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It breaks your heart. It is designed to break your heart. The game begins in spring, when everything else begins again, and it blossoms in the summer, filling the afternoons and evenings, and then as soon as the chill rains come, it stops and leaves you to face the fall alone.
A. Bartlett Giamatti
August 7, 1956. 68 cents + 7 cents tax. Via Eephus League.
“Umpire William Grieve issuing a walk to pinch hitter, outraging Red Sox manager Joe McCarthy and catcher Birdie Tebbetts, during Senators and Red Sox game.” October 1949. (Life Magazine.) The story of the memorable Yankees-Red Sox pennant race of 1949 is told in David Halberstam’s Summer of ’49.
Photo by Arthur Griffin. (via)
Phillies first-baseman Eddie Waitkus, Clearwater, Florida, 3/9/53 (source). On June 19, 1949, Waitkus was shot in the chest by a deranged fan, Ruth Ann Steinhagen, in a Chicago hotel room. The incident inspired the similar episode in Bernard Malamud’s The Natural.
Fenway Park, circa 1925: a Red Sox base runner slides into third as Yankee Joe Dugan applies the tag. From a trove of amazing images from baseball’s golden age by Boston news photographer Leslie Jones. Until their recent publication, most of the images in Jones’s collection have never been available. The Boston Public Library will continue to upload images from the collection as they are digitized. Read more about the collection here.
Matty McIntyre, left fielder, Philadelphia A’s, 1901. Probably taken at Columbia Park in Philadelphia, the first home of the A’s. (via George Eastman House)
