It’s easy to glorify the past, the proverbial good old days, the golden years. Baseball, for instance — it’s easy to set aside the bad stuff whilst remembering all the good. When you’re confronted with a picture like this one from 1940, however, you start to think maybe today’s game isn’t so bad after all.
(Click to see original.)
And yes, that is a Dodger fan.
Now, granted, we’ve all probably wanted to do something similar in the past — I imagine there are more than a few Phillies and Rays fans who’ve felt like beating up their umpiring crew the past week or so. But this sure makes the modern-day occasional cussing out of the ump look rather tame.
This is from the photo blog “If Charlie Parker Was a Gunslinger, There’d Be a Whole Lot of Dead Copycats” which, as I’ve mentioned before, is very, very, very cool.
Many a time the enraged fans of Flatbush have made the Welkin ring with their roar of “Kill the Umpire”. Today that roar was especially bitter and loud as Umpire George Magerkurth’s tenth inning decision on a close play enabled the first place Cincinnati Reds to nose the Brooklyn Dodgers out by 4 to 3 score.
Read the rest at “Adventures in the National Pastime #7″
UPDATE: Looking through the ever-useful Retrosheet, it looks like this game was on September 16, 1940. I didn’t track down a box score, but here’s the line:
CIN N 0 0 2 0 0 0 0 0 1 1 - 4 9 BRO N 2 0 0 0 0 1 0 0 0 0 - 3 10