The Baseball Read online

  ZACK HAMPLE

  THE BASEBALL

  Zack Hample is a baseball fan best known for having snagged 4,662 baseballs (and counting) from 48 different major league stadiums. Hample has been featured in hundreds of newspapers and magazines, including Sports Illustrated, People, Men’s Health, Maxim, Playboy, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and USA Today. He has also appeared on NPR, ESPN, FOX Sports, CNN International, The Rosie O’Donnell Show, the CBS Evening News with Katie Couric, and The Tonight Show with both Jay Leno and Conan O’Brien. Hample’s first book, How to Snag Major League Baseballs, was published in 1999 when he was 21 years old. His last book, Watching Baseball Smarter, was published in 2007 and is currently in its 16th printing. Hample, a New York City native, runs a business called “Watch With Zack” through which he takes people to games and guarantees them at least one ball. He also snags baseballs to raise money for the charity Pitch In For Baseball and writes a popular blog called The Baseball Collector.

  www.zackhample.com

  ALSO BY ZACK HAMPLE

  Watching Baseball Smarter

  How to Snag Major League Baseballs

  AN ANCHOR SPORTS ORIGINAL, MARCH 2011

  Copyright © 2011 by Zack Hample

  All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Anchor Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.

  Anchor Books and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Hample, Zack, 1977–

  The baseball : stunts, scandals, and secrets beneath the stitches / by Zack Hample.

  p. cm.

  eISBN: 978-0-307-74208-7

  1. Baseball—United States—History. 2. Baseball—Social aspects— United States. I. Title. GV863.A1H36 2011

  796.3570973—dc22

  2010043551

  www.anchorbooks.com

  Cover design by Base Art Co.

  Cover photograph © Don Hamerman

  v3.1

  This one’s for my dad.

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  About the Author

  Other Books by This Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Introduction

  PART ONE BASEBALLS IN THE NEWS

  CHAPTER 1 THE SOUVENIR CRAZE

  “Ball Grabbers, Read This” • Steve Bartman • Jeffrey Maier • Red Sox World Series Balls • Barry Bonds Home Run Balls • Hank Aaron’s Final Home Run • Sammy Sosa’s 62nd Home Run of 1998 • Ryan Howard’s 200th Career Home Run • Big Money Opportunities

  CHAPTER 2 FOUL BALL LORE

  Consecutive Foul Balls • Lightning Strikes Twice • Nice “Catch” • Heckle This! • Don’t Mess with Cal Ripken Jr. • Lynyrd Skynyrd • Banned from Baseball • Great Balls of Fire • Happy Mother’s Day • Family Affair • That Ball Is … Gone!

  CHAPTER 3 DEATH BY BASEBALL

  Dangerous Game • Ray Chapman • Mike Coolbaugh • Fan Fatalities • Fowl Balls

  CHAPTER 4 STUNTS

  Such Great Heights • Knocking the Cover Off the Ball • Punk’d by Pete Rose • Outer Space • The Motorcycle Test • Does a Curveball Really Curve? • The Brass Glove Award • Just Say No

  CHAPTER 5 FOUL BALLS IN POP CULTURE

  Movies and TV Shows • Celebrity Ballhawks

  PART TWO HISTORICAL AND FACTUAL STUFF

  CHAPTER 6 THE EVOLUTION OF THE BALL

  CHAPTER 7 THE RAWLINGS METHOD

  (De)constructing the Ball • The Pill • Mission: Impossible • The Winding Room • The Cowhide • The Stitching Process • Finishing Touches • Commemorative Balls

  CHAPTER 8 STORAGE, PREPARATION, AND USAGE

  Striving for Uniformity • Lena Blackburne Rubbing Mud • Equipment Managers

  PART THREE HOW TO SNAG MAJOR LEAGUE BASEBALLS

  INTRODUCTION

  CHAPTER 9 BEFORE YOU ENTER THE STADIUM

  Luck versus Skill • Choosing a Game • Stadium Security • Buying Tickets • What to Bring • When to Arrive

  CHAPTER 10 BATTING PRACTICE

  The First 60 Seconds • General Advice on Positioning • Left Field versus Right Field • Home Run Balls • Ground Balls • The Glove Trick (and Other Devices)

  CHAPTER 11 HOW TO GET A PLAYER TO THROW YOU A BALL

  Dress for Success • A Mishmash of Strategies • Don’t Be Annoying • Tailor Your Request to the Situation • Where to Go and When to Be There • If It Rains

  CHAPTER 12 THE GAME ITSELF

  What Are the Odds? • Foul Ball Theory • Game Home Runs • Nice Catch! Now What? • Third-Out Balls and Other Tosses • After the Final Out

  CHAPTER 13 TOP 10 LISTS AND OTHER THINGS OF INTEREST

  Top 10 Ballhawks of All Time • Top 10 Memorable Ballhawking Moments • Top 10 Stadiums for Ballhawking • Spring Training, Home Run Derby, and the Postseason • Ballhawking Etiquette • Documenting Your Collection

  Ballhawk Glossary

  Acknowledgments

  Photo and Illustration Credits

  INTRODUCTION

  I know this might be asking a lot, but can we forget about steroids for a moment? And while we’re at it, can we stop griping about instant replay and ticket prices and everything else? Baseball is still the national pastime, and whether you’re just a regular fan or a multimillionaire A-list celebrity, catching a foul ball—or better yet, a home run—might be the ultimate American experience. Ask Charlie Sheen. Back in April 1996, he bought 2,615 outfield seats at an Angels game to increase his odds of snagging a home run ball.

  It didn’t work.

  As hard as it might seem (particularly for Sheen) to leave the stadium with a souvenir, it used to be much harder. At the turn of the 20th century, fans weren’t even allowed to keep balls. Teams typically used just a few balls per game, so whenever one landed in the seats, a stadium employee retrieved it and put it back into play. Naturally, by the end of each game the balls were so dirty and discolored that they were tough to see, especially at dusk. No one thought much about this until 1920—more than two decades before teams started wearing helmets—when a batter named Ray Chapman was fatally hit in the head by a pitch that he barely saw. Soon after, umpires were instructed to keep new, clean balls in play.

  The tradition of keeping foul balls, while impossible to trace back to one particular moment, got a major boost the following season when a 31-year-old New York Giants fan named Reuben Berman refused to return a ball, got kicked out of the Polo Grounds, sued the team for mental anguish, and won. Now, nearly a century later, catching and keeping balls is such a big part of the game that some fans enjoy this pursuit as much as the game itself.

  I know because I’m one of them.

  Since 1990 I’ve snagged 4,662 baseballs at 48 different major league stadiums. Of course, when I first started going to games, I didn’t know what I was getting myself into. There weren’t any blogs about snagging baseballs. I didn’t know what a so-called ballhawk was. The whole thing was a mystery, and I just wanted to catch one ball. But now that I’ve reeled in thousands of them and had some time to reflect, I’ve discovered that the ball is more than just a five-ounce sphere of cork, rubber, yarn, and cowhide. It’s a major source of history and controversy and hilarity. Did you know that Babe Ruth once tried to catch a ball that was dropped from an airplane? Or that several NASA astronauts have thrown ceremonial first pitches from outer space? (See “Stunts.”) Remember when Kramer got hit in the head by a foul ball on Seinfeld? Or when Carrie snagged a ball on Sex and the City? (See “Foul Balls in Pop Culture.”) Do you know how many fans have been killed by balls at major league games? Or the story about Dave Winfield ne
arly getting thrown in jail after killing a bird with a ball in Toronto? (See “Death by Baseball.”) Are you aware that Rawlings uses nearly one thousand feet of yarn and thread inside every ball? Or that the balls get stamped with invisible ink that only shows up under a black light? (See “The Rawlings Method.”) Did you know that the juiced-ball controversy dates back to the 1860s? Or that the cover of the ball used to be made of horsehide that was purchased from dog food companies? (See “The Evolution of the Ball.”)

  Gathering these facts was lots of fun—it helped to have Rawlings, Major League Baseball, and the Hall of Fame on my side—but when I first started doing the research, explaining the book to people was oddly difficult.

  “It’s about baseballs,” I’d say.

  “You’re writing a baseball book?”

  “No … I mean … yes. I mean, it’s about base-balls … you know? The ball—the actual baseball itself.”

  (Cue the awkward silence.)

  “Oh, like, how the ball is made?”

  Yeah, how the ball is made—but this book covers so much more. I’m still not quite sure how to describe it, but if there’s one thing I’ve learned from going to hundreds of games and snagging thousands of balls and meeting tens of thousands of fans, it’s that there’s something about baseballs that makes people crazy. This book is a celebration of the ball—and of those people.

  Base ball fans—the radicals—are so anxious to get a base ball that has history attached to it, that they willingly risk arrest for petty theft. They are willing to fight amongst themselves for such a ball, if necessary. A blackened optic or a busted breezer, in their opinion, is a mere incident—if they only can get that pellet.

  —Sporting Life magazine, July 22, 1916

  CHAPTER 1

  THE SOUVENIR CRAZE

  “BALL GRABBERS, READ THIS”

  Way back in 1915, a first-class stamp cost two cents, a gallon of gas went for a quarter, and a game-used baseball fetched three bucks. At least, that was the going rate at the Polo Grounds when a Yankee fan named Guy Clarke snagged one in the left-field bleachers, got arrested for refusing to return it, and had to pay a $3 fine. That was a lot of money back then, but we’re not talking about any old ball. It was a ninth-inning home run hit by Yankees shortstop Roger Peckinpaugh against the Boston Red Sox. Considering what that ball would sell for today, it was totally worth it. The editors at the New York Times, however, didn’t see it that way, and on May 8, 1915—one day after the incident—the paper ran a short article called “Ball Grabbers, Read This.” It was a warning, and the message was clear: if you steal a baseball, you’re gonna get busted.

  This was old news.

  And it wasn’t entirely true.

  Clarke was just one of the unlucky few who got prosecuted; fans had been snapping up baseballs for years, and by 1915 more than two dozen balls were disappearing at the Polo Grounds each week. Yeah, these balls were expensive—owners were paying $15 per dozen—but beyond the financial burden, it didn’t really matter. If a few balls were lost here and there, the home plate umpire simply replaced them.

  That’s not how things worked when the National League formed in 1876. High-quality balls were so scarce that each one was expected to last an entire game, and if the ball went missing, the players went looking for it. As a result, fans policed themselves whenever a ball landed in the crowd and made sure that it was returned. It had to be. There was no room for debate. But when foul balls flew completely over the grandstand and landed outside the ballpark, they were much harder to recover. These balls were often grabbed by little kids who didn’t have enough money to buy tickets, so teams came up with a solution: anyone who returned a ball got to watch the game for free.

  This reward system was effective at first, but kids eventually began to value the ball more than the opportunity to watch grown men play with it. (Can you blame them?) On June 1, 1887, Toronto World reported that “fifteen balls were knocked over the left field fence at Buffalo Monday and were stolen by bad boys.”1 In other words, teams weren’t just losing balls during games; kids were taking them during batting practice as well. What began as a nuisance—a missing ball every once in a while—was turning into an epidemic.

  On May 1, 1897, The Sporting News declared that “the souvenir craze” was affecting games in the South. In 1899 the Washington Senators hired a group of boys to retrieve baseballs. By 1901 teams were spending so much money on balls that the National League Rules Committee suggested penalizing batters who fouled off good pitches. On May 2, 1902, the Detroit Free Press said, “Baseballs that go into the stands at St. Louis are hopelessly lost, the man who first gets his hands on the flying sphere clinging to it.” Sometime around 1903, it was rumored that on one occasion when a fan at the Polo Grounds refused to return a ball, John McGraw, the Hall of Fame manager of the New York Giants, retaliated by stealing the guy’s hat.

  Major League Baseball took action the following season by officially giving teams the right to retrieve balls that were hit into the stands. This new measure worked in some cases, but for the most part all it did was piss off the fans and make them more determined than ever not to cooperate.

  In 1905 a Cubs fan named Samuel Scott was arrested in Chicago after catching a foul ball and refusing to hand it over to an usher. Cubs president James Hart personally confronted him and signed a larceny complaint, but the charges were dropped the next day when Scott, a member of the Board of Trade, threatened to sue for assault and false arrest.

  Things got progressively worse from there.

  “Brooklynites seem to prize highly balls which go into the bleachers,” reported the New York Tribune in 1908.

  “Women are as bad as men about stealing baseballs; they aren’t so skillful in hiding them,” said baseball manufacturer Tom Shibe in 1911.

  Charles Weeghman, an unsung hero among modern-day ballhawks, was the first owner to let fans keep foul balls. (Photo Credit 1.1)

  “The practice of concealing balls fouled into the grandstand or bleachers has reached disgusting proportions in New York,” claimed Sporting Life magazine in 1915.

  Cubs owner Charles Weeghman felt otherwise. He recognized the foul ball frenzy as a business opportunity—a chance to bring more folks to the ballpark—and on April 29, 1916, he began letting fans keep the balls they caught. Two and a half months later, the Phillies’ business manager billed Weeghman for eight baseballs that were hit into the stands during BP, but that was the price of good PR. The October 1916 issue of Baseball magazine praised Weeghman in a lengthy staff editorial. “The charm of novelty, of possible gain might lure far more spectators than enough to pay for the lost balls,” it said. “At any rate, Mr. Weeghman evidently thinks so. For he has recently inaugurated this common-sense policy in his park at Chicago.”

  Other owners just didn’t get it.

  “Why should a man carry away an object worth $2.50 just because he gets his hands on it?” asked Colonel “Cap” Huston, part-owner of the Yankees. “When people go to a restaurant, do they take the dishes or silverware home for souvenirs?”

  Most teams generously donated used balls to servicemen during World War I, but continued bullying the regular fans.

  Enter Reuben Berman.

  On May 16, 1921, Berman, a 31-year-old stockbroker from Connecticut, caught a foul ball during a Reds-Giants game at the Polo Grounds, and when the ushers demanded that he return it, he responded by tossing it deeper into the crowd. Berman was whisked away by security personnel, taken to the team offices, threatened with arrest, and ejected from the stadium. Giants management figured that was the end of it, but nearly three months later Berman’s attorney served the team with legal papers, claiming that his client had been unlawfully detained and had suffered mental anguish and a loss of reputation. The case was tried in New York’s Supreme Court, and Berman was awarded $100—far less than the $20,000 sum originally sought by his attorney, but the message was delivered.

  “Reuben’s Rule” (as it came to be known)
was the real turning point, although change didn’t happen all at once. Several owners still refused to give in, and as a result, there were a few more high-profile clashes between fans and security personnel. The most outrageous incident took place in 1923, when an 11-year-old boy named Robert Cotter was arrested and thrown in jail for pocketing a ball at the Baker Bowl in Philadelphia. The following day he was released by a sympathetic judge who said, “Such an act on the part of a boy is merely proof that he is following his most natural impulses. It is a thing I would do myself.”

  Seven years later in Chicago, with Weeghman long gone as Cubs owner, there was another ugly incident involving a young fan. Arthur Porto, age 17, caught a Hack Wilson foul ball and brawled with stadium security when they tried to take it from him. He and his two friends, who had joined the scuffle, were booked for disorderly conduct. The next day in court the judge dismissed the charges and ruled that a ball hit into the crowd belongs “to the boy who grabs it.”

  There were still a few more altercations in the 1930s, and during World War II teams once again donated balls to the armed forces. During that time fans were asked to return whatever they snagged, but that was the end of it. Ballhawking bliss, along with a whole new set of controversies, was about to begin.

  STEVE BARTMAN

  Steve Bartman is responsible for the biggest ball-related controversy in history. Most sports fans know his name, but few are aware of the entire wacky aftermath. The original incident occurred on October 13, 2003—Game 6 of the National League Championship Series at Wrigley Field. It was the top of the eighth inning. One out. Runner on second base. The Cubs were beating the Marlins, 3–0, and needed just five more outs to advance to the World Series. They hadn’t been there since 1945. They hadn’t won it since 1908. Momentum was finally on their side—until Luis Castillo lofted a seemingly harmless fly ball down the left-field line. Cubs left fielder Moises Alou ran into foul territory and probably would’ve made the catch had a certain fan not reached out of the stands and deflected it.