The 34-Ton Bat Read online

  An Oxford-educated science-fiction novelist and mathematician, Hinton was married to Mary Everest Boole, eldest daughter of George Boole, inventor of Boolean logic and thus the father of computer science. But to say that Hinton was an absentminded professor doesn’t quite do him justice. At the time he was married to Mary Boole, for instance, he was also married to Maud Wheldon, making him a mathematician who evidently couldn’t count to two. Fleeing England after his bigamy conviction, Hinton landed at Princeton University, where he taught math, honed his pioneering theories about the fourth dimension, and spent idle hours watching the Tigers baseball team practice.

  “Among college boys,” Hinton wrote, “I had noticed many a case of [a pitching] aspirant who had to relinquish all efforts to make the team because his arm gave out.” To solve that problem, in 1896, Hinton conceived a device that would save the arms of young pitchers—and, he was certain, eliminate the need for pitchers entirely. He set about building a contraption that would marry two of America’s most overriding obsessions: firearms and baseballs.

  After experimenting with catapults, “it occurred to me that practically whenever men wished to impel a ball with velocity and precision, they drove it out of a tube with powder,” Hinton wrote. “Following then the course of history, I determined to use a cannon.” And so he built a baseball-firing cannon that proved wildly temperamental. Sometimes the ball “merely roll[ed] out of the muzzle,” as he put it; other times it was expelled with “prodigious velocity.”

  As Hinton explained to three hundred members of the Princeton Club in 1897, “The baseball is placed in the barrel of the cannon as an ordinary cannon ball, and is expelled by the pressure of air which comes from the rifle when a cartridge in the latter is discharged.”

  That cartridge was discharged when the batter stepped on a metal plate, sending an electrical impulse through a wire to the cannon, activating the cartridge of powder and, one would assume—a split-second later—the bowels of the batter.

  It became clear in its very first exhibition—on its very first pitch, in fact—that Hinton’s cannon made baseballs ballistic. “There was a muffled report, a puff of smoke and the ball went whizzing toward the plate,” reported the Boston Daily Globe. “It appeared so suddenly that the batsman ducked [and] the catcher made a wild leap to one side while the ball sailed directly over the plate and up against the backstop with a resounding crack.” Subsequent pitches were less accurate. One of the game’s participants, Captain Bradley, was reportedly hit “in the breast and floor,” which was surely every bit as painful as it sounds.

  Hinton retreated for a year to hone his cannon’s precision, and to reduce its bulk to “a handy and portable weapon.” He returned in 1897 with a baseball-firing rifle, a gun so accurate he called it Cupid. The papers called it “the Princeton Gun” or “the Baseball Gun.” Another exhibition was staged on the Princeton varsity field, between two campus social clubs: the Ivy Club and Tiger Inn. The gun impelled a baseball, with a puff of smoke, at seventy miles an hour. Two finger-like rods inserted by choice into the rim of the cannon barrel allowed the baseballs to curve. Cupid’s accuracy was such that only four walks were issued. “It was obvious that a little practice operating the machine would produce almost perfect accuracy,” an eyewitness reported. Hinton foresaw the day when a single inaccurate pitch would constitute a base on balls, and pitchers—newly rendered redundant—would remain by Cupid’s side to field the position and feed the beast its baseballs.

  But in fact the baseball gun was so effective that it rendered itself almost instantly obsolete. As a correspondent covering the exhibition put it, “Batters having accustomed themselves to the pitcher’s motion find it difficult to hit a ball delivered by an automaton.” Their fears and protests could not be overcome. Hitters, recognizing themselves as cannon fodder, were not eager to face the gun a second time, while the smoke still curled from its turret and the air still whistled with the sound of smoking baseball.

  Hinton left his Princeton post within months of demonstrating his baseball gun and would go on to vet the inventions of others as the second assistant examiner in the U.S. Patent Office. It is unlikely that he saw, at the turn of the century, the handiwork of Joseph Beit, a photographer and inventor in West Chester, Pennsylvania, who built a device of his own that shot baseballs out of the Chester County Courthouse on summer days at noon. Beit’s targets were considerably more receptive than Hinton’s. Crowds of children would gather at the courthouse at midday, awaiting Beit’s fusillade of horsehide. There was something gratifying—and deeply challenging—about catching a baseball that fell from a clear blue sky.

  Construction of the Washington Monument began in 1848 and continued—off and on, as funding and peacetime allowed—for the next thirty-six years. By 1874, when the unfinished obelisk had risen to nearly half its height, there was a “baseball ground” at its base.

  By the time the tower was completed, on December 6, 1884, the monument was instantly recognized as both a towering memorial to the city’s namesake and a kind of dare to baseball’s finest fielders. Professionals wondered—on road swings through the nation’s capital—if any among them could catch a baseball dropped from the top of the obelisk.

  Washington Monument, half completed, in 1874, with a baseball field in the foreground. (Library of Congress)

  “As regularly as the ball teams visited Washington there would be a controversy that no base ball player could catch a ball thrown from this height to the ground beneath,” wrote a correspondent in Sporting Life. “It has been held that no man could hold fast to a ball dropped 500 feet in sheer space.”

  And so, in the spirit of other nineteenth-century quests—Moby-Dick, say, or Stanley’s search for Livingstone—an expedition of Washington Nationals set out for the monument on January 9, 1885. The players had waited for only thirty-three days after it opened. A member of their party took the elevator to the top and, one by one, began raining baseballs onto his teammates below. Among them was catcher Phil Baker, who disdained the fairly recent phenomenon of a protective leather glove, relying instead on his bare hands, on which he would break six fingers in his career.

  “[A] ball was thrown from one of the small windows with some force,” the Washington Post reported the next day. “Baker, in one instance, gauged its fall correctly and caught it in his hands, but almost immediately dropped it.”

  Given that a pop fly seldom ascends higher than 150 feet, and that this ball fell from 555 feet, it should not have surprised Baker that two knuckles of his right hand were broken. But of course it did surprise him. As Baker told an interviewer in 1932, when he was a seventy-five-year-old man in Akron, Ohio, “I decided right then that I’d never try a stunt like that again.”

  But others were eager to do so. It was the kind of bar bet beloved by idle athletes, nurtured in the hothouse of stifling trains. Chicago Colts player-manager Cap Anson was especially obsessed with the monument, and, on August 25, 1894, at the end of a series in Washington, he volunteered catcher William (Pop) Schriver to attempt an assault on this baseball Everest, albeit an Everest equipped with an elevator.

  Teammates Clark Griffith and Wild Bill Hutchinson were dispatched up the elevator, and Griffith—future father of my first boss—dropped a test ball from the north window. When that ball did not burrow into the earth, as some had feared, but instead rebounded ten feet into the air, Schriver was emboldened. Wearing a glove, he caught and held on to the very next ball, at which time a “highly indignant” policeman intervened. “He talked of arrests,” Sporting Life noted, “but was finally coaxed into a more amiable temper, and the party came up town joyously, with Schriver a hero. Schriver says that the ball was ‘hot,’ but no more so than if it had come from the bat of a vigorous player.”

  Alas, Schriver’s historic feat eventually faded from memory, and by 1908 two Washington socialites—W. J. Preston Gibson and John Biddle—wagered $500 on whether a man could catch a ball dropped from the monument. On August 21 of
that summer, Senators catcher Gabby Street stood beneath the monument and caught the thirteenth ball thrown by Gibson, who later labeled it in black ink: AUGUST 21, 1908, 11:30 A.M. DROPPED FROM THE WASHINGTON MONUMENT BY W. J. PRESTON GIBSON, CAUGHT BY GABBY STREET. 550 FEET, 135 FEET PER SECOND.

  In 1964, the ball was discovered by Gibson’s son, James, when he sold his family’s Georgetown mansion at 3017 N Street to the recently widowed Jacqueline Kennedy, who had somehow not insisted that the ball be included in the sale price.

  Street’s catch received national attention, and was wrongly but widely reported to have been the first catch of its kind. “Ever since Street accomplished his feat base ball catchers the country over have been talking about it, and not a few of them have confessed a desire to emulate it,” according to the 1910 edition of The Reach Official American League Base Ball Guide, written with the flair of a Harlequin Romance. “[Billy] Sullivan was among this number, and on each visit of his team to Washington he would spend many hours gazing longingly and speculatively at the top of the big stone shaft.”

  Armed with a permit from park service police, White Sox catcher Billy Sullivan caught three of thirty-nine balls thrown from the big shaft on August 24, 1910. Within a month, the aviator Charles F. Willard thought it would be “great sport” to fly an airplane fortified with baseballs one thousand feet over Hawthorne Race Course in Cicero, Illinois, dropping them one by one into Sullivan’s hungry mitt. Sullivan declined the offer, saying prophetically that he “might as well try to stop a bullet as to be on the receiving end of one whizzing from an aeroplane.”

  Still, once an airplane was mentioned, it became like the gun in a Chekhov play. It had to go off—and it did, in 1914, in spring training, when Brooklyn manager Wilbert Robinson, for reasons known only to him, agreed to catch a baseball dropped 525 feet from a Wright Model B biplane flown over Daytona Beach. Preparing to take off that day, aviatrix Ruth Law realized she had forgotten a vital piece of equipment. Which is to say, a baseball. A man on the ground with a grapefruit in his lunch offered it to Law as a substitute. And so she brought the breakfast fruit on board instead, unbeknownst to Robinson. When the falling orb stopped whistling on descent and finally hit him in the chest—exploding in a spray of red—Robinson thought, not unreasonably, that he had been killed.

  Then as now, the grapefruit was at the upper end of the hail continuum, on which weathermen describe hail as golf-ball-sized, baseball-sized, or grapefruit-sized. And the hail continued to fall from the heavens throughout the next decade, when another attempt was made to catch a baseball from a passing airplane. On July 22, 1926, wearing his National Guard uniform, Babe Ruth circled beneath a biplane at Mitchel Field on Long Island. Such was the allure of these “stunt catches,” as they came to be known, that Ruth continued trying to shag flies—necktie knotted tightly in ninety-seven-degree heat—until he succeeded on his seventh attempt.

  But because Ruth’s ball dropped from a mere 300 feet, the Washington Monument remained the white-marble standard of stunt catches, 555 feet (and 5⅛ inches) of silent Everestian challenge. And so it remained until a group of Ohioans on the Come to Cleveland Committee had a novel idea in 1938. The committee would invite a member of the Indians to break the record shared by Schriver, Street, and Sullivan by catching a ball dropped from the city’s Terminal Tower. In doing so, the committee hoped to “let the world know that Cleveland has other things besides Torso murders,” as the Brooklyn Daily Eagle indelicately put it, referring to the serial killer then decapitating and dismembering his victims in the city.

  Babe Ruth in his National Guard uniform, shagging flies dropped from an airplane, at Mitchel Field on Long Island, July 22, 1926. (© Bettmann/CORBIS)

  And so on August 20, 1938, Indians third-string catcher Hank Helf, in dress slacks, cabana shirt, and steel helmet, prepared to field balls thrown from the observation deck of the tallest building between New York and Chicago. Terminal Tower rose 708 feet above Helf, and 10,000 spectators gathered behind a cordon. Indians third baseman Ken Keltner—who three summers later would rob Joe DiMaggio to end his fifty-six-game hitting streak—threw the first ball from the fifty-second floor. Keltner let it drop to the sidewalk, and watched with growing disquiet as it rebounded fifty feet into the air.

  Two more balls followed until Helf, on the fourth attempt, caught a ball that was falling 138 miles an hour at impact. “They looked like aspirin tablets coming down,” he said. “We were dumb enough to think it wouldn’t be dangerous.”

  It may or may not have inspired anyone to come to Cleveland, but the ensuing publicity did attract all manner of copycat catchers. Pedestrians in various American cities might have thought the clouds were seeded with Spaldings the next summer, when Phillies catcher Dave Coble caught a ball dropped from the top of the William Penn Tower in Philadelphia. “It felt as though a man had jumped into my arms,” he said.

  The same year, in San Francisco, at the Golden Gate International Exposition on Treasure Island, an aging San Francisco Seals catcher named Joe Sprinz caught five balls that fell 450 feet from the expo’s tallest attraction, the Tower of the Sun. The stunt went so well that Seals pitcher turned publicity man Walter Mails persuaded Sprinz to up the ante, and field a ball thrown from a blimp.

  On August 3, 1939—the catcher’s thirty-seventh birthday, and a mere twenty-one months since the Hindenburg disaster—Joe Sprinz stood on the Treasure Island baseball field, before two thousand fans, gazing up at a zeppelin impossibly high in the sky. The first ball it dropped, from a height of 1,200 feet, crashed into an empty section of stands. Sprinz missed the second one entirely, and the ball buried itself in the turf like an unexploded cannonball.

  The third ball fell directly into Sprinz’s mitt, which could impede but not entirely arrest its progress, traveling as it was at 150 miles an hour. The gloved ball smashed into the catcher’s face, breaking his jaw in twelve places and knocking out five teeth. Physicists at the University of California estimated the impact as 8,050 foot-pounds—like catching an 8,000-pound parcel dropped from one foot above. Sprinz was hospitalized for several weeks, and when he finally could speak he echoed Hank Helf. “It looked like an aspirin it looked so small,” he also said of the descending baseball, aspirin and other pain remedies then very much on his mind.

  Seals owner Charles Graham said, somewhat unnecessarily, “This is the end of that kind of a stunt involving any of my players.” And to this day the same has held true for all other players, bar one.

  Former minor-league player Jackie Price traveled to major- and minor-league parks, where he fired baseballs into the sky from a pneumatic tube, pursued them across the outfield in a jeep, and caught the “monstrous flies” in his glove hand while steering with his meat hand.

  Price could do more things with a baseball than any man before or since. He would hang from a miniature trapeze and take batting practice upside down, lining balls to all fields. He could hold three baseballs in his right hand and pitch them simultaneously to three separate catchers. Or pitch two balls at once, one of them a fastball, one a curve. From the catcher’s position, Price could throw two balls with a single motion, one of them to the pitcher’s mound, the other to second base.

  Jackie Price, upside down like a vampire bat. (National Baseball Hall of Fame Library, Cooperstown, NY)

  Casey Stengel had managed against Price in Milwaukee and said, “I get mad at the ball players today that can’t bunt. This fella could take the bat like this”—Stengel held it out like a rifle—“and plunk with the end of it like a pool cue.” Price could also lay down a bunt with the knob end of the bat, though there was, alas, little call for that in major-league baseball.

  Nevertheless, in the closing weeks of the 1946 season Cleveland owner Bill Veeck signed Price to play shortstop for the Indians, despite his having played only two seasons in the previous decade in the minors. An exceedingly skinny man, Price favored leopard-print shirts and often wore a snakeskin belt with the live snake still in it.
“He liked his snakes so much that he used to wear them around his waist,” wrote Veeck, though Price also kept snakes in his shirts. (At home, the snakes took their repose in his dresser drawer.)

  In 1947, the Indians were traveling by train to a spring training game in California when teammate Joe Gordon persuaded Price, whom Veeck had kept on, to remove the snake he was wearing as a belt and loose it down the aisle of the dining car, where a party of lady bowlers was eating. Indians player-manager Lou Boudreau, displeased with the chaos caused by Snakes on a Train, sent Price home, ending his major-league career after seven games.

  Price made a meager living throughout the 1950s, invariably billed again as a baseball “clown,” but by the following decade there was little call for his manifold skills, and he lived out his final years in San Francisco, where he was reported to have taken his own life on October 2, 1967. He isn’t a clown, Veeck said while Price was still alive: “He is an artist.”

  The sad end to a happy life catching baseballs as they fell from the heavens was one more reminder that the pursuit of these objects was often a fraught and melancholy proposition.

  Children have chased after lost balls throughout time, with bad results. At the turn of the last century, New York City newspapers told cautionary tales of boys who hit baseballs into neighboring yards with tragic consequences. In 1902, sixteen-year-old Max Bengersen retrieved a ball from his Brooklyn neighbor’s flower garden. The “annoyed” homeowner, cigar maker John Biesel, shot him dead, instilling fear in any child whose ball rolled into the neighbor’s yard.

  Two years later, on September 30, 1904, fourteen-year-old Christian Koehler climbed a fence in Harlem in pursuit of a baseball that had landed in a vacant lot. There, the great Simon P. Gillis was practicing his hammer throws.