by Steve Rushin
But Farkas wasn’t the first athlete to wear eye black. In his encyclopedic history of baseball, A Game of Inches, Peter Morris notes that veteran outfielder Patsy Dougherty was wearing it thirty-eight years before Farkas. “Pat Dougherty rubs mud or charcoal under his eyes,” Sporting Life reported in 1904, “after the practice of many minor league ball players, who assert that it lessens the glare of the sun on a bright day.”
When Dougherty was traded from Boston to the New York Highlanders that season, the Boston Herald headline—DOUGHERTY AS A YANKEE—is the earliest print citation of that nickname for the Bronx ball club. We can trace a direct line, then, from Dougherty (first Yankee, first in eye black) to Don Mattingly (raccoon-eyed Yankee of eight decades later) with a single black stripe of paraffin.
Dougherty quit his final team, the White Sox, in February 1912 with a letter to owner Charles Comiskey. “Dougherty declares his reason for retiring is that he has all the money he needs and does not care to play ball any longer,” according to the next day’s New York Times. And he was awash in cash every day. Dougherty worked for the next twenty-eight years at the State Bank of Bolivar, in his native Bolivar, New York, where he died at age sixty-three, of a heart attack, having attained the position of assistant cashier.
Bank cashier was an unlikely position for a pioneer of eye black, for those early wearers in baseball would have resembled bandits, the greasepaint often encircling their eyes entirely, in the manner of the McDonald’s Hamburglar. Peter Morris cites another seminal reference, from Sporting Life in 1905: “Sandow Mertes tried that new sun field wrinkle here [Chicago] the other day—that trick of painting black circles round the eyes instead of wearing smoked glasses. It made Sandow look like an Apache on the warpath, and the only perceptible result was, that Sandow misjudged a long fly and let in the winning run.”
Mertes had a beloved dog that ran around the outfield with him during Giants practices, a bull terrier like Spuds MacKenzie, the Bud Light mascot with a black ring around his eye. In applying eye black, Mertes may have simply begun to resemble his dog, as do many pets and their owners. In retirement, he ran a newsstand in San Francisco, where he died, in 1945, just as eye black was becoming popular in football.
Football players invested eye black with an ability—never proven by science—to reduce glare from sun- and floodlights. Eye black had the quality of snake oil, and may even have contained some, given the cauldron of ingredients comprising it—beeswax and paraffin and carbon, if not eye of newt.
It wasn’t until 2003 that a scientific study, by two researchers at the Yale School of Medicine, set out to determine if eye black had anything other than a placebo effect on athletes. Ophthalmologists Brian M. DeBroff, M.D., and Patricia J. Pahk, M.D., concluded that daubed-on eye black was indeed effective at reducing glare, though less so in the form of the adhesive decals that had by then come to predominate in football, replete with Bible verses, area codes, and other encrypted messages.
In baseball, eye black became a permanent feature of several top players, among them Mattingly and Will Clark, and of former college football player Kirk Gibson. After signing as a free agent with the Dodgers in 1988, Gibson found, in his first exhibition game at Dodgertown, that the band of his cap had been coated in eye black. (When he removed the cap to wipe his forehead with his forearm, he found both covered in black grease.) Before relief pitcher Jesse Orosco was fingered as the prankster, Gibson left the park in a rage, his head circled by a black halo.
Gibson was ahead of his time. Twenty years later, the misapplication of eye black was intentional. Bryce Harper, the number one pick in the 2010 draft, liked to smear it halfway down his cheek, Alice Cooper–style. It looked like his mascara had run in the rain.
At the start of a six-game home stand in 2010, Bobby Crosby of the Pirates challenged everyone on the team to grow a mustache. Fellow infielder Ronny Cedeño couldn’t raise sufficient facial hair, so went out in the Sunday matinee with a magnificent Fu Manchu mustache eye-blacked onto his upper lip. It was thin and neat and shone in the sun as he stood at the plate, where Cedeño looked like the unholy offspring of Prince and Prince Fielder.
With two outs in the ninth that afternoon against the Giants, he hit a single to end an 0-for-20 slump. And still Cedeño shaved off his mustache with a hand towel afterward. “It’s for one day,” he said of the ’stache. “I sweat too much.”
Their five World Series titles notwithstanding, the Pittsburgh Pirates’ greatest contributions to baseball history have been sartorial flourishes from the chin up, among them Fred Clarke’s flip shades, Ronny Cedeño’s nose black, and the century-old pillbox caps—with horizontal piping—that the Bucs brought back, without so much as a murmur of popular demand, in 1979. For reasons that defy explication, the franchise has had a flair for cranial adornment unmatched in baseball. But the most important of these innovations, by far, was the batting helmet.
Over the better part of a century, baseball players, loath to be called sissies, began wrapping their hands in leather, wore sliding pads beneath their pants, and even protected their arms from undue abuse. In the 1930s, Lena Feller made a sleeve that resembled a snug pants leg to warm the pitching arm of her son, Bob. Crucially, all these implements were—or began as—hidden protection. Batting helmets were no different.
The earliest known batting helmet was inflatable. Invented by Frank Pierce Mogridge in 1905 and patented by the A. J. Reach Company, it was so ridiculously conspicuous, and conspicuously ridiculous, that it fairly demanded a new adjective: conspiculous? When flaccid, the device looked like an empty backpack. But placed on the head of an unfortunate player, and inflated by an unlucky teammate blowing into a hose, it became—officially—the Pneumatic Head Protector. The Toledo Blade, in 1902, called a similar device—also billed as a Pneumatic Head Protector—“a practical idea for the use of firemen and policemen” when inflated and worn beneath their existing helmets, which were then made of a single layer of felt.
Baseball players would not allow themselves even that thin membrane of protection. In Cincinnati on June 18, 1907, Reds pitcher Andy Coakley hit Giants catcher Roger Bresnahan with a fastball behind the left ear. Bresnahan fell unconscious for a full ten minutes, was briefly revived, then lost consciousness again. He was taken to Seton Hospital, and a week later to his home in Toledo, where he convalesced for a month before returning to the lineup. Bresnahan had a rare quality for his age—the courage of self-preservation—and had heretically worn cricketers’ shin guards on Opening Day of that season, to great protest. When he returned from the Coakley beaning, he sought the temporary comfort of the Pneumatic Head Protector, though he quickly abandoned it, and there’s little wonder why.
To look at the army-green contraption, which lacks any aesthetic consideration whatsoever, is to feel a vague sense of unease. It doesn’t quite inspire the revulsion of some of the more medieval medical implements, but neither does it have the attraction of most vintage baseball equipment of that era. In 2001, one of six extant Pneumatic Head Protectors sold at auction for $675, an infinitesimal sum for a historic baseball item that has otherwise passed into obscurity. For more than a century now, inflating a player’s head has been—as it ought to be—the exclusive redoubt of fans, agents, and sportswriters.
Bresnahan played eight more seasons without head protection and went on to the Hall of Fame. Andy Coakley, who beaned him, did not. But he did spend thirty-six remarkable seasons as head baseball coach at Columbia University, where he had a young first baseman named Lou Gehrig in the early 1920s, when afternoon baseball—in the slanting shadows of upper Manhattan—was rife with perils.
In the late-afternoon shadows of the Polo Grounds on August 16, 1920, the enormously popular Indians shortstop Ray Chapman stood in close to the plate to face Giants right-hander Carl Mays, never flinching when a ball up-and-in caught him in the left temple with such force that it returned, with a loud report, to Mays, who thought it had struck the barrel of the bat.
Mays fielded the ball and threw to first, unaware that Chapman’s skull had been fractured and his brain lacerated. The twenty-nine-year-old died in St. Lawrence Hospital at four thirty the next morning.
“Headgear for ballplayers, to use while batting, is being considered by club owners and players as a result of the unfortunate accident which resulted in the death of Ray Chapman this week,” the New York Times reported three days later. “It will not be surprising if batsmen of the future go to the plate with a covering on that side of the head that is nearest to the opposing pitcher.”
Mays, the son of a Methodist minister, voluntarily appeared in the district attorney’s office, where he was immediately exonerated of any wrongdoing, but the real crime in this terrible accident would take longer to play out: Batting helmets were not mandated in major-league baseball for another fifty-one years, despite the exhaustive efforts of an eccentric inventor who arrived in America as James Philip Leo Taylor but quickly came to be known as Foulproof.
A year after his arrival—from his native England, aboard the Carmania, as a twenty-year-old in 1907—Taylor saw his first baseball game. He paid $0.50 to enter the Polo Grounds and see the Dodgers beat the Giants 1–0 in thirteen innings. The Englishman didn’t understand what he was witnessing. After eleven innings, with as many zeros hung top and bottom from hooks on the scoreboard, Taylor asked the man next to him what would happen when the remaining five hooks “were hung with naughts.”
The man spit out tobacco juice and replied, as if to an imbecile: “They’re gonna knock the grandstand down and build a skating rink.”
By the time of the Chapman tragedy, a dozen years later, Taylor had become an athlete of sorts, and a student of American sports. He stood only five six and weighed 125 pounds, but those dimensions worked to his advantage in 1918, when he set the world record in the sack race by hopping a ninth of a mile in thirty-two seconds in a burlap sack in front of 65,000 spectators at the Calgary rodeo. Sack racing was sufficiently popular that Spalding had manufactured Taylor’s official sack-racing sack, three feet by five feet and roped at the neck. Sporting goods, it seemed, offered inexhaustible possibilities for products and riches to those willing to pay attention.
Taylor took notice on the night of November 16, 1926. He was working for a telegraph company and moonlighting as a second tenor in the Metropolitan Opera chorus when he appeared at the Met in the American debut of Puccini’s Turandot. At the end of the first act, a spear-carrier hurrying off the stage accidentally kneed Taylor in the groin, changing his life and—briefly—his register. “I went from second tenor to baritone [sic] to boy soprano with the yelp I let out,” Taylor recalled years later.
Young Foulproof Taylor, sack-racing world champion. (Courtesy of Diane Taylor)
The day after he was kneed, Taylor purchased a sheet of aluminum, and then a supply of rubber cigars from a novelty shop on the Bowery, and fashioned—in his basement workshop in Brooklyn—a protective aluminum cup, which he wore to that night’s performance of Turandot.
“Kick me,” he told the spear-carrier.
“With pleasure,” the spear-carrier replied.
Taylor’s groin, ensconced in this new contraption, proved unassailable. He had no way of knowing, in that moment, that he’d “invented” something that already existed. His cup, he was certain, was about to runneth over.
Man has been protecting his nethers literally from the beginning, if we’re to go by Genesis, in which Adam covers his nakedness with a fig leaf. All manner of devices followed: loincloths, codpieces, chain mail. But it was the invention of the bicycle that spurred the great leap forward in groin safety.
The first bicycles—the word was coined in 1867—were called boneshakers, and for good reason. They had wooden wheels and seats and, for two decades before the invention of the pneumatic tire, were excruciating to ride on the cobblestoned streets of urban America.
Those boneshakers were shaking more than bones. In 1874, a cyclist and inventor named Charles F. Bennett invented the “bike web” to give comfort and support to male “bicycle jockeys,” for whom the undergarment became known as a “jockey strap.” The Bike Web jockey strap—as it was eventually branded—was quickly adopted by other athletes. When boxer George Dixon knocked out Eddie Pierce in Brooklyn in 1893, the victor “wore nothing but a white jockey strap and brown shoes.” A year later, Gentleman Jim Corbett vanquished Charley Mitchell in Jacksonville, Florida, in “nothing but a jockstrap and a tri-color belt of ribbons.”
Alas, as those fighters well knew, the jockey strap offered comfort without protection. In Paris in 1899, the British navy boxing champion Jerry Driscoll fought the French champion Charlemont in a bout refereed by Charlemont’s father. Driscoll was dominating the fight in the eighth round when the Frenchman “landed an upward kick on Driscoll’s groin.” Driscoll, it almost goes without saying, “doubled up in agony and was carried out of the ring”—while the crowd, somewhat uncharitably, shouted, “Vive la France!”
Baseball players were even more vulnerable than boxers, catchers especially so. Their pain was easily imagined from the undignified injury reports published in newspapers. “Berger, the Poly catcher, will not be able to play against Browne’s Business College at Prospect Park to-day, owing to having been hit in the groin in the High School-Poly game,” the Brooklyn Daily Eagle reported in 1901. “Berger is liable to be out of the game for some time.”
No other human endeavor has employed the word “groin” as frequently—or as euphemistically—as baseball has. And none has had so many reasons to do so, as medical textbooks and journals of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries attest. “The testicle being an exquisitely sensitive organ, the pain and shock produced by its injury are very pronounced,” wrote George Frank Lydston, M.D., in his groundbreaking—one hesitates to call it seminal—textbook, The Surgical Diseases of the Genito-Urinary Tract, published in 1900. “The author recalls one severe case produced by a blow with a baseball.”
That chapter, “Traumatisms of the Testis,” could have shared its title with any number of baseball memoirs. One can spend a leg-crossing afternoon reading tales of testicular trauma from the baseball diamond in nineteenth-century medical literature, dating nearly to the dawn of professional baseball. “Mr. D., single, aged twenty-eight years, had enlarged left testicle for about ten years,” begins one harrowing tale of amputation in an 1893 issue of Medical Review. “This had dated back to a blow by a baseball.”
Catchers had no groin protection, and umpires relied on catchers as their form of groin protection. In the eighth inning of an Eastern League game between the Baltimore Orioles and Buffalo Bisons in 1907, umpire Brick Owens took a pitched ball to the groin that felled him like a tree. “It was several minutes,” the Baltimore Sun noted drily, “before he was revived.”
The following spring, “Iron Man” Joe McGinnity was confined to his hotel room in Dallas during the Giants’ exhibition tour of the American South, unable even to visit the dining hall while “suffering from severe pains in the groin” after an unspecified trauma in a team workout.
Something needed to be done. Enter Claude Berry, born on Valentine’s Day of 1880 in Losantville, Indiana, the state to which he returned every baseball off-season, to his Berry Brothers grain and coal dealership in Lynn. After three seasons in the big leagues with the White Sox and A’s, the diminutive Berry spent five seasons with the San Francisco Seals of the Pacific Coast League, catching an unfathomable 167 games in 1908, and 166 more in 1909. For five straight years in San Francisco, he would catch at least 151 games a season. To say that he did so unflinchingly may not be an exaggeration. As one writer put it: “In moments of stress the little catcher was as imperturbable as if he had been discussing the price of corn with a farmer back in Indiana.”
By 1915, Berry was back in the bigs with the Pittsburgh Rebels, of the Federal League, the short-lived, breakaway, third major league, where he continued to catch with uncommon composure and self-assuran
ce, qualities enhanced by the piece of molded steel in his pants, which necessitated a separate kind of jockey strap, pocketed to hold this new device.
Berry was wearing, in 1915, the first known protective cup. It was steel, with ten ventilating holes in a bowling-pin pattern, and resembled—in shape, construction, and ability to induce dread in those who view it—the muzzle worn by Hannibal Lecter. The protective cup, embossed PATENT PENDING and vouchsafed now at the Baseball Hall of Fame, had a distinct advantage over gloves and helmets: It was hidden from view. Wearing one wasn’t emasculating. Not wearing one very well could have been.
The Washington Senators were hoping to force a seventh game as they clung to a 2–1 lead in Game 6 of the 1924 World Series. From a buntinged box at Griffith Stadium, President and Mrs. Coolidge looked on, three months after the blood-poisoning death of Calvin Jr. The president hadn’t intended to go, but the first lady prevailed upon him at the last minute. And so they saw, with one out and a runner on first in the top of the ninth inning, Giants left fielder Irish Meusel hit a hot grounder to Senators shortstop Roger Peckinpaugh, who fielded the ball, threw to second baseman Bucky Harris, and promptly fell to the ground, having reinjured the strained left thigh muscle that kept him out of Games 4 and 5.
Harris caught the ball at second and stepped on the bag for the inning’s second out, but his throw to first baseman Joe Judge for the double play was in the dirt. With the home team’s shortstop already in agony in the infield, and the World Series on the line, the first baseman was hit in the testicles by a baseball thrown with great urgency. “There was a fresh cry of alarm from the stands,” wrote a witness from a wire service, “when Joe Judge was hit in the groin by Harris’s low throw and fell to the ground in pain.”