there should read this book -- that talks about the role of baseball games on the radio, try http://www.amazon.com/Night-Driving-John-Coy/dp/0805067086).

And for a look at baseball as witnessed outside the ballpark, here is a great blog article:

http://www.schubincafe.com/2012/09/26/watching-remote-baseball-games-before-tv/

Thanks, Tom, for your remarks.

Bill

That's wild. It's almost like it was written in a different language.
Maybe HAL should write up the reviews of our games like that.

I also noticed that they finished a 7-5 game in 1 hour and 50 minutes.
A baseball fan could save an hour a day if they still played like that.

Thanks again, Bill, this time for calling our attention to the history of the efforts to bring baseball results to fans as quickly as possible, and to the beauty of listening to radio broadcasts before TV and the Internet. Makes you appreciate how important the game was in the social fabric of our lives long ago.

Incidentally, you might enjoy a novel by my friend and former colleague, James Goldsborough, "The Paris Herald." Though a bit disjointed at times, it recounts the story of the world's most famous newspaper during the 1960s, when the fates of the paper and of the regime of Charles de Gaulle became curiously intertwined. I've only visited Paris once (much too briefly to have even scratched the surface of the city) and the novel gave me a vivid look as to how life in the city was during the Vietnam era when my own newspaper career was just beginning.

BTW, it wasn't until many years later that reporters were given bylines on their stories, so I doubt that the 1917 piece was written by anyone other than the NY Times' baseball beat reporter. Starting with the Civil War, The Times, and a lot of other papers, prided themselves on having writers at the scene of all major news stories as soon as possible. Baseball beat reporters traveled (by train) with the teams, ate in the same restaurants and slept in the same hotels as the players. Being so close to the players and managers, it was darn near impossible for the reporters to write negatively about anything other than performances on the field. "Merkle's Boner" and "Snodgrass' $100,000 Muff," were rare exceptions. Ring Lardner's speculation about the 1919 World Series won him few friends in baseball and may have led to his relatively short career as a beat writer. And I'd lay odds that the Detroit and Cleveland baseball writers (perhaps the most coveted jobs on the paper in those days) danced very lightly in reporting about the alleged, but never proven, deal between managers Cobb and Speaker to fix a late-season game after both the Tigers and Indians were out of the race.

Again, thanks for providing some fascinating insight into the game we love.

Tom

I suspect that the HR's were of the inside the park variety, and the Polo Grounds could easily have created much hilarity for those with its weird dimensions and strange angles. A very interesting writeup. Thanks for sharing.

When I was a kid I would save my allowance up for months to subscribe to the Sporting News, and read every line religiously through junior high and high school. Nowadays, it's just not the same.

Thanks Tom for the heads up on the novel. I'll search it out for my train rides down to work. You're right about how baseball was engrained in our social structure, something that, alas, seems to be no longer the case. That's what interests me about the game, how the tangents that the game produces bounce off in various directions, like so many Polo Grounds ricochets (thanks rburgh for those precisions!): newspaper reports, radio broadcasts, songs ("Joltin' Joe Dimaggio" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1q6odQuCxFU, "Say Hey" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=40Uxl2t41fU), sounds from outside the stadium, groundskeepers (for how many of us is a trip to the ballpark not a trip to the ballpark without that gasp of the first sight of the field -- no matter how times we've seen it; I mean, how can you ever be jaded by that?), playing catch with friends, dads, moms (in my case), the reading from cover to cover of The Sporting News (man, rburgh, were you ever right -- that was my Christmas present), trying to reproduce seasons or games (as we do here or as I did with the 67 series by bouncing a tennis ball against my garage wall), baseball cards (and the smell of bubble gum that never disappeared), the smell of glove oil, the surprise and joy the first time you ever caught a fly ball. Maybe we've lost the "working class" quality that the game had, that sense of work done well, simply but well.

Then again, maybe I'm just a middle-aged guy stuck in a world of nostalgia...but I take heart that I'm probably not alone in that world .

Bill

Thanks for posting. I remember as a kid loving the game summary's in the papers back in the early 50's. Brought back many a memory..thanks again.