Happy New Year!
With winter’s wrathful vengeance plummeting our local temperatures to the low 60s today, melancholy hearts turn to baseball and the return of Spring. And a young man’s thoughts naturally turn to 19th Century Baseball.
The Old Time Family Baseball blog got around to reading the massive, Tolstoyan Baseball Chronology tome and, as the blogger puts it, “Let me tell you, the 1800s were a weird and bizarre time.”
My personal favorite of the 1845-1875 factoid-vignettes he mentions:
August 16, 1870 – “Fred Goldsmith, an 18-year-old pitcher invited by Henry Chadwick to demonstrate his curveball at the Capitoline Grounds in Brooklyn, succeeds before a large crowd. Chadwick observes: ‘That wich had up to this point been considered an optical illusion and against all rules of philosophy was now an established fact.’”