Baseball

The 2009 World Series brings together two cities uncommonly rich in baseball history. Though you might guess which team NYPL is rooting for this year, we've posted a selection of images on The Commons on Flickr representing a variety of New York and Philadelphia ball clubs of yore.

Some of the game's earliest years are chronicled in over 500 photographs, prints, drawings, caricatures, and printed illustrations donated in 1921 to the New York Public Library by early baseball player and sporting-goods tycoon A. G. Spalding (whose name to this day is printed across every ball used in the National League).

As the contemporary Yankees and Phillies clash on the field, here you'll find Philadelphia Quakers, Athletics and Keystones in a gentlemanly mix with New York Giants, Knickerbockers and Metropolitans, and of course Brooklyn Excelsiors and Atlantics. Each one of these images of course has an enormous back story, which we hope the baseball history buffs among you will help fill in through comments, links, tags and annotations.

Also check out a smaller set, Proto-baseball, which gathers images of baseball's ball-and-stick forebears like cricket and Old Cat. Here's "Six boys with a ball and three bats, playing Three Old Cat":

We also invite you to explore the full Spalding Collection on the NYPL Digital Gallery and through this finding aid (PDF) from the Manuscripts and Archives Division.

Now let's just pray for the rain to stop so Game 1 can get underway...

***UPDATE*** Picked up by Gothamist!

Ever wonder what Jack Kerouac was doing at ages fourteen, fifteen and sixteen? Competing, for one. The author played on a neighborhood baseball team and was skilled enough in high school football that he was offered scholarships to play at both Boston University and at Columbia (he later accepted the New York school’s offer, a choice that ensured his path crossed with William S. Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg, and Neal Cassady, among others here).

As a teenager, Kerouac was also at work inventing his own fantasy field of dreams. In his free time, the young writer founded a complicated fantasy baseball league, as well as a Thoroughbred horseracing circuit. Kerouac recorded the rules, results, and player stats of both games in an extensive collection of broadsheets, cards, newsletters, and scorecards in the Jack Kerouac Papers, housed in the Stephen A. Schwarzman Building’s Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection of English and American Literature. These documents are the subject of a new book, Kerouac At Bat: Fantasy Sports and the King of the Beats, by Isaac Gewirtz, Curator of the Berg Collection.  read more »

Spring has sprung, and for many of us that means the beginning of the baseball season. A few years ago, a ballpark, named Richmond County Ballpark at St. George, was built right next to the Staten Island Ferry terminal. It is the home of the Staten Island Yankees, a Class A minor league team of the New York Yankees. They play a short season (this year from June 17 to September 6). Prices for tickets are cheap; in past years they have been in the $10 range for the best seats. Food prices are cheaper than the major leagues, but not as inexpensive as one might hope, at least in my opinion. Most of the players are right out of high school or college, and for most this is their first professional baseball experience. They play with a lot of enthusiasm and hope.

Current NY Yankees Chien-Ming Wang, Melky Cabrera, and Shelly Duncan all played here before moving on in their baseball careers.

It is a great place to take in a game on a hot summer night, getting a nice breeze from the water. A lot of people rave about the view of the Manhattan skyline, but I think my favorite non-baseball thing is watching all the the ships passing by. It reminds me that we live on an island, which in the day-to-day running around many of us tend to forget. At least I do.

Check it out this summer if you get a chance! Even if you aren't a big baseball fan, I think you will still enjoy it!

The St. George Library branch is right up the street and is open till 8:00PM Monday thru Thursday.

"
Nostalgia for the past is what leads many of us to pour over our old pictures. Recently The New York Public Library posted several thousand old baseball pictures on its website. Known as the NYPL Digital Gallery, the website contains millions of digital images of pictures taken from books and archives found throughout the vast collections of the NYPL.One of the more recent image collections to go live in the NYPL Digital Gallery was the Albert G. Spalding Collection. While not all of the A.G. Spalding Collection is currently available online, we at last have a window through which to see some of the incredible things that Spalding, who must have been a real packrat, collected. The Manuscripts and Archives Division at NYPL posted a description of the A.G. Spalding collection, and although they describe things that are not in the NYPL Digital Gallery, their site has information about Spalding and all of the stuff that he collected during his time as a ball player, manager, and promoter of the sport.A word about the image, above. It is photograph of the trophies collected by the Atlantics of Brooklyn (1857-1875). The wooden frame holds a baseball from every game won by the team. The A.G. Spalding Collection contains only the photograph, not the baseballs.

At first glance, this picture looks like it has seen better days. To a trained eye, it looks like a remarkable survival.

Which is it?

This picture of the Atlantic Base Ball Club in 1869, from the Albert G. Spalding Collection, is an albumen photographic print, mounted on thin paper board.

Two words come to mind, “fugitive materials.” Because of the albumen photographic printing process, the image will fade every time it is exposed to light. Imagine how many times this picture has been viewed since it was printed in 1869! The wood pulp that formed the photograph’s mounting backboard is also highly unstable. Stanford University has a website devoted to the albumen photographic print and there you can learn all about the printing process and the stability of early photographic prints. For information about preserving photographs and working with acidic papers and board stock, see the American Institute of Conservators (AIC) website. The AIC documentation explains some of the common problems encountered in the preservation of historical artworks.If you’d like to learn about the team, check out the site maintained by their modern-day equivalents, the Atlantic Base Ball Club. Maybe you’ve heard of or participated in re-creation events (i.e. Civil War battles, or Renaissance fairs). Well there is a group of guys in New York who dress up in base ball uniforms just like those in the picture above and play ball.

For more history on the Atlantics, check out an early account of their won/loss record from1858 to 1866 that appeared in The Book of American Pastimes by Charles H. Peverelley (New York, the author, 1866). According to George Touhey, in his A history of the Boston Base Ball Club (Boston: Quinn, 1897), the stars of the team in 1870 were “Ferguson, Zittlein, Start, Pike, Pearce, Chapman, and George Hall.”At the top of the photograph, right in the middle is a small label, pasted right onto the photographic print. Hard to read at this resolution, I think it says,

“FROM: This picture”

“TO: Get photos of [Gump?, Grant?], Zittlein, Pearce, Start, Ferguson“

These appear to be instructions to the photo editor of a publication. So it would seem that this photographic print was part of a publisher’s archive, and not something that would have been framed and hung on the wall as an artistic or documentary memento of the 1869 Atlantics of Brooklyn.