Baseball keeps better records than any other game, and it still cannot agree on where it came from. These stories run from a Massachusetts town law of 1791 to a record book rewritten in 2024, by way of a ballpark that killed its own grass, a catcher who worked for wartime intelligence, and a pitcher who took the mound at 59.
Every tile in a Baseball game carries one of these. Open one to read it now, or leave them for the board to hand you.
Legends
nine stories
1The general who did not invent baseball
On the tile: Doubleday1907Myth busted
Baseball's official origin story arrived in 1907, when a commission funded by sporting goods magnate A.G. Spalding announced that Abner Doubleday had devised the game at Cooperstown in 1839. Its evidence was a letter from Abner Graves, a Colorado mining engineer who had been five years old in 1839. Doubleday spent that year as a cadet at West Point. He left sixty-seven diaries behind, and not one of them mentions baseball. The Hall of Fame now says the story has been refuted.
Moses Fleetwood Walker studied at Oberlin, then went to the University of Michigan to read law, then went back to catching. His team, Toledo, joined the American Association, a major league, and he made his debut on May 1, 1884. He played 42 games behind the plate with a mask and almost nothing else; a batboy recalled that he more often caught barehanded. He was the first man to play major league baseball openly as a Black man. The next was Jackie Robinson, 63 years later.
Babe Ruth's first fame came on the mound for the Red Sox. In the 1916 World Series he gave up a run in the first inning, then held Brooklyn scoreless through the rest of a fourteen-inning game. Two years later he shut out the Cubs in the opener, and four days after that he started again. By the time anyone scored on him, his World Series scoreless streak had reached 29 2/3 innings. It stood until Whitey Ford passed it in 1961.
Moe Berg graduated from Princeton with honors, took a law degree at Columbia, and caught in the American League until 1939, fluent in German, Japanese, French, Italian, Spanish and Portuguese. In 1943 the Office of Strategic Services recruited him. In December 1944 he sat in a Zurich lecture hall listening to the physicist Werner Heisenberg with a pistol in his pocket and orders to use it if the talk suggested Germany was near an atomic bomb. Berg decided it was not.
Three years before Brooklyn, Second Lieutenant Jackie Robinson boarded an Army bus at Camp Hood, Texas, on July 6, 1944, and refused an order to move to the back, telling the driver the Army had banned segregation on post. He was charged with insubordination and conduct unbecoming an officer, among other counts. After four and a half hours of testimony, a panel of nine officers acquitted him on all of them. He was honorably discharged that November.
Effa Manley ran the business side of the Newark Eagles, the Negro Leagues club she co-owned with her husband Abe, and in 1946 the Eagles beat the Kansas City Monarchs for the Negro League World Series title. She had walked a picket line in 1935 to push local stores to hire Black clerks. When major-league teams started signing her players, she insisted that Negro Leagues contracts counted, and won compensation for Larry Doby. In 2006 she became the first woman elected to the Hall of Fame.
Bill Veeck signed Satchel Paige to Cleveland in the middle of the 1948 season, when he was 42 and had already spent decades in the Negro Leagues. Seventeen years later, Athletics owner Charlie Finley brought him back for one night. Paige waited in the bullpen in a rocking chair while a nurse rubbed liniment into his arm, then pitched three scoreless innings against Boston, giving up a double to Carl Yastrzemski and nothing else. He left to a standing ovation.
When Hank Aaron left the Indianapolis Clowns for the Milwaukee Braves, the club signed Toni Stone to take his job at second base. She played 50 games in 1953 and hit .243 in the Negro American League, the first woman to play for a major-level professional team that had been all men, and the first of at least a dozen women who would play in the Negro Leagues. The Clowns sold her contract to the Kansas City Monarchs, where she finished in 1954.
On the last day of the 1972 season, Roberto Clemente doubled off Jon Matlack at Three Rivers Stadium for career hit number 3,000. Ten players had reached the mark before him and none from Latin America. It was the last regular-season hit of his life. On December 31 he boarded a plane carrying relief supplies to earthquake victims in Nicaragua, and it crashed. The writers waived the five-year waiting period and elected him to the Hall of Fame in March.
The Knickerbocker club's famous rules are usually credited to Alexander Cartwright. The historian John Thorn gives the writing of them instead to two other members, William R. Wheaton and William H. Tucker. What is not in doubt is where the club played. By 1845, with industry pushing north through Manhattan, the Knickerbockers had taken their game across the Hudson to the Elysian Fields in Hoboken, a resort owned by the Stevens family, whose ferries left Barclay Street every fifteen minutes.
Rick Woodward took design advice from Connie Mack, looked hard at Pittsburgh's new steel and concrete Forbes Field, and opened his own park in Birmingham on August 18, 1910. A newspaper contest named it Rickwood Field. The Black Barons rented it whenever the white Barons were on the road, and a seventeen-year-old Willie Mays started there in 1948. It is the oldest professional ballpark in the country. Mays died two days before the Giants and Cardinals played there in June 2024.
Fenway Park opened on April 20, 1912, after rain washed out two earlier dates, and Boston beat New York 7-6 in eleven innings on a Tris Speaker single with the daylight nearly gone. The wall in left field, 37 feet 2 inches of it, spent decades covered in advertising. Only after 1947 was it painted Fenway green and left bare, which is when a wall became a monster. It is the oldest park in the major leagues.
Paterson, New Jersey built Hinchliffe Stadium in the early 1930s, an Art Deco bowl of cast concrete. The New York Black Yankees called it home for a dozen seasons, and a Paterson high school player named Larry Doby was scouted there by the Newark Eagles before he integrated the American League. The stadium closed in 1996 and stood behind weeds and graffiti for 27 years, reopening in 2023. In 2013 it became the first site of any kind tied to the Negro Leagues to be named a National Historic Landmark.
5The president switched the lights on from Washington
On the tile: Crosley Field1935
The Reds were a losing club short of customers, so general manager Larry MacPhail talked the National League into letting them try baseball after dark. On May 24, 1935, President Franklin Roosevelt pressed a button at the White House, Crosley Field lit up, and 20,422 people watched Cincinnati beat the Phillies 2-1. The league stayed cautious. Clubs were held to no more than seven night games a season, in case the novelty wore off.
Phil Wrigley wanted his ballpark to feel woodsy, so in early September 1937 a young Bill Veeck went to work with head groundskeeper Charlie Dorr and his assistant Cotton Bogren. Boston ivy was the plan, but Boston ivy is slow, so they set Japanese bittersweet along the base of the wall to climb fast and green it while the ivy caught up. The outfield of Wrigley Field has been a planting job ever since.
Houston's domed stadium opened in 1965 with a clear roof and real grass underneath. Fielders lost fly balls in the glare, so crews painted the roof panels white. That cured the glare and doomed the lawn, which died without sun. The Astros opened the 1966 season on a synthetic surface called ChemGrass, soon rebranded AstroTurf. Only the infield was covered at first. The outfield waited until July, and the first game on a fully artificial field came on July 19, 1966.
Oriole Park at Camden Yards opened on April 6, 1992, and made brick and odd angles fashionable again. Behind right field stands the B&O Railroad Warehouse, built between 1898 and 1905, 1,016 feet long and 51 feet wide. Center field covers the ground where George Ruth Sr. ran Ruth's Cafe on the ground floor of the family home from 1906 to 1912. In a Home Run Derby, Ken Griffey Jr. reached the warehouse, 439 feet away.
A single row of purple seats runs through the upper deck at Coors Field, exactly 5,280 feet above sea level. Thin, dry air let fly balls carry and curveballs flatten out, and the scoring in Denver was absurd. In 2002 the Rockies began keeping their baseballs in a room-sized humidor at 50 percent humidity, putting moisture back into the leather. Over the decade that followed, runs per game at Coors Field fell by about a sixth.
Pittsfield, Massachusetts had a new meeting house in 1791, and the town moved at once to protect its windows. The bylaw forbade wicket, cricket, baseball, batball, football, cats, fives or any other game played with ball within 80 yards of the building. The historian John Thorn turned up the reference in an old town history in the spring of 2004. Whatever the people of Pittsfield were playing, they were playing enough of it to need a law about it.
The base on balls entered the rules in 1864, and then the rule makers spent a generation arguing about the price of wildness. Umpires were reluctant to punish pitchers, so the count climbed until a batter needed nine balls to reach first base. As pitchers learned to throw overhand and bend a curve, the number came back down, step by step, through the 1880s. Four balls arrived with the 1889 season and has not moved since.
Harvard's team manager, Fred Thayer, remembered an opposing catcher who had worn a fencing mask, so he had a Cambridge tinsmith build a wire cage with rests for the chin and forehead. James Tyng, who had taken too many foul tips in the face, wore it in the spring of 1877. Stores were selling copies by mid-April, and that July Charley Snyder of Louisville became the first major leaguer on record to wear one. Critics called the thing cartoonish.
On February 9, 1920, baseball's joint rules committee outlawed the spitball, along with the mud ball, the shine ball and the emery ball. The next spring the leagues relented for the men who already made their living that way: 17 pitchers, nine in the American League and eight in the National, were allowed to keep throwing it. The last of them was Burleigh Grimes, who struck out Jersey Joe Stripp with a spitter for Pittsburgh on September 20, 1934.
5The New Jersey mud that takes the shine off a new ball
On the tile: Rubbing mud1938
A new baseball comes out of the box slick to grip and bright enough to hide against the lights. Clubs used to rub the shine off with infield dirt and tobacco juice, which marked up the covers. In 1938 Lena Blackburne, a coach with the Philadelphia Athletics, remembered a fine mud he had found as a boy in a creek off the Delaware River in southern New Jersey. It worked, the leagues took it up, and the family that harvests it still will not say exactly where.
On May 1, 1920, at Braves Field, Boston and Brooklyn each scored a run early and then stopped scoring altogether. Leon Cadore and Joe Oeschger pitched all 26 innings, the longest game in major-league history, until the umpires called it for darkness at ten minutes to seven. The whole thing took three hours and fifty minutes. Brooklyn then lost a thirteen-inning game the next day and a nineteen-inning game the day after that.
Hack Wilson drove in 190 runs for the Cubs in 1930, a season total nobody has matched. Decades later, researchers found a run charged to the wrong man. In the second game of a doubleheader against Cincinnati on July 28, 1930, the league ledger gave Charlie Grimm two runs batted in when one of them belonged to Wilson. In 1999 the commissioner's office corrected the record to 191, saying it mattered to get it right.
Johnny Vander Meer of the Reds no-hit the Boston Bees on June 11, 1938. Four days later he took the mound at Ebbets Field for Brooklyn's first night game, in front of a capacity crowd that included his parents and 500 people from his home town in New Jersey. In the ninth inning he walked the bases loaded before Leo Durocher flied out to center. Nobody in the majors or the minors has thrown no-hitters in consecutive starts since.
Pitching swallowed the 1968 season. Bob Gibson finished with a 1.12 earned run average, Denny McLain won 31 games, and Carl Yastrzemski led the American League at .301, the lowest average ever to win a batting title. That winter the rules committee cut the pitcher's mound from 15 inches to 10 and pulled the strike zone in to the armpits and the tops of the knees. Batting averages in both leagues climbed the following season.
Pittsburgh owner Barney Dreyfuss challenged the champion of the upstart American League to a best-of-nine series, and he and Boston's Henry Killilea signed the agreement in September 1903. The first game was played on October 1 at the Huntington Avenue Grounds, where the overflow crowd stood in the outfield and the clubs agreed that any ball hit into it counted as a triple. Boston won five games to three. Then there was no World Series at all in 1904.
During the seventh-inning stretch of Game One of the 1918 World Series at Comiskey Park, a military band struck up the Star-Spangled Banner. Red Sox third baseman Fred Thomas, playing on leave from the Navy, came to attention and saluted the flag. The other players turned toward it with hands on hearts, the crowd found the tune, and the ballpark sang the last notes together. The song would not become the national anthem until 1931.
Game Three of the 1932 World Series, Wrigley Field, two balls and two strikes on Babe Ruth. The story goes that he pointed to center field and then hit the next pitch there. He did raise two fingers, and the home run was real. Cubs pitcher Charlie Root said for the rest of his life that Ruth was only noting he had a strike left. Lou Gehrig homered right after him, and nobody argues about that one.
Chicago was hosting a world's fair in 1933, and Arch Ward, sports editor of the Chicago Tribune, proposed a game at Comiskey Park between the best of both leagues. Fans voted by the hundreds of thousands; Al Simmons alone drew 346,291 ballots. A crowd of 47,595 watched the American League win 4-2, and Babe Ruth, then 38, supplied the margin with the first home run in All-Star history. Both managers said afterward that they hoped the game would be repeated every year.
Uniform numbers became regular in 1929, and at first they marked a player's place in the batting order, which is why Babe Ruth wore 3 and Lou Gehrig, who followed him, wore 4. On July 4, 1939, Gehrig stood at Yankee Stadium and told the crowd he considered himself the luckiest man on the face of this earth. That same day the Yankees put his number away for good. It was the first number any team retired.
Don Larsen was knocked out of Game Two of the 1956 World Series in the second inning. Three days later he faced Brooklyn again, using a no-windup delivery he had picked up late in the season, and 27 Dodgers came to the plate and 27 went away. It was the first no-hitter in World Series history, and a perfect game besides. The Yankees won 2-0. The last batter, pinch-hitter Dale Mitchell, took a called third strike that is still argued about.
On May 26, 1959, at County Stadium in Milwaukee, Harvey Haddix of the Pirates retired 36 Braves in a row, twelve perfect innings, while Lew Burdette scattered twelve hits and gave up nothing at all. In the thirteenth, an error by third baseman Don Hoak put a runner on. A sacrifice, an intentional walk to Hank Aaron and a drive by Joe Adcock finished it, 1-0. Aaron thought the game was over and left the base path, so Adcock was credited with a double.
San Francisco signed a young left-hander from the Nankai Hawks before the 1964 season, as a cultural exchange more than a scouting plan. On September 1, 1964, Masanori Murakami walked to the mound at Shea Stadium and pitched the eighth inning against the Mets, giving up one hit and striking out two, the first Japanese player to appear in a big-league game. He pitched a full season in 1965, then went home, homesick. No other followed until Hideo Nomo in 1995.
Babe Ruth's 714 home runs had stood since 1935. On April 8, 1974, with tornado warnings in the area and 53,775 people in the seats at Atlanta Stadium, Hank Aaron hit number 715 off Al Downing in the fourth inning. Braves reliever Tom House caught it one-handed in the left-field bullpen and carried it in to him. Two fans ran the bases alongside Aaron, and his 65-year-old father got to home plate ahead of everybody.