When going through my collection of baseball books, most of them have nice covers, full of graphics and nice print. However, one book clearly stands out in my collection. An old, tattered, solid green hardback book looks like the worst piece in my collection. It is not. In fact, it is the best book in my collection.
This is the inside page which tells that the book is titled Low And Inside and was printed in 1949. This book would later be reprinted with cover art, but this is in fact a first edition version of the book. The top line lets us know what this book will be about: "A Book of Baseball Anecdotes, Oddities and Curiosities". It's full of interesting short true stories that occurred in baseball from the 1800s to the 1940s. These aren't the basic stories of great games and moments, but the odd and strange moments that would have been lost to time if not gathered by the author here from discussions with people and newspaper articles.
Once we get to the stories themselves, we see that it's an easy reading size font and there are many pages with full page or most-of-the-page illustrations of the events taking place in the stories. It does not go in any specific order or have any kind of structure. The stories are random to say the least, and are about many different baseball leagues and teams, not restricted to Major League Baseball.
I feel that this is such a great book, that I am going to post several stories from this book to my blog, because I feel they need to be known and would be interesting to any baseball fan. I am going to post these stories over several posts, because a smart person once said 'if we don't remember the past, we're doomed in the future to repeat it.' The stories don't have titles, so the titles I give are just for appeal. I also typed them out with the same spacing, capitalization and punctuations used by the original author.
Snakes On A Field
ONE DAY in July of 1909, James Phelps was playing in the outfield for Rayville in a game at Monroe, Louisiana. In the eighth inning a Monroe batter drove a long fly over Phelp's head. He turned with the crack of the bat and raced into a bog on the outer edge of the playing field, and the spectators roared approval when he made a spectacular, one-handed catch of the ball.
At the moment the ball hit his glove, Phelps felt a stinging sensation on his leg. Glancing down, he saw a large snake. He was one of the team's star players, and he felt that he should stay in the game, so he said nothing about the snake and played out the ninth inning. Only then did he mention the snake to his teammates. Two hours later he was dead.
The Dog Days Of Summer
A CLEVELAND OUTFIELDER named Moffitt encountered extraordinary difficulties when he went after a high fly ball during a game with Chicago one afternoon in 1884.
Just as Moffitt started his run, a dog came onto the field. The dog appeared to believe that Moffitt was running from him in fright and went for the outfielder. Moffitt stayed on his course despite the fact that the dog was soon nipping at his legs. In the same instant that he caught he ball, the fielder kicked the dog in the head, and the dog lit out for the side lines.
Moffitt took quick stock of the situation. Nobody on base. He whirled around, cocked his arm, and threw the ball with all his might---a perfect peg it was, too, for it hit the fleeing dog squarely in the backside and knocked him essover appetite.(Note, I don't condone animal cruelty, but apparently he was pretty mad at the dog; also, the player's name on the 1884 Cleveland Blues was Sam Moffet, so the author misspelled his name, not me).
Baseball Takes A Lot Of Heart
ASSIGNED to the job of scorekeeper in a game at Morristown, Ohio, one day in 1902, a young man named Stanton Walker found that his pencil needed sharpening in one of the late innings. He asked the man sitting next to him for a knife. Walker had just started to put a new point on his pencil when a hard foul ball shot back of the plate, struck his hand, and drove the blade of the knife into his heart.
"Kill The Umpire!"....Literally?!
JUST for the record, at least two umpires have been killed by ballplayers who, infuriated over decisions, have attacked the officials with bats. In 1899 at Lowndesborough, Alabama, Umpire Samuel White was killed by a player who had been abusing him all afternoon. Umpire White, after taking the abuse for several innings, knocked the player down; when he got up he had a bat in his hand and used it to fracture White's skull, killing him instantly. Two years later, at Farmersburg, Indiana, Umpire Ora Jennings was killed in much the same way.
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