\n
![](\"https:\/\/maxwellhalsted.uic.edu\/files\/2017\/08\/917-GRANDMOTHERS-FUNERAL-A-DOUBLEHEADER-Life-1024x810.jpg\")
<\/a><\/p>\nINTRODUCTION<\/strong><\/h3>\n\n- Urban Chicago and the National Game<\/em> by Laurent Pernot<\/a><\/strong><\/li>\n
- Chicago Baseball Parks Before 1900<\/a><\/strong><\/em><\/li>\n
- Spreading The Language of Baseball<\/a><\/strong><\/em><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n
\u00a0PHOTO GALLERY<\/strong><\/h3>\n\n- Tangled Mass of Boys at West Side Baseball Game<\/a><\/strong><\/li>\n
- Street Ball West Side<\/a><\/strong><\/li>\n
- Baseball Parks West Side<\/a><\/strong><\/li>\n
- Local Baseball Clubs and Players<\/a><\/strong><\/li>\n
- Baseball on Popular Magazine Covers<\/a><\/strong><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n
CHICAGO PLAYER BASEBALL CARDS<\/h3>\n
![\"2261\"](\"https:\/\/maxwellhalsted.uic.edu\/files\/2015\/09\/2261-300x180.jpg\")
<\/a>![\"2269\"](\"https:\/\/maxwellhalsted.uic.edu\/files\/2015\/09\/2269-146x300.jpg\")
<\/a><\/p>\nBaseball in the nineteenth century strived to make itself into\u00a0a respectable professional sport from a rowdy pick-up game. Photography assisted in raising the game to a visual spectacle especially for younger fans. As part of a campaign to sell products, advertisers in the decades after the Civil War began marketing popularly branded consumer goods by including color-printed trade cards in the package. The practice took off, and professional baseball followed suit. “To see was to believe.”<\/p>\n
Sponsored first by tobacco companies, baseball cards featured uniformed players from winning teams in iconic batting and fielding poses with tools of the trade (bats and gloves) in hand. The first cards were included as a premium stiffening a pack of cigarettes. \u00a0They were quickly valued as collectibles especially by youth. In the realm of the visual, the new-found glamour of baseball reciprocated by enhancing the glamour of the manly use of tobacco.<\/p>\n
Chicago with its winning teams and large fan (”fanatic”) base was a major market for transforming the previously casual ball game into a major industry with celebrated heroes. As a viewing experience, the Joe Tinker card of the Tinker to Evers to Chance combo “knocked it out of the park.” The front side of a baseball card featured a player, the back side often information about the player branded with the company’s commercial trademark and logo.<\/p>\n
The success of the marketing strategy quickly attracted confectionery (candy) companies, especially caramel products, to produce and distribute sets of \u00a0trade cards as prizes in boxes. An instance was the popularity of the caramel covered popcorn in Cracker Jacks in Chicago in 1914–“the more you eat the more you want.” \u00a0With the rapid proliferation of baseball cards, the marketing message became, “the more you see the more you want.” \u00a0Take me out to the old ball game! \u00a0 bjb<\/p>\n
\n- Chicago Players Baseball Card Gallery<\/a><\/strong><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n
“CHICAGOED”: BASEBALL GLOSSARY<\/strong><\/h3>\n![\"TANGLE](\"https:\/\/maxwellhalsted.uic.edu\/files\/2017\/01\/TANGLE-MASS-BOYS-WEST-SIDE-BASEBALL-GAME-896x1024.jpg\")
<\/a><\/p>\nThe ever growing vernacular male slang of American baseball expressed felt-realities\u00a0shared in a polyglot urban environment of diverse nationalities, ethnicities, religions, and races where \u201ckeeping one\u2019s eye on the ball,\u201d “hitting a home run,” not \u201cstriking out\u201d or getting \u201cshut out (Chicagoed)\u201d described attitudes in the everyday world of ordinary living where one \u201cstepped up to the plate,\u201d \u201cwent the distance,\u201d \u00a0and was \u00a0“thrown out.”<\/p>\n
The vernacular of baseball was for the most part generational. \u00a0A first generation of Jews in the ghetto, for instance, commonly spoke only Yiddish not English, while they rejected baseball as a frivolous waste of time. Unlike their parents, bi-lingual children became Americans by learning to speak a slangy American vernacular prevalent on the neighborhood streets and in the playgrounds. \u00a0 bjb<\/p>\n
\n- “Chicagoed” Baseball Glossary<\/a><\/strong><\/li>\n
- Baseball Vernacular in Everyday Life<\/em> by Burton J. Bledstein<\/a><\/strong><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n
BASEBALL “TALK” IN LIFE<\/em> MAGAZIN<\/strong>E: POPULAR CARTOONS (1889-1913)<\/strong><\/h3>\n![](\"https:\/\/maxwellhalsted.uic.edu\/files\/2017\/06\/912-BASEBALL-TALK5-Life-1024x943.jpg\")
<\/a>![](\"https:\/\/maxwellhalsted.uic.edu\/files\/2017\/06\/913-BASEBALL-IDIOM-Life-e1496490952200.jpg\")
<\/a><\/p>\n\n- In Training-Life (1889)<\/a><\/strong><\/li>\n
- Baseball Term-Life (1894)<\/a><\/strong><\/li>\n
- Baseball Term-Life (1897)<\/a><\/strong><\/li>\n
- Baseball Term-Life (1902)<\/a><\/strong><\/li>\n
- Baseball Term1-Life (1909)<\/a><\/strong><\/li>\n
- Baseball Term2-Life (1909)<\/a><\/strong><\/li>\n
- Baseball Term1-Life (1910)<\/a><\/strong><\/li>\n
- Baseball Term2-Life (1910)<\/a><\/strong><\/li>\n
- Baseball Term3-Life (1910)<\/a><\/strong><\/li>\n
- Baseball Suggestion-Life (1911)<\/a><\/strong><\/li>\n
- Baseball Term-Life (1911)<\/a><\/strong><\/li>\n
- Baseball Term-Life (1912)<\/a><\/strong><\/li>\n
- Baseball Talk-Life1 (1912)<\/a><\/strong><\/li>\n
- Baseball Talk-Life2 (1912)<\/a><\/strong><\/li>\n
- Baseball Talk-Life3 (1912)<\/a><\/strong><\/li>\n
- Baseball Talk-Life4 (1912)<\/a><\/strong><\/li>\n
- Baseball Talk-Life5 (1912)<\/a><\/strong><\/li>\n
- Baseball Term-Life (1912)<\/a><\/strong><\/li>\n
- Baseball Term5-Life (1912)<\/a><\/strong><\/li>\n
- A Baseball Fan-Life (1913)<\/a><\/strong><\/li>\n
- Baseball Idiom-Life (1913)<\/a><\/strong><\/li>\n
- Baseball Talk-Life1 (1913)<\/a><\/strong><\/li>\n
- Baseball Talk-Life2 (1913)<\/a><\/strong><\/li>\n
- Baseball Term-Life (1913)<\/a><\/strong><\/li>\n
- Baseball Term3-Life (1913)<\/a><\/strong><\/li>\n
- Baseball-Life (1913)<\/a><\/strong><\/li>\n
- Watching The Bulletin-Puck (1913)
\n<\/a><\/strong><\/li>\n<\/ul>\nBASEBALL AN URBAN RELIGION<\/h3>\n
![\"\"](\"https:\/\/maxwellhalsted.uic.edu\/files\/2015\/09\/2594.jpg\")
<\/a>![\"\"](\"https:\/\/maxwellhalsted.uic.edu\/files\/2015\/12\/0116.jpg\")
<\/a><\/p>\nMorris Raphael Cohen was born in Imperial Russia, and at age twelve moved with his family to the U.S. in 1892. He was educated at City College of New York (the proletarian\u2019s Harvard) where he taught Philosophy for many years.<\/p>\n
In response both to his orthodox Jewish home traditions and his secular urban childhood, Cohen was pragmatic about what it would take to unite diverse peoples in a common activity in industrial and commercial cities like New York and Chicago. Political pleadings for community, shared sacrifice, and the public good\u2013refrains from a nativist older generation–were insufficient to motivate and convert skeptical and cynical urban populations to join in a common objective.<\/p>\n
Professional baseball, in which the objective was winning, had proven itself as more than a mere game. From sand lot to ball park, from immigrant child to working-class adult, the sport of professional baseball displayed an awesome identification with a higher power, a mystic unity with a larger life. \u201cIs there any other experience in modern life in which multitudes of men so completely and intensely lose their individual selves in the larger life which they call their city?\u201d<\/p>\n
Baseball with its rules embodied adversarial combat on a fair field of battle–a moral equivalent of war. With the long baseball season, the large number of games, the importance of statistical averages such as RBIs and ERAs\u2013there was always another time at bat to anticipate, another inning to play, another game to win or lose, another penant race, another season to play. Consolation today, work for a better outcome. In 1919, after the human carnage on the First World War\u2019s battlefields, Cohen\u2019s moral equivalent of war argument pitched the ball into the strike zone. \u00a0 bjb<\/p>\n
\n- Morris Raphael Cohen (1880-1947)<\/a><\/strong><\/li>\n
- An Urban Religion, Moral Equivalent of War by Morris R. Cohen (1919)<\/a><\/strong><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n
BASEBALL PRIMERS: 19th CENTURY<\/strong><\/h3>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/maxwellhalsted.uic.edu\/files\/2017\/02\/2160-1-300x255.jpg\")
<\/a>![\"\"](\"https:\/\/maxwellhalsted.uic.edu\/files\/2017\/02\/4175-1-300x243.jpg\")
<\/a><\/p>\n\u201cHow To\u201d primers proliferated in the reading marketplace in the mid-19th century. When Mark Twain signed on as a cub pilot on the shape-shifting and treacherous Mississippi River, his mentor handed him a notebook and guiding maps with instructions to start learning the indeterminate snake-like river as he had learned his \u201cABCs.\u201d<\/p>\n
With the rising popularity of ball games, both in the countryside and cities, English-born American sportswriter Henry Chadwick began producing \u201chow to\u201d primers for the evolving game of Base Ball. He elaborated upon the features of the game with multiple illustrations, detailed descriptions, precise measurements of the playing field, and methodical guiding rules. A statistician, Chadwick was the first to rely on the centrality of numerical evidence, box scores of runs and home runs, strikeouts, batting averages and earned run averages, all essential features of the modern professional game.<\/p>\n
With a sense of the sensational, Chadwick promoted himself as the father of the national sport. He described his achievement as an \u201centering wedge\u201d and \u201cpowerful lever\u201d in a \u201cgreat reformation\u201d by which regular people would be \u201clifted into a position of more devotion to physical exercise and healthful outdoor recreation.\u201d<\/p>\n
His objective was to lay out a disciplined form of \u201cmoral recreation\u201d which could be played almost anywhere by any person with inexpensive equipment and minimal fear of bodily injury from wild pitching, brawling players, and imperious umpires. \u00a0 bjb<\/p>\n
\n- Henry Chadwick (1824-1908)<\/a><\/strong><\/strong><\/li>\n
- How To Learn The Game by Henry Chadwick-1st book (1868)<\/a><\/strong><\/li>\n
- How To Learn The Game by Henry Chadwick-2nd book (1868)<\/a><\/strong><\/li>\n
- How To Learn The Game by Henry Chadwick-3rd book (1868)<\/a><\/strong><\/li>\n
- Rules and Regulations (1868)<\/a><\/strong><\/li>\n
- Chadwick’s Baseball Manual (1874)<\/a><\/strong><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n
ALFRED G. SPALDING, CHICAGO<\/h3>\n
![](\"https:\/\/maxwellhalsted.uic.edu\/files\/2017\/07\/14598469169_0935797a98_b-e1500590891404.jpg\")
<\/a>
\n![](\"https:\/\/maxwellhalsted.uic.edu\/files\/2017\/07\/Rawlings1982XFG6HBEFORE01_zps1f793e52-e1500590923897.jpg\")
<\/a><\/p>\nCelebrated as the father of baseball, Albert Goodwill Spalding dedicated most of his career contributing to the professionalization and development of \u201cAmerica\u2019s game.\u201d He believed sports built character and furnished a wholesome antidote to the late nineteenth century\u2019s urban industrial ills.<\/p>\n
Spalding was born in 1850 in Byron, Illinois to financially prosperous parents. After his father died in 1858, Albert lived with his aunt in Rockford, Illinois, where he attended public school and later Rockford Community College. His career in baseball began at the age of twelve when he participated in informal town games in a local schoolboy club.<\/p>\n
When a new baseball club formed in 1865 called the Forest Cities, Spalding was asked to join as pitcher. By 1867 he became well known when the Forest Cities defeated the Washington Nationals. He was first employed as a clerk for one of the baseball team\u2019s players. At the time the National Association of Baseball Players prohibited players being paid salaries.<\/p>\n
In 1870 Spalding became a professional player and joined Harry Wright\u2019s newly created professional league, the National Association of Professional Baseball Players. \u00a0He was captain and pitcher for the Boston Red Stockings. The team subsequently won four championships between 1872 and 1875. In five years with the Red Stockings, Spalding won 205 games and became identified as the \u201cchampion pitcher of the world.\u201d<\/p>\n
In 1876 to left Boston to pitch for and manage the Chicago White Stockings. While building Chicago\u2019s professional baseball team, Spalding also aided in transforming baseball into a respectable and popular pastime for rural and urban young Americans alike. Spalding quit pitching in 1878 and became a full-time team and business manager. In 1882 he was named president of the Chicago White Stockings, and remained until 1891. He assisted in creating the National League of Professional Baseball Clubs now with standardized rules and\u00a0means of enforcement.<\/p>\n
At the same time he opened A. G. Spalding and Brothers Sporting Goods in Chicago, including the manufacture and vending of baseball equipment. The company expanded and profited from Spalding\u2019s name recognition and influence, and became the exclusive provider of baseballs for league players, and publisher of the Official League Book. Spalding himself edited Spalding\u2019s Official Baseball Guide<\/em> from 1878 to 1880. The Spalding enterprises also manufactured equipment for other sports, including footballs, basketballs, and golf clubs, becoming the best known sports equipment company of its time. \u00a0bjb<\/p>\n\n- The Psychology Of Baseball by A.G. Spalding (1911)<\/a><\/strong><\/li>\n
- America’s National Game by Albert .G. Spalding (1911)<\/a><\/strong><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n
BILLY SUNDAY, EVANGELICAL ATHLETE<\/strong><\/h3>\n![\"4335\"](\"https:\/\/maxwellhalsted.uic.edu\/files\/2015\/09\/4335.jpg\")
<\/a>![\"4350\"](\"https:\/\/maxwellhalsted.uic.edu\/files\/2015\/09\/4350.jpg\")
<\/a><\/p>\nBilly Sunday was a popular outfielder known for his speed and agility in the National League in Chicago. When he converted to evangelical Christianity at Pacific Garden Mission at 386 S. Clark Street in the 1880s, his life took a new direction. Born into poverty in Iowa of German immigrant parents (name Sonntag Americanized to Sunday), Billy\u2019s father died serving in the Civil War, and the boy was raised in a series of orphanages. He shifted around in odd jobs when his athletic ability was spotted and he was signed by A.G. Spalding\u2019s Chicago White Stockings in the National League. Over an eight year baseball career with major league teams, his hitting was average, fielding good, and base-running first-rate.<\/p>\n
Following the encounter with salvation at the Mission on Clark St., Billy decided to sacrifice a $3500. baseball salary to work at the YMCA for $83 per month, while developing his skills as a pulpit evangelist. Also he now renounced drinking, swearing, and gambling–all inveterate habits of his working-class professional baseball player circle of friends.<\/p>\n
In the early decades of the 20th century Sunday\u2019s unique style of fire-drenched sermons and frenzied acrobatics–stretching and racing to snare and catch sinners as he once had leaped and dived to catch baseballs and speed around the bases–made him the nation\u2019s largest drawing revivalist preacher on the \u201csaw dust\u201d trail. Churches that were too small to hold the crowds turned to tents, and midwestern towns not electrified prompted Sunday to refer to his circuit as the \u201ckerosene trail.\u201d Every limb animated, Sunday circled around the stage, throwing out his arms and feet gesturing a slide into home base.<\/p>\n
With his ministry expanding, Sunday\u2019s wife became his campaign manager. The family operation was now transformed from a casual free-will offering road show into a profitable business hiring song leaders, a music director, advance men, Bible teachers, set-up workers, and support staff for outreach evangelization.<\/p>\n
Fireworks and slangy sermonizing were the new brand for saving souls, an extravagant style of hell-fire gloom that many main-line religionists found raw, disgusting, improper, indecent, and depraved. \u00a0But all that mattered was that evangelical sinners in the pliable and gesticulating hands of Billy Sunday approved their spiritual fate in large numbers, an estimated one hundred million face to face before the era of electronic amplification. Scandal never touched Billy Sunday.<\/p>\n
It all began for a working-class boy on a baseball field in Chicago and in a rescue Mission on South Clark Street. Over the years, Pacific Garden Mission was relocated several times in the city to serve and shelter transient and homeless populations. Today it is located at 14th Place and Canal Street, about a mile southwest of its original State Street site. \u00a0bjb<\/p>\n
\n- Billy Sunday (1862-1935)<\/a>\u00a0<\/strong><\/li>\n
- Billy Sunday’s Urban Religion<\/em> by Stephen A. Brown<\/strong><\/a><\/li>\n
- Pacific Garden-Mission in the Slum (1904)<\/a><\/strong><\/li>\n
- The Devils Boomerangs or Hotcakes on the Griddle<\/strong><\/a><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n
\u00a0BILLY SUNDAY EVANGELICAL PREACHER: GALLERY<\/strong><\/h3>\n
\u00a0PHOTO GALLERY<\/strong><\/h3>\n\n- Tangled Mass of Boys at West Side Baseball Game<\/a><\/strong><\/li>\n
- Street Ball West Side<\/a><\/strong><\/li>\n
- Baseball Parks West Side<\/a><\/strong><\/li>\n
- Local Baseball Clubs and Players<\/a><\/strong><\/li>\n
- Baseball on Popular Magazine Covers<\/a><\/strong><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n
CHICAGO PLAYER BASEBALL CARDS<\/h3>\n
<\/a><\/a><\/p>\nBaseball in the nineteenth century strived to make itself into\u00a0a respectable professional sport from a rowdy pick-up game. Photography assisted in raising the game to a visual spectacle especially for younger fans. As part of a campaign to sell products, advertisers in the decades after the Civil War began marketing popularly branded consumer goods by including color-printed trade cards in the package. The practice took off, and professional baseball followed suit. “To see was to believe.”<\/p>\n
Sponsored first by tobacco companies, baseball cards featured uniformed players from winning teams in iconic batting and fielding poses with tools of the trade (bats and gloves) in hand. The first cards were included as a premium stiffening a pack of cigarettes. \u00a0They were quickly valued as collectibles especially by youth. In the realm of the visual, the new-found glamour of baseball reciprocated by enhancing the glamour of the manly use of tobacco.<\/p>\n
Chicago with its winning teams and large fan (”fanatic”) base was a major market for transforming the previously casual ball game into a major industry with celebrated heroes. As a viewing experience, the Joe Tinker card of the Tinker to Evers to Chance combo “knocked it out of the park.” The front side of a baseball card featured a player, the back side often information about the player branded with the company’s commercial trademark and logo.<\/p>\n
The success of the marketing strategy quickly attracted confectionery (candy) companies, especially caramel products, to produce and distribute sets of \u00a0trade cards as prizes in boxes. An instance was the popularity of the caramel covered popcorn in Cracker Jacks in Chicago in 1914–“the more you eat the more you want.” \u00a0With the rapid proliferation of baseball cards, the marketing message became, “the more you see the more you want.” \u00a0Take me out to the old ball game! \u00a0 bjb<\/p>\n
\n- Chicago Players Baseball Card Gallery<\/a><\/strong><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n
“CHICAGOED”: BASEBALL GLOSSARY<\/strong><\/h3>\n<\/a><\/p>\nThe ever growing vernacular male slang of American baseball expressed felt-realities\u00a0shared in a polyglot urban environment of diverse nationalities, ethnicities, religions, and races where \u201ckeeping one\u2019s eye on the ball,\u201d “hitting a home run,” not \u201cstriking out\u201d or getting \u201cshut out (Chicagoed)\u201d described attitudes in the everyday world of ordinary living where one \u201cstepped up to the plate,\u201d \u201cwent the distance,\u201d \u00a0and was \u00a0“thrown out.”<\/p>\n
The vernacular of baseball was for the most part generational. \u00a0A first generation of Jews in the ghetto, for instance, commonly spoke only Yiddish not English, while they rejected baseball as a frivolous waste of time. Unlike their parents, bi-lingual children became Americans by learning to speak a slangy American vernacular prevalent on the neighborhood streets and in the playgrounds. \u00a0 bjb<\/p>\n
\n- “Chicagoed” Baseball Glossary<\/a><\/strong><\/li>\n
- Baseball Vernacular in Everyday Life<\/em> by Burton J. Bledstein<\/a><\/strong><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n
BASEBALL “TALK” IN LIFE<\/em> MAGAZIN<\/strong>E: POPULAR CARTOONS (1889-1913)<\/strong><\/h3>\n<\/a><\/a><\/p>\n\n- In Training-Life (1889)<\/a><\/strong><\/li>\n
- Baseball Term-Life (1894)<\/a><\/strong><\/li>\n
- Baseball Term-Life (1897)<\/a><\/strong><\/li>\n
- Baseball Term-Life (1902)<\/a><\/strong><\/li>\n
- Baseball Term1-Life (1909)<\/a><\/strong><\/li>\n
- Baseball Term2-Life (1909)<\/a><\/strong><\/li>\n
- Baseball Term1-Life (1910)<\/a><\/strong><\/li>\n
- Baseball Term2-Life (1910)<\/a><\/strong><\/li>\n
- Baseball Term3-Life (1910)<\/a><\/strong><\/li>\n
- Baseball Suggestion-Life (1911)<\/a><\/strong><\/li>\n
- Baseball Term-Life (1911)<\/a><\/strong><\/li>\n
- Baseball Term-Life (1912)<\/a><\/strong><\/li>\n
- Baseball Talk-Life1 (1912)<\/a><\/strong><\/li>\n
- Baseball Talk-Life2 (1912)<\/a><\/strong><\/li>\n
- Baseball Talk-Life3 (1912)<\/a><\/strong><\/li>\n
- Baseball Talk-Life4 (1912)<\/a><\/strong><\/li>\n
- Baseball Talk-Life5 (1912)<\/a><\/strong><\/li>\n
- Baseball Term-Life (1912)<\/a><\/strong><\/li>\n
- Baseball Term5-Life (1912)<\/a><\/strong><\/li>\n
- A Baseball Fan-Life (1913)<\/a><\/strong><\/li>\n
- Baseball Idiom-Life (1913)<\/a><\/strong><\/li>\n
- Baseball Talk-Life1 (1913)<\/a><\/strong><\/li>\n
- Baseball Talk-Life2 (1913)<\/a><\/strong><\/li>\n
- Baseball Term-Life (1913)<\/a><\/strong><\/li>\n
- Baseball Term3-Life (1913)<\/a><\/strong><\/li>\n
- Baseball-Life (1913)<\/a><\/strong><\/li>\n
- Watching The Bulletin-Puck (1913)
\n<\/a><\/strong><\/li>\n<\/ul>\nBASEBALL AN URBAN RELIGION<\/h3>\n
<\/a><\/a><\/p>\nMorris Raphael Cohen was born in Imperial Russia, and at age twelve moved with his family to the U.S. in 1892. He was educated at City College of New York (the proletarian\u2019s Harvard) where he taught Philosophy for many years.<\/p>\n
In response both to his orthodox Jewish home traditions and his secular urban childhood, Cohen was pragmatic about what it would take to unite diverse peoples in a common activity in industrial and commercial cities like New York and Chicago. Political pleadings for community, shared sacrifice, and the public good\u2013refrains from a nativist older generation–were insufficient to motivate and convert skeptical and cynical urban populations to join in a common objective.<\/p>\n
Professional baseball, in which the objective was winning, had proven itself as more than a mere game. From sand lot to ball park, from immigrant child to working-class adult, the sport of professional baseball displayed an awesome identification with a higher power, a mystic unity with a larger life. \u201cIs there any other experience in modern life in which multitudes of men so completely and intensely lose their individual selves in the larger life which they call their city?\u201d<\/p>\n
Baseball with its rules embodied adversarial combat on a fair field of battle–a moral equivalent of war. With the long baseball season, the large number of games, the importance of statistical averages such as RBIs and ERAs\u2013there was always another time at bat to anticipate, another inning to play, another game to win or lose, another penant race, another season to play. Consolation today, work for a better outcome. In 1919, after the human carnage on the First World War\u2019s battlefields, Cohen\u2019s moral equivalent of war argument pitched the ball into the strike zone. \u00a0 bjb<\/p>\n
\n- Morris Raphael Cohen (1880-1947)<\/a><\/strong><\/li>\n
- An Urban Religion, Moral Equivalent of War by Morris R. Cohen (1919)<\/a><\/strong><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n
BASEBALL PRIMERS: 19th CENTURY<\/strong><\/h3>\n <\/a><\/a><\/p>\n\u201cHow To\u201d primers proliferated in the reading marketplace in the mid-19th century. When Mark Twain signed on as a cub pilot on the shape-shifting and treacherous Mississippi River, his mentor handed him a notebook and guiding maps with instructions to start learning the indeterminate snake-like river as he had learned his \u201cABCs.\u201d<\/p>\n
With the rising popularity of ball games, both in the countryside and cities, English-born American sportswriter Henry Chadwick began producing \u201chow to\u201d primers for the evolving game of Base Ball. He elaborated upon the features of the game with multiple illustrations, detailed descriptions, precise measurements of the playing field, and methodical guiding rules. A statistician, Chadwick was the first to rely on the centrality of numerical evidence, box scores of runs and home runs, strikeouts, batting averages and earned run averages, all essential features of the modern professional game.<\/p>\n
With a sense of the sensational, Chadwick promoted himself as the father of the national sport. He described his achievement as an \u201centering wedge\u201d and \u201cpowerful lever\u201d in a \u201cgreat reformation\u201d by which regular people would be \u201clifted into a position of more devotion to physical exercise and healthful outdoor recreation.\u201d<\/p>\n
His objective was to lay out a disciplined form of \u201cmoral recreation\u201d which could be played almost anywhere by any person with inexpensive equipment and minimal fear of bodily injury from wild pitching, brawling players, and imperious umpires. \u00a0 bjb<\/p>\n
\n- Henry Chadwick (1824-1908)<\/a><\/strong><\/strong><\/li>\n
- How To Learn The Game by Henry Chadwick-1st book (1868)<\/a><\/strong><\/li>\n
- How To Learn The Game by Henry Chadwick-2nd book (1868)<\/a><\/strong><\/li>\n
- How To Learn The Game by Henry Chadwick-3rd book (1868)<\/a><\/strong><\/li>\n
- Rules and Regulations (1868)<\/a><\/strong><\/li>\n
- Chadwick’s Baseball Manual (1874)<\/a><\/strong><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n
ALFRED G. SPALDING, CHICAGO<\/h3>\n
<\/a>
\n<\/a><\/p>\nCelebrated as the father of baseball, Albert Goodwill Spalding dedicated most of his career contributing to the professionalization and development of \u201cAmerica\u2019s game.\u201d He believed sports built character and furnished a wholesome antidote to the late nineteenth century\u2019s urban industrial ills.<\/p>\n
Spalding was born in 1850 in Byron, Illinois to financially prosperous parents. After his father died in 1858, Albert lived with his aunt in Rockford, Illinois, where he attended public school and later Rockford Community College. His career in baseball began at the age of twelve when he participated in informal town games in a local schoolboy club.<\/p>\n
When a new baseball club formed in 1865 called the Forest Cities, Spalding was asked to join as pitcher. By 1867 he became well known when the Forest Cities defeated the Washington Nationals. He was first employed as a clerk for one of the baseball team\u2019s players. At the time the National Association of Baseball Players prohibited players being paid salaries.<\/p>\n
In 1870 Spalding became a professional player and joined Harry Wright\u2019s newly created professional league, the National Association of Professional Baseball Players. \u00a0He was captain and pitcher for the Boston Red Stockings. The team subsequently won four championships between 1872 and 1875. In five years with the Red Stockings, Spalding won 205 games and became identified as the \u201cchampion pitcher of the world.\u201d<\/p>\n
In 1876 to left Boston to pitch for and manage the Chicago White Stockings. While building Chicago\u2019s professional baseball team, Spalding also aided in transforming baseball into a respectable and popular pastime for rural and urban young Americans alike. Spalding quit pitching in 1878 and became a full-time team and business manager. In 1882 he was named president of the Chicago White Stockings, and remained until 1891. He assisted in creating the National League of Professional Baseball Clubs now with standardized rules and\u00a0means of enforcement.<\/p>\n
At the same time he opened A. G. Spalding and Brothers Sporting Goods in Chicago, including the manufacture and vending of baseball equipment. The company expanded and profited from Spalding\u2019s name recognition and influence, and became the exclusive provider of baseballs for league players, and publisher of the Official League Book. Spalding himself edited Spalding\u2019s Official Baseball Guide<\/em> from 1878 to 1880. The Spalding enterprises also manufactured equipment for other sports, including footballs, basketballs, and golf clubs, becoming the best known sports equipment company of its time. \u00a0bjb<\/p>\n\n- The Psychology Of Baseball by A.G. Spalding (1911)<\/a><\/strong><\/li>\n
- America’s National Game by Albert .G. Spalding (1911)<\/a><\/strong><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n
BILLY SUNDAY, EVANGELICAL ATHLETE<\/strong><\/h3>\n<\/a><\/a><\/p>\nBilly Sunday was a popular outfielder known for his speed and agility in the National League in Chicago. When he converted to evangelical Christianity at Pacific Garden Mission at 386 S. Clark Street in the 1880s, his life took a new direction. Born into poverty in Iowa of German immigrant parents (name Sonntag Americanized to Sunday), Billy\u2019s father died serving in the Civil War, and the boy was raised in a series of orphanages. He shifted around in odd jobs when his athletic ability was spotted and he was signed by A.G. Spalding\u2019s Chicago White Stockings in the National League. Over an eight year baseball career with major league teams, his hitting was average, fielding good, and base-running first-rate.<\/p>\n
Following the encounter with salvation at the Mission on Clark St., Billy decided to sacrifice a $3500. baseball salary to work at the YMCA for $83 per month, while developing his skills as a pulpit evangelist. Also he now renounced drinking, swearing, and gambling–all inveterate habits of his working-class professional baseball player circle of friends.<\/p>\n
In the early decades of the 20th century Sunday\u2019s unique style of fire-drenched sermons and frenzied acrobatics–stretching and racing to snare and catch sinners as he once had leaped and dived to catch baseballs and speed around the bases–made him the nation\u2019s largest drawing revivalist preacher on the \u201csaw dust\u201d trail. Churches that were too small to hold the crowds turned to tents, and midwestern towns not electrified prompted Sunday to refer to his circuit as the \u201ckerosene trail.\u201d Every limb animated, Sunday circled around the stage, throwing out his arms and feet gesturing a slide into home base.<\/p>\n
With his ministry expanding, Sunday\u2019s wife became his campaign manager. The family operation was now transformed from a casual free-will offering road show into a profitable business hiring song leaders, a music director, advance men, Bible teachers, set-up workers, and support staff for outreach evangelization.<\/p>\n
Fireworks and slangy sermonizing were the new brand for saving souls, an extravagant style of hell-fire gloom that many main-line religionists found raw, disgusting, improper, indecent, and depraved. \u00a0But all that mattered was that evangelical sinners in the pliable and gesticulating hands of Billy Sunday approved their spiritual fate in large numbers, an estimated one hundred million face to face before the era of electronic amplification. Scandal never touched Billy Sunday.<\/p>\n
It all began for a working-class boy on a baseball field in Chicago and in a rescue Mission on South Clark Street. Over the years, Pacific Garden Mission was relocated several times in the city to serve and shelter transient and homeless populations. Today it is located at 14th Place and Canal Street, about a mile southwest of its original State Street site. \u00a0bjb<\/p>\n
\n- Billy Sunday (1862-1935)<\/a>\u00a0<\/strong><\/li>\n
- Billy Sunday’s Urban Religion<\/em> by Stephen A. Brown<\/strong><\/a><\/li>\n
- Pacific Garden-Mission in the Slum (1904)<\/a><\/strong><\/li>\n
- The Devils Boomerangs or Hotcakes on the Griddle<\/strong><\/a><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n
\u00a0BILLY SUNDAY EVANGELICAL PREACHER: GALLERY<\/strong><\/h3>\n
CHICAGO PLAYER BASEBALL CARDS<\/h3>\n
Baseball in the nineteenth century strived to make itself into\u00a0a respectable professional sport from a rowdy pick-up game. Photography assisted in raising the game to a visual spectacle especially for younger fans. As part of a campaign to sell products, advertisers in the decades after the Civil War began marketing popularly branded consumer goods by including color-printed trade cards in the package. The practice took off, and professional baseball followed suit. “To see was to believe.”<\/p>\n Sponsored first by tobacco companies, baseball cards featured uniformed players from winning teams in iconic batting and fielding poses with tools of the trade (bats and gloves) in hand. The first cards were included as a premium stiffening a pack of cigarettes. \u00a0They were quickly valued as collectibles especially by youth. In the realm of the visual, the new-found glamour of baseball reciprocated by enhancing the glamour of the manly use of tobacco.<\/p>\n Chicago with its winning teams and large fan (”fanatic”) base was a major market for transforming the previously casual ball game into a major industry with celebrated heroes. As a viewing experience, the Joe Tinker card of the Tinker to Evers to Chance combo “knocked it out of the park.” The front side of a baseball card featured a player, the back side often information about the player branded with the company’s commercial trademark and logo.<\/p>\n The success of the marketing strategy quickly attracted confectionery (candy) companies, especially caramel products, to produce and distribute sets of \u00a0trade cards as prizes in boxes. An instance was the popularity of the caramel covered popcorn in Cracker Jacks in Chicago in 1914–“the more you eat the more you want.” \u00a0With the rapid proliferation of baseball cards, the marketing message became, “the more you see the more you want.” \u00a0Take me out to the old ball game! \u00a0 bjb<\/p>\n The ever growing vernacular male slang of American baseball expressed felt-realities\u00a0shared in a polyglot urban environment of diverse nationalities, ethnicities, religions, and races where \u201ckeeping one\u2019s eye on the ball,\u201d “hitting a home run,” not \u201cstriking out\u201d or getting \u201cshut out (Chicagoed)\u201d described attitudes in the everyday world of ordinary living where one \u201cstepped up to the plate,\u201d \u201cwent the distance,\u201d \u00a0and was \u00a0“thrown out.”<\/p>\n The vernacular of baseball was for the most part generational. \u00a0A first generation of Jews in the ghetto, for instance, commonly spoke only Yiddish not English, while they rejected baseball as a frivolous waste of time. Unlike their parents, bi-lingual children became Americans by learning to speak a slangy American vernacular prevalent on the neighborhood streets and in the playgrounds. \u00a0 bjb<\/p>\n Morris Raphael Cohen was born in Imperial Russia, and at age twelve moved with his family to the U.S. in 1892. He was educated at City College of New York (the proletarian\u2019s Harvard) where he taught Philosophy for many years.<\/p>\n In response both to his orthodox Jewish home traditions and his secular urban childhood, Cohen was pragmatic about what it would take to unite diverse peoples in a common activity in industrial and commercial cities like New York and Chicago. Political pleadings for community, shared sacrifice, and the public good\u2013refrains from a nativist older generation–were insufficient to motivate and convert skeptical and cynical urban populations to join in a common objective.<\/p>\n Professional baseball, in which the objective was winning, had proven itself as more than a mere game. From sand lot to ball park, from immigrant child to working-class adult, the sport of professional baseball displayed an awesome identification with a higher power, a mystic unity with a larger life. \u201cIs there any other experience in modern life in which multitudes of men so completely and intensely lose their individual selves in the larger life which they call their city?\u201d<\/p>\n Baseball with its rules embodied adversarial combat on a fair field of battle–a moral equivalent of war. With the long baseball season, the large number of games, the importance of statistical averages such as RBIs and ERAs\u2013there was always another time at bat to anticipate, another inning to play, another game to win or lose, another penant race, another season to play. Consolation today, work for a better outcome. In 1919, after the human carnage on the First World War\u2019s battlefields, Cohen\u2019s moral equivalent of war argument pitched the ball into the strike zone. \u00a0 bjb<\/p>\n \u201cHow To\u201d primers proliferated in the reading marketplace in the mid-19th century. When Mark Twain signed on as a cub pilot on the shape-shifting and treacherous Mississippi River, his mentor handed him a notebook and guiding maps with instructions to start learning the indeterminate snake-like river as he had learned his \u201cABCs.\u201d<\/p>\n With the rising popularity of ball games, both in the countryside and cities, English-born American sportswriter Henry Chadwick began producing \u201chow to\u201d primers for the evolving game of Base Ball. He elaborated upon the features of the game with multiple illustrations, detailed descriptions, precise measurements of the playing field, and methodical guiding rules. A statistician, Chadwick was the first to rely on the centrality of numerical evidence, box scores of runs and home runs, strikeouts, batting averages and earned run averages, all essential features of the modern professional game.<\/p>\n With a sense of the sensational, Chadwick promoted himself as the father of the national sport. He described his achievement as an \u201centering wedge\u201d and \u201cpowerful lever\u201d in a \u201cgreat reformation\u201d by which regular people would be \u201clifted into a position of more devotion to physical exercise and healthful outdoor recreation.\u201d<\/p>\n His objective was to lay out a disciplined form of \u201cmoral recreation\u201d which could be played almost anywhere by any person with inexpensive equipment and minimal fear of bodily injury from wild pitching, brawling players, and imperious umpires. \u00a0 bjb<\/p>\n Celebrated as the father of baseball, Albert Goodwill Spalding dedicated most of his career contributing to the professionalization and development of \u201cAmerica\u2019s game.\u201d He believed sports built character and furnished a wholesome antidote to the late nineteenth century\u2019s urban industrial ills.<\/p>\n Spalding was born in 1850 in Byron, Illinois to financially prosperous parents. After his father died in 1858, Albert lived with his aunt in Rockford, Illinois, where he attended public school and later Rockford Community College. His career in baseball began at the age of twelve when he participated in informal town games in a local schoolboy club.<\/p>\n When a new baseball club formed in 1865 called the Forest Cities, Spalding was asked to join as pitcher. By 1867 he became well known when the Forest Cities defeated the Washington Nationals. He was first employed as a clerk for one of the baseball team\u2019s players. At the time the National Association of Baseball Players prohibited players being paid salaries.<\/p>\n In 1870 Spalding became a professional player and joined Harry Wright\u2019s newly created professional league, the National Association of Professional Baseball Players. \u00a0He was captain and pitcher for the Boston Red Stockings. The team subsequently won four championships between 1872 and 1875. In five years with the Red Stockings, Spalding won 205 games and became identified as the \u201cchampion pitcher of the world.\u201d<\/p>\n In 1876 to left Boston to pitch for and manage the Chicago White Stockings. While building Chicago\u2019s professional baseball team, Spalding also aided in transforming baseball into a respectable and popular pastime for rural and urban young Americans alike. Spalding quit pitching in 1878 and became a full-time team and business manager. In 1882 he was named president of the Chicago White Stockings, and remained until 1891. He assisted in creating the National League of Professional Baseball Clubs now with standardized rules and\u00a0means of enforcement.<\/p>\n At the same time he opened A. G. Spalding and Brothers Sporting Goods in Chicago, including the manufacture and vending of baseball equipment. The company expanded and profited from Spalding\u2019s name recognition and influence, and became the exclusive provider of baseballs for league players, and publisher of the Official League Book. Spalding himself edited Spalding\u2019s Official Baseball Guide<\/em> from 1878 to 1880. The Spalding enterprises also manufactured equipment for other sports, including footballs, basketballs, and golf clubs, becoming the best known sports equipment company of its time. \u00a0bjb<\/p>\n Billy Sunday was a popular outfielder known for his speed and agility in the National League in Chicago. When he converted to evangelical Christianity at Pacific Garden Mission at 386 S. Clark Street in the 1880s, his life took a new direction. Born into poverty in Iowa of German immigrant parents (name Sonntag Americanized to Sunday), Billy\u2019s father died serving in the Civil War, and the boy was raised in a series of orphanages. He shifted around in odd jobs when his athletic ability was spotted and he was signed by A.G. Spalding\u2019s Chicago White Stockings in the National League. Over an eight year baseball career with major league teams, his hitting was average, fielding good, and base-running first-rate.<\/p>\n Following the encounter with salvation at the Mission on Clark St., Billy decided to sacrifice a $3500. baseball salary to work at the YMCA for $83 per month, while developing his skills as a pulpit evangelist. Also he now renounced drinking, swearing, and gambling–all inveterate habits of his working-class professional baseball player circle of friends.<\/p>\n In the early decades of the 20th century Sunday\u2019s unique style of fire-drenched sermons and frenzied acrobatics–stretching and racing to snare and catch sinners as he once had leaped and dived to catch baseballs and speed around the bases–made him the nation\u2019s largest drawing revivalist preacher on the \u201csaw dust\u201d trail. Churches that were too small to hold the crowds turned to tents, and midwestern towns not electrified prompted Sunday to refer to his circuit as the \u201ckerosene trail.\u201d Every limb animated, Sunday circled around the stage, throwing out his arms and feet gesturing a slide into home base.<\/p>\n With his ministry expanding, Sunday\u2019s wife became his campaign manager. The family operation was now transformed from a casual free-will offering road show into a profitable business hiring song leaders, a music director, advance men, Bible teachers, set-up workers, and support staff for outreach evangelization.<\/p>\n Fireworks and slangy sermonizing were the new brand for saving souls, an extravagant style of hell-fire gloom that many main-line religionists found raw, disgusting, improper, indecent, and depraved. \u00a0But all that mattered was that evangelical sinners in the pliable and gesticulating hands of Billy Sunday approved their spiritual fate in large numbers, an estimated one hundred million face to face before the era of electronic amplification. Scandal never touched Billy Sunday.<\/p>\n It all began for a working-class boy on a baseball field in Chicago and in a rescue Mission on South Clark Street. Over the years, Pacific Garden Mission was relocated several times in the city to serve and shelter transient and homeless populations. Today it is located at 14th Place and Canal Street, about a mile southwest of its original State Street site. \u00a0bjb<\/p>\n<\/a><\/a><\/p>\n\n
“CHICAGOED”: BASEBALL GLOSSARY<\/strong><\/h3>\n
<\/a><\/p>\n\n
BASEBALL “TALK” IN LIFE<\/em> MAGAZIN<\/strong>E: POPULAR CARTOONS (1889-1913)<\/strong><\/h3>\n
<\/a><\/a><\/p>\n\n
\n<\/a><\/strong><\/li>\n<\/ul>\nBASEBALL AN URBAN RELIGION<\/h3>\n
<\/a><\/a><\/p>\n\n
BASEBALL PRIMERS: 19th CENTURY<\/strong><\/h3>\n
<\/a><\/a><\/p>\n\n
ALFRED G. SPALDING, CHICAGO<\/h3>\n
<\/a>
\n<\/a><\/p>\n\n
BILLY SUNDAY, EVANGELICAL ATHLETE<\/strong><\/h3>\n
<\/a><\/a><\/p>\n\n
\u00a0BILLY SUNDAY EVANGELICAL PREACHER: GALLERY<\/strong><\/h3>\n