400 years ago, New York City was New Amsterdam—outpost of the Dutch West India Company. 100 years ago, Babe Ruth experienced the bellyache heard round the world. It marked a forgettable season with the New York Yankees. That very year, Mrs Dalloway was published. In it, Virginia Woolf writes: “But cricket was no mere game. Cricket was important. He could never help reading about cricket. He read the scores in the stop press first, then how it was a hot day; then about a murder case.” Priorities! (BTW, August 9, 2025, 100 years later—400 into NYC—MLB debuts its first female umpire: Jen Pawol.)
Hardship found no home at the afternoon doubleheader of April 8, 2025, for both the Yeshiva University Maccabees and the Lehman College Lightning.
Lehman, of the City University of New York, broke a 42 (or 41?)-game losing streak with a 7-6 extra-innings thriller over Yeshiva, a Modern Orthodox Jewish school, in the opener.
The heartbreaker was Yeshiva’s 100th consecutive loss.
In game 2 the Maccabees stormed back 9-5 to avoid a 101st.
The 1961 Philadelphia Phillies of the National League had a long way to go in catching-up-or-down in futility by losing 23 consecutive games. (The 1889 Louisville Colonels hold the record for the longest losing streak in official MLB history at 26 games.)
Torpedo bats are here! Based on innovations by Professor Aaron Leanhardt (“Lenny”), they’re differently configured: more bulk toward the handles, by the labels. The bats are further customized based on the comfort zone of the major-league ballplayer. Or can they be hazardous to a hitter’s health? Nothing in the specifications or professional North American rules contradicts the basic-design shape. So far. (We’re barely out of March 2025.) The on-deck baseball doughnut developed by Elston Howard; Roger Maris’s 34-ounce H&B; Babe Ruth’s mighty stick—the ash-wood Louisville Slugger; 30 years ago, maple wood. So yesterday. Today? Torpedomania! Right off the Bat indeed.
Ernie Banks’s enthusiasm was contagious as Covid-19 as he declared, “Let’s play two!”
Will the regularly scheduled doubleheader, the double-dip, make a comeback in Major League Baseball? Perhaps even in deference to other-sports schedules? Auguring this is a matter of time. Literally.
Nice work if you can get it!
To produce a leaner product MLB introduces the pitch clock (2 seconds shaved with runner or runners on base in 2024); decrees a limit to pick-off throws; and heeds the message that fashionable yet soul-sucking analytics-shifts be outlawed, returning infielders to position-defined placements. For good measure, near pillow-sized bases have been tossed in to encourage between-pitches action.
From some seasons ago observe sparser per-game “visits” (5) to the pitcher—fewer sermons on the mound, with MVR standing for Mound Visits Remaining.
As of the 2021 season, Rule 7.04 in the Official Baseball Rules states games cannot be played under protest. Almost assuredly, this was to cut down on time-wasting arguments. (Until the World War II era, successfully protested games were rare: only 5 from 1876 through 1942. Since then to 2020, there had been 153.)
It’s the coral and the hare!!
Free-runners; or, ghost-runners (a.k.a. Manfred Man, for Commissioner Rob Manfred) continue to haunt (or come on without, come on within). Ties at nine innings are expeditiously resolved for the most part. Relief pitchers are required to face the minimum three batters—unless such artists-from-the-pen suffer an injury or are replaced once an inning concludes.
In 2025, find a stiffened penalty for any fielder, such as second baseman or shortstop, who violates the infield-shift rule and is the first to touch the ball. Should this happen, the batter will be awarded first base and any runners would advance one base.
Also in 2025, spring-training games will experiment with robo-umpires in judgment of pitchers and batters via the ABS: Automated Ball-strike System. Call for the Ty-D-Bol Man: Anyone for A.I.?
Benches have 10 seconds from an umpire’s call to request video-reviews. By misfortune, these continue to slow an otherwise-quickened tempo.
Is this a ballgame or an oil painting?
Baseball.A largely swifter! freer! electrifying! 21st-century-springtime version of itself: young, fast, and (yes, still “Coming, Mother!”—to analytics) scientific.
And you pays your money and takes your Joyce!!!
Amidst the within-game sea change, each club now would also get a whack at every club over the course of 162 games: the good, the bad, and the wallydraigle. This is known as “a balanced schedule,” tho it’s really somewhat hapless-shapeless with respect to geographic-rivalries, meaning: more travel.
Private-airline convivia and travel-fatigue aside, from experience on the minor-leagues level it’s estimated the average nine-innings MLB game shall diet: from three hours and three minutes to two-and-a-half hours.
Welcome home, then, to the old-fashioned weekend-afternoon doubleheader?The twiniter? Such would no longer amount to a crushing—especially if kids are involved—eight-hours plus at the stadium.
We don’t care if we never get back—not!!!!
Ballplayers would earn the timely extra-day blow. That off-day following a Sunday doubleheader would ease extra-travel pressures, deriving from fewer intra-division (divisions are predicated on traditional rivalries-by-location) games—a number that’s dropped from 19 to 13.
So many clubs qualifying for Wild Card berths diminish the significance of divisional play, possibly an unwise decision by MLB, which had faced economic pressures to model itself on other U.S. pro sports in their loooong seasons: the NFL, NBA, and especially the NHL—in fall, winter, spring, summer.
Halftime yet?
Fatalistic, vampiric (Is that a word? What about umpiric?)analytics too, over our years, had been sapping life from games; extinguishing the scintillating, the spontaneity, the fun (oodles of money can foster a clumpy effect—joy can’t be monetized); reducing longevous, rococo-florid ballgames to the even worse: predetermined outcomes.
Time for le cordon sanitaire to boredom.
Infielders’ athleticism would be on display. Batters would return to purer, in-the-moment hand-eye coordination. Pitchers would rely on muscle-memory capacity sans iPad opacity.
And the Powers…are…thinking…of…the…stalwart fans? Mere efts. A novel approach to that recessive-gene of fandom, as no games on spring/summer holidays, such as July 4th, leave a hole in the soul…
…um, heaven forbid between-innings commercials be reduced to interlunations’ frequency or accelerated to meteoric speed. (They’d be MVP’d!)
Stubbornly, timidly reluctant to change compared to cricket, which has reinvented itself in timely ways, baseball by its starchy, branchiopodstandards is going all out to inject Banks’s ardour…
…um, even to schedule pack-a-windlestraw-lunch doubleheaders that simultaneously re-energize long-case clock fans and galvanize younger ones?
A similar novel approach…now to foreshadow the past…
…um, the game is afoot to return to jesterday’s 154 regular-season (or similar)—thereby expanding the Wild Cards’ formula, yet not playing deep in November—and scheduling doubleheaders may well be part of this plan.
In the summer-rhythmic diurnality of baseball, wherein the rivalries and history of the world are played out Lilliputian, wherein followers debate and thrive in nostalgia—its opposite being the prescient past—on the modern-rare day off we’ll imaginatively play the regularly scheduled two too…jestermorrow.
There was little talk of manufacturing runs. (“What [made-in-the-USA or foreign] factory does that?” [hoho]) Batted balls either flew out of vacant parks (cf. scoring 29, above) or there was “a K.” The spin-rate launch-angle-analytics-exit-velocity era was in full swing (as it were).
Why outfielders? Or maybe 4, even 5? There was the cricketlike shifting of infielders.
Or…we’ve had to grow accustomed to four outfielders.
Hitting below the Mendoza Line was virtually acceptable and probably inevitable thro a puny 60-game schedule. This sample-size determination, versus a regular-season 162 games, plus 30-to-40 preseason, in part accounts for many statistical anomalies. Essentially, we watched an April-and-September season.
Gained in all probability (thus saving jobs) was the DH by the N.L., which hereby would join the rest of the uncivilized-baseball world. (It seems increasingly likely the full change would occur round a new collective-bargaining agreement [CBA] in 2022-23.)
Loss and gain are brothers twain.
Watch out for neutral-site World Series, which aren’t plagued by the late-October or even November (or beyond) vagaries of unseasonable heat, unreasonable cold, rain, wind, and sleet/snow. Year-round international baseball, long predicted on the model of the ICC, has to be in the (metaphorical) offing.
It started, in-season, as so-called Subway Series. More and more, regional rivalries will further supersede traditional intraleague-play (there’s overlap of course) rivalries. Costs will be cut that way.
Questionable is whether, from here, every announcer will travel with his or her team anymore, or regularly gather onsite during CDC-projected waves of the coronavirus. More costs cut…and Zoom! it’s back to the future.
If history doesn’t repeat, its stories and lessons rhyme. (This witticism ofttimes is attributed to Mark Twain, even if he never said it; positively, he never saw the clever observation published under or over his name.) It took Babe Ruth and the live-ball era/revolution of the home run—just as, perhaps, proponents of analytics (or anti-analytics) are functionally accomplishing today—to rejuvenate the game.
Irony is its own reward…the walking shadow…
…that measures what we lost.
On to Le Sacre du Printemps! (in 2021 or 2022 or even 2023 and then well beyond that)…when it’s Wait ’til this Year all over again….
Joe DiMaggio barnstorms (and instructs) in Japan following the 1950 World Series.
As I (Evander) write this on July 16, 2020, it is 79 years since Joe DiMaggio’s hitting streak reached its 56th and final game.
In the twilight of his proud career the Clipper would enjoy his second-longest consecutive-game batting streak: 19 games.*
Between September 7, 1950, and September 26, 1950, DiMaggio collected 29 hits in 75 at-bats. That’s a .387 accomplishment. He had 8 home runs and drove in (RBI) 25 during this streak.
On September 11 he even hoisted three home runs into the distant left-field bleachers of Griffith Stadium. In his career, DiMaggio had hit three home runs in only two other games: on June 13, 1937, and on May 23, 1948 (this the first game of a doubleheader in Cleveland…two of the homers came off Bob Feller).
Overall that 1950 season, his last great one, Giuseppe led the American League with a .585 slugging percentage. He walked 80 times that year, an unusually high number for his career. He had 32 home runs, 122 RBI, and a .301 batting average.
Meanwhile, an 18-year-old slugger in Class C Ball, Joplin, Missouri, presumably still learning to ply his trade at shortstop, had 199 hits for a .383 batting average, 26 homers, and a .638 slugging percentage.
By 1951, and in right field not shortstop, Mickey Mantle would join the American hero JD, the greatest since Lindbergh and Ruth, on the New York Yankees.
(As fate would have it during the World Series that year, in running for a fly ball off the bat of another New York rookie and great-to-be, Willie Mays, who uncharacteristically swung late, Mantle [as DiMaggio called him off the play] caught his foot on the lip of a rubbery-drain and popped a knee. The injury itself was the true beginning of Mantle’s star-crossed career.)
*My bad. The great DiMaggio had a 23-game hitting streak in 1940! (Thus we have an anniversary of 80 years as this blog was posted, along with the 70 of its title.)…Now that I’ve extended this essay, I’ll do so a little more. The also-great Red Smith, equally at home at a cuppy-racetrack or the baseball-sward, finished it all thus: “There were, of course, many others [memorable and favorites], not necessarily great. Indeed, there was a longish period when my rapport with some who were less than great made me nervous. Maybe I was stuck on bad ballplayers. I told myself not to worry. Some day there would be another Joe DiMaggio.”
The magazine everyone in the US once read identifies Hemingway and Ruth as two of the most-important Americans of the preceding century.
My (Evander’s) old friend and longtime supporter of the Right off the Bat project, Mike Katzmarek, reported a story he’d heard on a French-radio broadcast that started me on the slightly scattered subjects of this blog. Thanks also go to the late Professor Peter L. Hays for his singular knowledge of all things Hemingway. Any errors of fact or logic or proportion, or lapses in taste in the following conspectus are, emphatically, solely my own.
Nineteen-eighteen is one of those big-news years. Getting into the action early, Ernest Hemingway, as yet too unworldly for fame, sailed from New York to Europe on May 11. By July, he was injured by mortar-fire in Italy. A bogus letter (see the link four paragraphs below) from F. Scott Fitzgerald claims Hemingway was too macho to quarantine during the early stages of the Spanish (originating in Kansas and likely spread to Europe by US troops) Flu, not even to wash his hands they say.
On May 19 and a world away, Babe Ruth—who would hit 11 home runs that year, a staggering total, more than entire teams (Ed Barrow of all people was among the many who felt the home run was something of a fad to fade away), though Tillie Walker matched the great one’s power-number—came down with a high fever.
Ruth would be reported near death.
The Behemoth of Blast was transitioning to a legend. So was Papa Hemingway. The pair, in age separated by four years, would soon come to define the Jazz Age, the Roaring Twenties.
In a smidgen of that era, Hemingway would have to quarantine at the Fitzgeralds’. It was at Cap d’Antibes, in 1926, part of a deft à trois arrangement the Babe would’ve admired…while Papa gravitated toward rich (“Let me tell you about the very rich. They are different from you and me….”)* women. (Ruth is never known to have quarantined, and he’d have plenty of his own gold, sans digging, by the 1920s.)
Ruth’s heroics would be reported, in Boston particularly, as akin to an avenging Uncle Sam on the battlefields of France. The Red Sox luckily had sent few players to that bleak theater.
The 1918 World Series, which would haunt Red Sox Nation (the agony of Cubs fans would be a footnote to it) for nearly a century, was over by early September as the MLB season ended on the eleventh (after a 140-game schedule). Due to the pandemic the government had ordered citizens to find “meaningful work.” Ruth signed on with Charles Schwab’s steel factory in Lebanon, Pennsylvania, largely to play ball.
By early October, however, and always on the move (another trait shared with Papa), the Babe was back in his native Baltimore—two or three years (or so) before tripping the light fantastic in New York. He was likely recovering from a second-round knockout by the pandemic. Antibodies? Antigens? Herd immunity? Curse of the Bambino?
With vim and verve he walloped the curve From Texas to Duluth, Which is no small task, and I rise to ask; Was there ever a guy like Ruth? [or Papa?]
—John Kieran
Though Papa Hemingway had several brushes with death before self-ending a crowded life, only Babe Ruth could succumb to a pandemic twice (!) and win a World Series in the same year.
Coda: The 1918 (e.g., Hal Chase’s suspension) and 1919 seasons were front-and-back-loaded with scandal not unlike what MLB had in store for the public a hundred years later, in 2017 and 2019. It was “1918 and All That.”
*The quote is from F. Scott Fitzgerald’s “The Rich Boy,” not said by Hemingway or Ruth: just likely thought by them, too, along with many of us.
June 1, 2020, with nary a game played. There is no lockout. There is no players’ union work-stoppage. There has been no declaration of war. There is no paralyzing scandal. What do we do with an empty stadium? As the song says, we could put up a parking lot. If not for the social-distancing suggested, we could turn it into an urban mall…as the artist’s conception shows. Impersonate a stadium…a season….
And use your imagination….(credit: New York Times)
Credit Rod Kennedy Jr. for a keen perseverance. Pursuant to the story linked to his name, Kennedy unearthed (the right word) the blueprints for Ebbets Field. This is where Kennedy lives in his memories (as all us fans of baseball and cricket do, whatever the era or place in the world, Flatbush or Tibet) of a wild (in terms of where the ball was going after it left his hand)-young Sandy Koufax and the then-more-established Boys of Summer from the 1950s.
Kennedy’s dream is a one-quarter scale re-creation of Ebbets Field for a Dodgers museum. Kennedy went scavenging, in a place he more expected to find Bela Lugosi morphing into a bat (not a 42-oz. model), for the original stadium plans. Unfortunately, the Brooklyn Municipal fathers have reclaimed the blueprints. But much had been learned:
“The drawings revealed unknown aspects of the ballpark’s design…. ‘Photos are usually taken from some distance away, and when you stand back from the entrance you see little tiny round things on the roof of the ballpark,’ [an observer] said. The blueprints showed that these rooftop decorations, known as antefixes, were in fact baseballs, ornaments that echoed the baseball-adorned terracotta spandrels above the pilasters. The lot plan also showed that McKeever Place, on the…third-base side, was named Cedar Place in 1912.”
Charles Hercules Ebbets would be happy. His great club wouldn’t win a championship till 30 years after his death.
Whether instruments belonging to the Dodgers Symph-phony Band have been or will be discovered, since the wrecking (base)ball of early 1960, remains unknown.
She’s the lyrics of Hart When he wrote with Dick Rodgers, A raspberry tart, And the ol’ Brooklyn Dodgers!
The pitcher does a little shuffle: By the time the ball’s released his back foot is ten inches in front of the rubber.
The ball whizzing toward the batter is loaded with pine-tar or similar foreign-substance; or the ball’s been scuffed on a sharpened belt-buckle to make it dance a little, dip, or sail.
Then there’s the ol’ neighborhood play: The shortstop maybe not even straddles second base to double up the runner at first.
Standing on second, the runner transmits the catcher’s signal to the batter thro some even-more elaborate signal.
Two out and the ball’s popped up toward third as the runner, formerly on second now scooting by, orally distracts the infielder camping under it.
On the bench players decode the third-base coach’s signs.
PED are serious enough. Ditto the Suits messing with the liveliness of the ball and players corking their bats, or pitchers doctoring baseballs to obtain an unfair-competitive advantage. But the reason the Chicago Black Sox Scandal of a hundred years ago remains the seismic U.S.-sports infraction to our time is that it leaves fans questioning whether they are yawning thro predetermined exhibitions. Pro wrestling.
Right Off the Bat 