The 34-Ton Bat Read online

  Gillis had competed in that summer’s Olympics, and would go on to throw in the 1908 and 1912 Games. Gillis was such a giant figure in every sense of the phrase that he and a group of fellow field athletes had become renowned in the early part of the previous century as the Irish Whales. Coaches urged them to gluttony to improve their throwing distance, and once, Gillis and two other Whales, having phoned in an order of twenty-seven dozen oysters and six steaks, arrived at the restaurant to find their table set for thirty-three people.

  “Will you wait for the group?” asked the maître d’.

  “We are the group,” Gillis said.

  It was an almost unbelievable misfortune, then, that Christian Koehler clambered over that fence in 1904 just as Gillis released his sixteen-pound hammer. Shouts of warning went unheard. The boy was struck in the head and died instantly. The tragedy left Gillis heartbroken, and served as yet another high-profile reminder of the perils of pursuing a baseball.

  Those people who weren’t pursuing baseballs in the last century often found baseballs pursuing them. Don Larsen, not expecting to pitch, went out for beers the night before Game 5 of the 1956 World Series. The morning of the game, he arrived at his Yankee Stadium locker to find a baseball in his left shoe. That’s how Larsen—like countless pitchers before him—learned he would be starting on that soon-to-be-famous day.

  After jumping into Larsen’s arms at the end of the first (and still only) perfect game in World Series history, Yankees catcher Yogi Berra gave the pitcher the ball from the final out, when Dodgers pinch hitter Dale Mitchell was called out looking. Larsen held on to that ball for forty-six years. In 2002, he auctioned it—and the cap, glove, and spikes he wore that day—for $120,750.

  By then, historic baseballs had become lottery balls. In 1961, Associated Press photographer Harry Harris, covering spring training, ran into the world’s most famous divorcés in a Florida hotel lobby. Harris fumbled for a baseball he happened to have in his pocket, which Joe DiMaggio and Marilyn Monroe—on vacation, attempting to reconcile—agreed to sign. In 2006, the Harris estate sold that baseball at auction for $191,200.

  Other fortunes fell from the sky. Philip Ozersky, a research scientist at Washington University School of Medicine, attended a St. Louis Cardinals game with coworkers in 1998. When Cardinals slugger Mark McGwire hit his then-record-setting seventieth home run, the ball bounced off the hands of two different colleagues before it fell, in the left field stands, into the hands of Ozersky, who at the time earned $30,000 a year and lived in a house he rented with his girlfriend.

  Enter Todd McFarlane, who made his fortune as a comic-book artist and entrepreneur. At Guernsey’s auction house, McFarlane bought Ozersky’s baseball for a record $3.05 million, explaining: “Women don’t have the same silly wants and needs that men have. Guys can just look at this sedate piece of rawhide and go: ‘Whooooa. It’s the ball.’ ”

  That sedate piece of rawhide, with the right provenance, is seductive. The writers of The Simpsons invented the sexiest possible piece of sports memorabilia when they had Bart marvel, through the fogged glass of a baseball-card shop: “Wow! A baseball made out of Secretariat!”

  A baseball need not even be real to be desired. In 1987, Dave Bresnahan, a twenty-five-year-old catcher for the Williamsport Bills of the Double-A Eastern League, had a transformative idea. The Reading Phillies had a runner on third when Bresnahan caught a pitch and then intentionally fired it over the third baseman’s head and into left field. When the Phillies runner broke for home, Bresnahan tagged him out with the baseball in his mitt. He hadn’t thrown a baseball into left field after all. He had thrown a potato, peeled and then carved. Bresnahan’s furious manager immediately pulled him from the game, and the next day, the Cleveland Indians released him, for conduct unbecoming a Double-A catcher.

  But the keeper of the Baseball Reliquary, a museum of baseball ephemera in Pasadena, did not let the story die there. So he kept what he claimed were the desiccated remains of the Bresnahan potato spotlighted in a jar of denatured alcohol in his shrine. The reliquary also displayed a dozen major-league baseballs bearing the forged signature of Mother Teresa, allegedly seized in an FBI sports-memorabilia sting called “Operation Bullpen.”

  The reliquary’s Bresnahan potato is a fake. The original tuber is lost to history. And the Mother Teresa baseballs are also bogus—they are forgeries of forgeries. The exhibits are part of an art installation that plays on public reverence for, and fascination with, baseball’s artifacts, chief of which is the baseball itself.

  America’s fascination with the baseball may be explained, in part, by decades of denial. As late as the Depression, many baseball fans were required to return any balls hit into the stands, and most complied, as they still do at tennis matches.

  But many did not. As Sporting Life editorialized in 1913: “It is rather disconcerting, if not inconvenient, for a fan who is in the throes of the excitement that a close contest entails to have his pet corn trod and trampled on by a big, clumsy, lumbering special policeman, whose feet are as wide as an elephant’s, come charging through the aisles and packed side rows in a frantic and usually unsuccessful endeavor to capture a ball from the grasping clutches of a relic-seeking old gentleman or a small boy who wants to show his playmates a ‘real dollar-and-a-half big league base ball.’ ”

  Fans sometimes handed foul balls to servicemen seated nearby, as cops and security guards seldom fought soldiers for the safe return of a ball.

  In 1916, Cubs owner Charlie Weeghman wearied of fighting his own customers and became the first owner to let fans keep the baseballs. Not every owner followed suit. In 1921, the Giants, as was their custom at the Polo Grounds, ejected a thirty-one-year-old stockbroker named Reuben Berman for failing to turn over a foul ball. Berman sued the team and won $100 for his mental and physical distress.

  The following season, at the Baker Bowl in Philadelphia, eleven-year-old Robert Cotter declined to return a foul ball at a Phillies game. The club had a reluctant policeman arrest the boy on a larceny charge, for which he was—it scarcely seems possible now—jailed overnight. The Phillies’ business manager, William Shettsline, had been looking to make a test case over a $1.50 baseball. That he chose an eleven-year-old boy as his scapegoat was a tactical error, to say the least.

  The judge in the case was not sympathetic to the Phillies. “I don’t know whether you or Shettsline were ever boys, for if you were you would know how they cherish the ball they get, and you would permit them to have the ball instead of throwing them into a cell overnight,” he told the club’s attorney. “Such an act on the part of a boy is merely proof that he is following his own natural impulses.”

  Shortly after Phillies v. Cotter, fans were allowed to keep foul balls and home runs, with one notable exception. During World War II, teams prominently placed barrels on the field for the collection of baseballs hit into the stands. The balls were to be shipped overseas, for use by American servicemen, and any fans who failed to return foul balls to the field of play were often persuaded to do so by their seatmates. The New York Times columnist John Kieran witnessed “a one-round knockout of a gent who refused to give. It was a most amusing sight.”

  Two Barry Bonds home run baseballs—his record seventy-third of the 2001 season and the milestone six hundredth of his career—were the subjects of lawsuits between fans claiming to have been robbed of the ball in the bleacher scrum. But then the quest for an elusive baseball has been a part of American life for as long as the game has been played. John Irving’s novel A Prayer for Owen Meany centers on a missing baseball that killed the protagonist’s mother. Don DeLillo opens Underworld at the Giants–Dodgers playoff of October 3, 1951, with a kid attempting to find Bobby Thomson’s game-winning “Shot Heard ’Round the World” home run ball. The kid’s name is Cotter Martin, an echo of Robert Cotter, detained in Philadelphia for daring to keep the baseball that was hit to him.

  By that year, 1951, the annual production of major-league baseba
lls required the hides of thirty-five thousand horses, most of them American breeds who’d given their lives for “medical purposes,” as one contemporary account put it. But with each passing decade, horsehide was getting harder to come by.

  For many years, major-league horsehide came from France and Belgium, where young animals were slaughtered for meat. (Babe Ruth was swatting bleached French horsehide into the bleachers at Yankee Stadium.) But the German occupation of those countries in World War II cut off the supply line.

  So the major leagues switched first to Bolivian horsehide, then, in 1943, to hide from domestic animals. With Japan occupying Malaya and the Dutch East Indies, rubber had been rationed. So Spalding tried balata at the center of its baseballs. Alas, balata—from the milky juice of the Guyanese bully tree—is inelastic. And it showed instantly.

  On Opening Day, the powerhouse Cardinals lost 1–0 in eleven innings. The next day, they lost 1–0 in ten innings. Eleven of the first twenty-nine games in both leagues were shutouts. Reds general manager Warren Giles, in frustration, dropped a bag of balata balls off the roof of Crosley Field onto the sidewalk below. Then he did the same with a bag of 1942 baseballs. The old ones bounced an average of 13 feet, the new ones just 9½. A scientific study at New York’s Cooper Union got the same results. By early summer, Spalding acknowledged its mistake and replaced the balata with a synthetic rubber cement that returned resilience to baseballs.

  This satisfied the naysayers. But what of the neigh-sayers, the ever scarcer horses who gave their hides for the national pastime? Spalding managed to keep baseballs covered in horsehide until 1974, when the company switched to abundant American Holstein cows.

  Rawlings, meanwhile, sewed its bleached horsehides together in Haiti, having moved its plant there from Puerto Rico in 1969. Labor was cheaper in Haiti and workers became skilled with leather. Gucci handbags were made there under the dictatorship of Jean-Claude Duvalier. So were Pierre Cardin belts. After Duvalier was overthrown in 1986, Rawlings left Haiti for the political stability of Costa Rica, and baseballs now make the journey from factory floor in Turrialba to game action at major-league stadiums in as little as two weeks.

  All of this started with a lumpen orb. The first baseballs had a solid core, made of lead or another hard substance, wrapped in yarn and covered with a single piece of brown leather. These “lemon-peel” or “rose-petal” balls, their white stitches forming an X pattern, resembled a closed rosebud—that evocative word that instantly took “Citizen Kane” back to his childhood.

  Because the leather cover wasn’t bleached, the balls were brown. They could be ordered dead, medium, or live, depending on the density of the stuffing. The balls were also smaller and softer than they are today: Until 1845, fielders could throw the ball at the runner for a putout, “tucking him out” or “soaking” him.

  The great leap forward for the baseball, like the great leap forward for the swimsuit, was the introduction of the two-piecer. The Edison of the two-piece baseball cover is often said to be Colonel William A. Cutler, whose ball went into production by H. P. Harwood & Sons in Natick, Massachusetts, in 1858.

  But a shoemaker’s son, Ellis Drake, of nearby Stoughton, Massachusetts, also claimed authorship of the two-piece cover. Near the end of his life, in 1909, he told the Stoughton Sentinel that the first baseballs he knew had a lead center, were wrapped tightly in knitting yarn, and were then covered in a single scrap of leather chamois.

  “One day in school when the teacher was not looking—it was a rare moment—I took a sheet of paper and made a diagram of a baseball cover in its present form. It was just a thought that came to me.”

  Drake made a prototype but neglected to take out a patent, an oversight for which he sounded both resigned and embittered. “It is a satisfaction to me to think that I have been able to confer some pleasure on the world,” he said, “though I have never received a thank you or a complimentary ticket to a ball game.”

  By the 1870s, London-born Philadelphia Athletics outfielder Al Reach was manufacturing his own baseballs under the brand name A. J. Reach. Boston Red Stockings shortstop George Wright—son of an English immigrant—was manufacturing his own as well. With his partner, Henry Ditson, Wright expanded into tennis, hockey, and golf equipment. To spur club sales, George Wright would design one of America’s first public golf courses, Franklin Park in Boston.

  The following year, at the National Association’s convention in New York, the baseball’s dimensions were fixed: Balls should weigh between 5 and 5¼ ounces and measure between 9 and 9¼ inches in circumference, with a two-piece cover in figure-eight stitching. The dimensions have not changed to this day. That Reach and Wright were essentially creating America’s sporting-goods industry was not lost on Wright’s Boston teammate.

  In 1876, Chicago White Stockings owner William Hulbert lured the game’s best pitcher, Albert G. Spalding, away from the Boston Red Stockings and back to his native Illinois. Hulbert, with the help of Spalding, set about persuading seven teams, including Boston, to leave the National Association and form a breakaway new league, the National League of Professional Baseball Clubs.

  An 1883 baseball being inspected by a U.S. patent officer in 1925. (Library of Congress)

  Spalding won forty-six games in 1876, increasing the wattage of his stardom and the breadth of his influence. Spalding was the first star player to wear a protective glove on his catching hand, in 1877, and a year after his move to Chicago, he opened a sporting-goods store in which to sell those gloves, plus his own brand of baseball, for which he became the exclusive supplier to the brand-new National League, a distinction that Spalding would hold for the next hundred years.

  But this near monopoly on America was not enough. From October 1888 to April 1889, Spalding traveled the globe, a trip chronicled in a wonderful book by Mark Lamster called Spalding’s World Tour. Over thirty thousand miles and five continents, Spalding’s White Stockings played exhibition games against a team of All-Stars, in an effort to promote friendship among nations—Spalding’s middle name literally was Goodwill—but also to sell baseballs to the wider world. “The famous baseball genius has been at work for several months on a plan to carry the game into foreign fields at the furthest ends of the earth,” reported the St. Paul Pioneer Press, “and at the same time bring back a bountiful store of shekels.”

  Spalding’s raucous party of ballplayers, entertainers, and assorted hangers-on sailed to Hawaii that fall aboard the cruise liner Alameda. After losing five baseballs overboard, Spalding forbade all members of his traveling party from playing catch at sea.

  That party included comedian Frank Lincoln, a black “mascot” named Clarence Duval, and a one-eyed “aerialist” who called himself Professor C. Bartholomew. At an exhibition in Adelaide, Australia, Bartholomew dangled from a trapeze that in turn dangled from a hot-air balloon hovering two thousand feet in the air. When Bartholomew leaped from his trapeze, and his parachute deployed too late, he hit the chimney of a hotel. The fall didn’t kill him, but it did dampen, for the rest of the tour, the professor’s enthusiasm for performing.

  Ballplayers behaved then as they might today. Spalding’s players tried, and failed, to throw a baseball over the Great Pyramid of Giza. They were photographed climbing the Sphinx, where one of them threw a baseball at its eye. In Rome, officials declined Spalding’s offer of $5,000 to let his teams play an exhibition in the Colosseum. On and on the tour went, for the entirety of an American winter—Ceylon, Naples, Rome, Paris, London, Glasgow, Belfast, Dublin—Spalding attempting to sell his little world to the world at large, hoping an Italian’s first experience of the game would prove as captivating as his was, in Illinois.

  Spalding’s players on the Sphinx, 1889. (National Baseball Hall of Fame Library, Cooperstown, NY)

  As a boy, Spalding had watched from the sidelines as older kids played baseball games in his native Rockford. One day, a baseball was hit toward him. It was his entrée not only into that baseball game, but into the game its
elf. “Talk about special Providence!” he wrote years later. “That ball came for me straight as an arrow. Impulsively I sprang to my feet, reached for it with my right hand, held it for a moment, and then threw it home on an air-line to the catcher.”

  Even as a wealthy man—a wealth built in part on the selling of baseballs—Spalding never failed to be enthralled by the baseball as a physical object. Whenever one of the game’s dignitaries died, Spalding would send a funeral wreath composed of white immortelles in the shape of a baseball. When Spalding himself died in 1915, in Point Loma, California, his body was cremated. This was in stark contrast to his partner in forming the National League, Hulbert, who remains buried in Chicago beneath that giant granite baseball embossed with the names of the original National League cities, and figure-eight patterned with 108 stone stitches.

  Those 108 stitches recall this world, the ancient world, and—in some religions—the world to come. By happy coincidence, there are also 108 Hindu deities, 108 sins in Buddhism, 108 prayer beads on the Japa mala, or Hindu rosary. That number, so fraught in Hindu culture, was introduced in the early twenty-first century as the unifying emergency telephone number in the Indian subcontinent, where 108 is now the equivalent of 911—a number equally fraught, for very different reasons, in America.

  In the weeks following the attacks of September 11, 2001, New York firefighter Vin Mavaro was “working the pile” at Ground Zero, sifting through fine rubble for human remains, when he saw what he thought was a chunk of concrete. As he reached for it, he saw red stitching. To Mavaro’s astonishment, it was a baseball, intact and emblazoned with the corporate logo of TradeWeb, whose offices had been on the fifty-first floor of the North Tower.

  Ball from TradeWeb, whose offices were on the fifty-first floor of the North Tower of the World Trade Center, found in the rubble at Ground Zero, 2001. (Milo Stewart Jr./National Baseball Hall of Fame Library, Cooperstown, NY)