by Steve Rushin
Outside Target Field was a statue of another Twin, Hall of Famer Harmon Killebrew. When Killebrew was a boy in Payette, Idaho, playing ball with his two brothers in their front yard, his mother would complain they were wrecking the lawn. Killebrew’s father, also named Harmon, replied, “We’re raising boys, not grass.”
But Emil Bossard defied that bit of wisdom, raising grass and boys at Municipal Stadium, and doing a masterful job of both. In 1940, White Sox owner Grace Comiskey asked Bossard to send one of his sons to Chicago, hoping genes would have an effect. Gene took the job there, at age twenty-three, but his brothers Harold and Marshall remained in Cleveland. They would sit in the scoreboard with Bob Feller’s 20-millimeter gun scope, which the pitcher had used as an antiaircraft gunner on the USS Alabama, and steal the signs of opposing catchers.
The Bossards moved the fences in and out in Cleveland, depending on the opponent. The pitcher’s mound rose and fell like the stock market. The visitors’ bullpen mound was raised, so that opposing pitchers then throwing from the actual mound felt like they were pitching from a trench.
Emil retired from the Indians in 1956 and was succeeded by his son Harold, who was succeeded by his son Brian, who went on to conjure grass for the Padres and the Yankees. In Chicago, Gene Bossard worked for forty years in the manner Emil taught him. Ken Harrelson of the Red Sox once laid down a bunt at Comiskey Park that stuck in the swamp in front of home plate, only half visible, like a golf ball that had fried-egged itself in a sand trap. When the home plate umpire asked Bossard to explain the pond in front of the plate, the groundskeeper removed his cigar, shrugged, and said, “The hose broke.”
Gene Bossard was succeeded in Chicago by his son Roger. Emil’s grandson became renowned in his own right in the world of sports—indeed, in the world at large—as “The Sodfather.” Among his many side projects, he conjured soccer fields in the sand for the Saudi royal family, to whom he seemed a desert sorcerer.
George Toma, meanwhile, grew grass on plywood for the 1994 World Cup, and it was from this kind of unpromising soil—a hardware store in St. Paul—that Emil Bossard grew a family tree whose branches reached into every major-league ballpark across a century. Acolyte Toma got his first big-league job in Kansas City in 1957, working for Charles Finley and the A’s, repeating all the tricks he learned from Emil. Toma branched out into football, working every Super Bowl played through 2012, and published an autobiography in which he wrote: “Is there another Emil Bossard on the horizon? Not that I have seen.”
In fairness, how could there be? Bossard has been credited with inventing the tenpenny-nail drag for grooming the infield, creating protective screens for batting practice pitchers, and even putting bases on stakes, the better to anchor them into the ground.
Previously, as Ty Cobb recalled in his autobiography, “bases were left out until they were spiked apart. They weren’t anchored and strapped down firmly, giving you a solid cushion for sliding. Those sawdust bags would shift a foot or more when you tore into them.”
Those shifting bases were canvas sacks, offered “stuffed” or “unstuffed” by the A. J. Reach Company, whose official guide in 1910 noted unstuffed bags “can be filled with sand or hay, and after the game emptied.” When Babe Ruth circled the bases for the ’27 Yankees, those bases were stuffed canvas. It was a minor-league club executive named Jack Corbett who patented a better base—rain-resistant, and tapered at the bottom so as not to turn up at the edges. The Jack Corbett Hollywood Base debuted in the big leagues in 1939, and its fifteen square inches of quilted white rubber remains the only base used in Major League Baseball.
Those bases are anchored by six-inch stanchions, brainchild of Emil Bossard, who was also by some accounts the first to stripe the grass, using a heavy roller dragged behind the mower to bend the blades toward and away from the sun, creating contrasting light and dark shades, as on a vacuumed carpet.
This technique lay dormant until the 1990s, when Milwaukee groundskeeper David Mellor mowed a pattern into the outfield at County Stadium to disguise damage from a concert there. By the time Mellor was director of grounds in Boston, striping jack-o’-lanterns and socks and American flags into the grass at Fenway Park, mowing patterns were customary throughout baseball. Even artificial turf fields were striped. Red Sox fans could submit their own mowing patterns, via the club’s website, and Mellor would choose one to cut into the field at Fenway.
Target Field on this night was checkered like a tablecloth, laid for a vast banquet.
Minnie and Paul pulsing with neon at Target Field in Minneapolis. (Ffooter/Shutterstock.com)
And so the familiar ritual began, with a pitch. The pitch was tracked and measured by three cameras, from pitcher’s hand to catcher’s mitt. This space-age technology didn’t obscure the fact that the two principals in this drama were still called a battery, vestige of a previous technological revolution.
The word battery, in baseball, derived from Foulproof Taylor’s old vocation, telegraphy, which consisted of a transmitter and a receiver, a pitcher and a catcher.
The pitcher and catcher looked, on this night, not all that different from their forebears. True, their uniforms were no longer instruments of torture. Their pants were tailored to reach their shoe tops, obscuring their socks entirely, though some players flashed high socks, in homage to the game’s origins. Stirrups had all but vanished from every level of the game. Batters came to the plate in armor, their shins and forearms shielded without any stigma whatsoever. Ryne Duren’s rose-tinted sunglasses had given way to red-tinted contact lenses that made the wearer’s eyes glow like feral animals. Maple bats whipped through strike zones framed by electronic monitors that instantly conveyed information to flat screens and laptops.
But the umps still made the calls, the ball still looked as it did a century earlier, and the Arizona Diamondbacks still had a cow femur mounted on a railing in their dugout, for the bone rubbing of bats.
The gloves were still made of leather, though not always, and not entirely. On June 16, 2011, Yankees pitcher Brian Gordon took the mound in New York wearing the first all-synthetic glove in major-league history, without a stitch of leather. It was the brainchild of an artist named Scott Carpenter, who handcrafted gloves from a man-made microfiber called Clarino. The gloves were stuffed with wool, but Carpenter also offered a synthetic stuffing, for vegan shortstops. Each of his gloves was five to ten ounces lighter than its rawhide equivalent, and tailored to the player’s hand, and still only one player in history had worn one by 2012, owing not just to existing contracts with leather-glove manufacturers but to 140 years of tradition. Synthetic gloves are scent-free. Even the big leaguers who wore synthetic back panels on their gloves preferred a leather pocket, allowing them to do what I did when my grandfather’s catcher’s mitt arrived in the mail: place it over my nose and mouth and inhale.
And so the game played on, literally hidebound but somehow ever changing. Carpenter lived and worked in Cooperstown, of all places, where the glove he made for Gordon was enshrined nearby, behind glass in the Hall of Fame.
The last forty-eight miles of the drive to Cooperstown, from my home in Connecticut, is a stretch of rural roads that runs past stands of trees, past grazing cows, past horses and sheep and—just on the outskirts of town, overlooking Otsego Lake—the estate of August Anheuser Busch. The land was purchased by the brewery magnate at the turn of the previous century, when Otsego County was the nation’s finest region for growing hops. In good times, before he fell ill and took his own life with a shotgun in 1934, Busch entertained the neighbors with trained elephants performing on the lawn.
On my drives to Cooperstown, every ingredient necessary for a baseball game, then, was just beyond the car window: cow, horse, sheep, tree, and hops. Which is to say ball, bat, glove, grass, and beer.
As forty thousand of us sat in Wi-Fi’d wonder watching the game in Minneapolis, on infinite flat screens and smartphones and even—when strictly necessary—with the naked eye, I couldn’
t help but marvel at how we got here. A ball hand-sewn in Costa Rica was whipped round the horn, recalling another epic journey, to say nothing of baseball’s own, embracing culture, commerce, technology, race, romance, murder, travel, war, and screwballs of every variety.
Baseball was the world on a plate—home plate. And it was all set down before me on the checkered tablecloth of Target Field.
For all its novelty, Target Field still had bleachers that bleached and shadows that crept and a tarp that rolled out when the skies opened up. The first time that happened, after twenty-eight seasons indoors, Twins fans looked up in disbelief and loudly applauded the heavens.
Under the stars, I silently did the same, and felt a sharp pang of memory. Not a day had passed since I was ten that I hadn’t thought of baseball, or at the very least baseballs. And I still couldn’t eat a snow cone at Target Field—or drink any other hot or cold beverage—without a sharp pain in my left front tooth, thirty-four years after it was snapped in half by a thrown baseball, an ever-present reminder of my failure to catch a ball at first base for the Bloomington Athletic Association Braves in the summer of 1976.
Baseball had literally made an impression on me, even before that employee ID card arrived on my thirteenth birthday, bearing the Twins’ mesmeric logo of Minnie and Paul shaking hands.
That logo was the centerpiece of the new Target Field. On a magnificent sign above the center field bleachers, the cartoon ballplayers wore belted flannels and tall socks. Like Babe Ruth and Cy Young before him, Paul leaned on his bat for support. Framed by the silhouette of my home state, the pair shook hands. They were forty-six feet tall and pulsing with neon.
Somewhere down the third-base line, so was I.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Early in the research of this book, I made a late-autumn drive from my home in Connecticut to the National Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, New York, with my then seventy-seven-year-old father riding shotgun. After four hours in the car, we arrived to find a paper note taped to the Hall’s front door: CLOSED TODAY.
Unlike other shrines, the Baseball Hall of Fame closes only three days a year—Thanksgiving, Christmas, and New Year’s—but snowmelt from a November storm threatened the region with flooding. So Dad and I passed a windswept moment on the front steps, jiggling the locked front door, feeling like Clark and Rusty Griswold in National Lampoon’s Vacation, denied entry into Walley World by the animatronic moose.
Mercifully, the Hall reopened the next day, and I set foot for the first time in its wonderful library, where visitors are obliged—as in other solemn rituals—to don white gloves. These gloves, proffered at the front desk, turn everyone who wears them into Mickey Mouse. In that and subsequent visits, I spent several white-gloved days poring over file folders so endlessly absorbing they risked swallowing me whole.
In one such folder of flaking, yellowed news clippings devoted to baseball concessions, I found a silver foil hot-dog wrapper. When Tom Shieber, the Hall of Fame’s senior curator, happened by and snatched it out of my hand to archive elsewhere, I suddenly envied this man whose job necessitated a file drawer devoted to ballpark hot-dog wrappers. (He writes engagingly about many of his discoveries on his Baseball Researcher blog at baseballresearcher.blogspot.com.)
Shieber’s colleague Bill Francis is a Hall of Fame researcher in every sense of that phrase. I’m indebted to Bill for answering every one of my queries with great skill and good cheer. No subject—from the urinals at Ebbets Field to the bring-your-own-beer policies in major-league ballparks—was too inane for Bill to field. Or if it was, he never told me. Because he knows something about everything, from baseball to the British guerrilla artist Banksy, stumping him became a personal challenge.
When thirst for knowledge gave way to thirst for beer, Bill took me to the Doubleday Café on Main Street. On our own, my dad and I discovered Cooley’s Stone House Tavern on Pioneer Street, where we were fortified with Guinness and grilled cheese.
Freddy Berowski made time for me in the National Baseball Hall of Fame Library—officially the A. Bartlett Giamatti Research Center—and ensured that a mountain of folders (and a pair of white gloves) were waiting on arrival.
I’m also grateful to the Hall of Fame’s director of research, Tim Wiles, who coauthored Baseball’s Greatest Hit, an evocative book about “Take Me Out to the Ball Game.” Wiles graciously offered to house my (now extensive) research on Jimmy Boyle at the Hall. He and all the staff in Cooperstown saved me from many errors in this book. Any that remain are mine.
Pat Kelly, the Hall of Fame’s photo archivist, helped to bring the manuscript alive with pictures of many of the principals. The Library of Congress is another invaluable photo resource as well as a national treasure.
Speaking of bringing things to life: John Parsley at Little, Brown shares an enthusiasm for things lost and things found, and a Dr. Frankenstein–like belief that we can reanimate the dead. John was the first person to suggest there was a book in the objects of baseball—the first to realize that my grandfather’s mitt could tell a broader story. His deft editing and enthusiasm for the subject were invaluable.
I’m likewise indebted to Michael Pietsch for his interest in the project, and to Malin von Euler-Hogan for her endless assistance.
Carolyn Haley is a thoughtful copyeditor who improved the manuscript. Karen Landry improved everyone’s improvements.
I’m grateful as ever to Esther Newberg, for her twin love of books and baseball (though in which order those belong, I cannot say).
Baseball Reference (baseball-reference.com) is a bottomless resource for anyone writing about the game, as is all the good work done by the Society for American Baseball Research (SABR.org).
It’s not possible to write about baseball uniforms without feeling Paul Lukas—author of the Uni Watch column for ESPN.com—looking over your sleeve-patched shoulder. Marc Okkonen’s epic book on baseball uniforms (Baseball Uniforms of the 20th Century) was a good point of entry on that subject. Noah Liberman’s book on gloves (Glove Affairs), and two books on the Louisville Slugger (Crack of the Bat by Bob Hill and Sweet Spot by David Magee and Philip Shirley), are likewise engaging on those subjects. Peter Morris’s two-volume epic, A Game of Inches, is a fascinating account of baseball’s origins and evolution.
Joe DeMartino is a former Linotype operator for the Brooklyn Daily Eagle, whose offhand memories about the long waits at urinals at the Ebbets Field men’s room of his youth inspired chapter 6.
Thanks to the staff of the Brooklyn Public Library, who helped both in person and online, with its archive of the Daily Eagle.
The online archives of Sporting Life and Baseball Magazine maintained by the LA84 Foundation were also indispensable.
My friend Jim Badorek tipped me off to the story of his relative Ted Pisk.
My editors at Sports Illustrated excused my occasional absence.
Diane Taylor is a lovely writer who has blessedly maintained the memory of Foulproof Taylor, her great-uncle, in every sense of that adjective. Diane was kind enough to share stories and photographs of Foulproof with me.
Jimmy Boyle and his wife, Clare, raised three children on the west side of Cincinnati. One of them is Pat Boyle, my uncle, who has kept his father’s mitt and scrapbook and stories alive, and passed all of them along to me. My aunt Ann (Boyle) Burns shared letters, photographs, and above all memories of her father. Ann and Pat’s big sister is my late mother, Jane (Boyle) Rushin, who loved baseball and Cincinnati and the point at which they intersected in the Cincinnati Reds. It was my mother who encouraged me to read and to write, and to get a job at Metropolitan Stadium. This book is the product of all those urgings.
Pete Rose was another product of Cincinnati’s west side. When he beat the Mets with a home run in the twelfth inning of Game 4 of the 1973 National League Championship Series, my mother danced around the shag carpet of our family room in Bloomington, Minnesota.
In my mind’s eye, she never stopped.
NOTE
S
Introduction
guard the team’s supply of baseballs: R. J. Lesch, “Eddie Brannick,” SABR bio, http://sabr.org/bioproj/person/f0d59a5f.
stolen a bouquet of bats and my Uncle Buzz’s uniform pants: “Boys in ‘Bats’ Theft Raid Ebbets Field,” New York Times, February 11, 1936.
Clark Griffith invented the screwball: Leavengood, Clark Griffith, 23.
Bob Casey informed fans: Associated Press, “17,697 at Minnesota Ball Park Evacuated over Bomb Threat,” New York Times, August 26, 1970.
Chapter 1
sixty-one baseball-shaped gefilte fish: “Hank Greenberg Didn’t Have a Last Shot in the Dark at Ruth’s Record,” Sports Illustrated, June 14, 1982.
Laura Bush commissioned a cake: Bush, Spoken from the Heart, 191.
“What Christy Mathewson could do to the Germans”: United Press International, “Ingenuity of Germans,” Northern Indianian, April 1, 1915.
invented a hand grenade: Yellowstone News, September 30, 1916.
“If America ever goes to war”: “London Correspondent of the Washington Star: Bomb Throwing by Hand,” St Joseph’s News-Press, August 9, 1916.
“Our boys already excel”: “Captain Fish Writes from France,” New York Times, May 5, 1918.
“He threw in a peculiar fashion”: Evers, “Teaching the Poilus How to Play Baseball.”
“This hand grenade throwing is great exercise”: Nort, “A Message from the War Front.”
one went off in his right hand: Associated Press, “Marine Hero to See Game,” New York Times, October 7, 1944; “Marine Hero in Cards’ Dugout,” Youngstown Vindicator, October 8, 1944.
pitcher Dave Ferriss was photographed: “Baseball-Shaped Tear-Gas Grenade Strikes ’Em Out,” Popular Science, October 1945, 121.
“The Chinese, lacking America’s baseball tradition”: Associated Press, “Chinese Reds Have Resurrected the Grenadier,” The Day (New London, CT), January 22, 1951.