Baseball in the Colleges

...In the Middle-West basketball has cut into the ranks of the natural boy baseball material...

...It is the latter tendency that has made college fielding occasionally look so poor, without aiding the real stand of college batting, which is in reality better than it looks...

...But the college game stands on its own feet, and with this season's great revival looks forward to many years of continued prosperity...

...The fact is that the notable revival of interest in the college game is due in part to a reaction from the overcommercialization of the professional game...

...With a sharpened stick he drew on the ground the outline of the first baseball diamond...

...There is little likelihood for some years to come that the demand for club professionals, greenskeepers, club makers, and so on, will reach the saturation point, and while baseball salaries of today are most alluring, the diamond life of the good player is not apt to run beyond ten years, if, indeed, he lasts that long...

...With rare exceptions, and those too soon transplanted from the college ranks to those of the leagues, one can hardly expect the expert position play of the professional to appear profusely in the college ranks...

...Today, the big-league magnates will tell you that they look for the very life of their organizations to the colleges, Catholic and non-Catholic alike, and with the many reforms in the professional game, especially the newer standards of deportment on the field, it is at least a temporary career not to be scoffed at by the collegian...

...For all practical purposes, the United States ended at the Mississippi River...

...But fundamentally the professional and college games remain vastly different in technique...

...The very nature of the game calls for a championship of some sort...

...But the average of skill in the colleges is high enough to keep the big-league scouts on the job, and to make of every college trainer and scout an emissary of the magnates...

...This is why in the newly formed Eastern Intercollegiate Baseball League every team in the six-club organization meets every other club twice in the course of the season...

...So far as actual skill went, the Catholic colleges have been closer to the professional standard from the beginning...

...Were the teams to play only one game with each other the decision might rest solely with the pitching talent or with the breaks of the game...

...These two got their heads together last season and founded a formal league among colleges that already had a league organization in basketball...

...With the lessened publicity, Colonel Ruppert will tell you that there was a difference of 25,000 in the daily attendance at the Yankee Stadium...

...It is most unlikely that one team will have all the breaks in the course of two games...

...There is a curious reason for this...

...The Eastern Intercollegiate Baseball League has indulged in an official scorer, with the result that averages are to be found in the newspapers every week, thus increasing interest...

...From the day of its inception, at Cooperstown, Otsego County, New York, in 1839, the game was seized upon by the professionals...

...With this advantage, against a background of intense undergraduate and graduate loyalty, the college game stands out this year to a marked degree...

...They were among the earliest to send players up to the big leagues, and among the first to receive adequate professional coaching...

...In parts of Illinois, in Indiana and in Ohio, there are large-size schools which have no baseball teams at all, enamored of the longer season possible in basketball...

...Then, too, until track and field athletics came along, the short baseball season did not have to divide its pulling power with any other sport...

...But this year the college game is enjoying an unusually fine season...

...The large Irish element, always stalwart baseball fans, are vastly responsible for this, and there has been one other factor of great importance, the fact that even without formal organization there has always been what amounted to a league among the Catholic institutions...

...This came at a time when the New York Yankees were engaged in one of those "crooshal" series...

...Further, the work of the official scorer is teaching the college scorers to be a little more liberal on hits and a little less severe on errors...

...It is true that the American Legion and other patriotic organizations are trying to keep what was once known as the "sand lot" game alive, and have been fairly successful, but there is more color in the college player who graduates to the league...

...In the case of golf, the kids have found that they could pick up that game by acting as caddies, and be paid for it at the same time...

...In other words, there has been a remarkable revival of interest in defense, in the "inside baseball" made famous by Hugh Fullerton more than a decade ago...

...In some sections of the country the professional basketball player, with his long season—practically all the year, indoors or outdoors, and often including games twice a day—will frequently make a great deal more money than any but the highest-paid professional baseball men...

...And there is evidence that the amateurs have done much for "inside baseball" from time to time...

...There has been a tendency recently to challenge its standing as the national game, and there can be no doubt that it has faced something of a battle for continued popularity, competing as it has been with golf, tennis and even lacrosse and soccer...

...James A. Tyng of Harvard is generally credited with the invention of the catcher's mask, and A. Alonzo Stagg, now director of athletics at Chicago University, B. Spalding de Garmendia, S. A. W. Baltazzi, Huyler Westervelt, and others, stand ready to dispute with followers of the old Baltimore Orioles the invention of "inside baseball...

...Its technique, however, always appealed to the American youth, as probably no other game ever will...

...And of course, the batting is far below the professional standard, but in these two respects the college game makes a virtue of its defects, with the result that it is a better-balanced sport...

...Then, just as the world war marked a great revival in boxing interest, the Civil War developed the still infant game of baseball...

...The National League was organized in 1876...

...The subsequent progress of the game is probably fairly familiar to most of its old-time devotees...

...There is a movement under way to erect on the field a monument to the memory of General Doubleday...

...130 THE COMMONWEAL June 4, 1930 BASEBALL IN THE COLLEGES By HERBERT REED BASEBALL, "birthright of every American," as the late Father Henry Chadwick used to put it, gets a healthier start in the colleges this season than in many a long year...

...Especially is this true of those headed for the professions, notably medicine and law—professions requiring the outlay of considerable capital...

...As far as publicity is concerned, too, he will fare as well or perhaps even better...

...Thousands of soldiers turned to baseball between spells of fighting, and when the conflict ended the country was equipped with a large group of players and a vast assemblage of spectators, ready made...

...The result at the opening league games recently was immediately noticeable in the increased enthusiasm and attendance...

...Sharp fielding, once so loudly cheered in the professional game in the course of pitchers' battles, is today too often applauded in a perfunctory way—which is decidedly not the case among the colleges...

...And the best place to find inside baseball is in the colleges...

...California belonged to Mexico, and Texas was a struggling young republic...

...On that summer day a youth named Abner Doubleday was explaining to a group of boys and young men a game of his own invention...

...In 1868 Cincinnati organized the first salaried team in baseball history, and the first professional league followed in 1871...

...This last, it may be said, is not an unmixed blessing...

...The error-making, of course, runs into higher figures, and it is not always a home run, but often a blow-up in the field that starts someone in the crowd to shouting, "There goes your old ball game...

...It is of record that A. J. Reach was the first professional baseball player, and as long ago as 1864 he was transferred from Brooklyn to the Philadelphia Athletics for a money consideration, the beginning of the traffic in ball players that is now known as "the ivory trade...

...Golf has been a greater threat to the continued popularity of the professional game than any other sport —golf, and conditions in the cities where fields available for play have been steadily shrinking in number and size...

...For instance, at Harvard, the lacrosse squad outnumbers the baseball squad by a considerable majority, and at the rowing colleges the oarsmen, too, turn out in greater numbers than do the baseball players...

...And in the end, in the field chosen, there is a champion whose title cannot be disputed...

...In Columbus, Ohio, alone there are something like three hundred basketball teams going through regular league seasons, and playing to big attendances...

...Allegiance to it has never wavered among the Catholic colleges, to be sure, for the game in such surroundings is as fundamental as the faculty itself...

...And color even more than skill, is needed as an asset by the professional organizations...

...It is the color that makes the newspaper space, and it is newspaper space that makes the huge attendances at the ball parks...

...It is true that up to that time a game called One Old Cat had been in existence, and it is from this fact that many baseball historians draw the conclusion that baseball June 4, 1930 THE COMMONWEAL was a descendant of rounders, a sport well known in England and Ireland...

...To these men baseball has few attractions...

...Martin Van Buren was then President of the United States...

...However that may, and wherever the credit may lie, the college game has always been one of defense rather than attack—and necessarily so...

...The West already had its Big Ten, and the Missouri Valley Conference was also equipped with a workable organization, but the East had suffered from a lack of formal competition...

...I delve thus far into history to establish the thoroughly professional and organized background that from time to time has helped and hurt baseball...

...Now a further word or two about the league idea in college baseball...

...There are other factors, too, in what may be looked upon as a real revival of interest in the college game...

...And this championship in baseball, contrary to football, boat races and kindred college sports, must be a matter of percentages...

...It was inevitable that in the professional game practices should grow up that would hardly do for transplanting to the colleges, and that is why the game has been so hard to handle there...

...The machinery was ready to hand, and while the conduct of the league last year was purely informal, it was highly successful, so that the league made its formal debut this year with considerable prestige...

...The first formal game under rules developed from the Doubleday idea was played by two Knickerbocker nines in Hoboken, New Jersey, June 19, 1846...

...The professional game has become one of a few individual home-run heroes, and while there is still as much appreciation as ever of the circuit drives of such established favorites as Babe Ruth, Lou Gehrig and others, the fans have come to resent the rise of the newer crop of longdistance hitters, feeling as they do that short right-field fences at many of the parks have become too prominent as factors in this slugging...

...It is the only just way in which to arrive at a decision...

...So it is that the professional clubs must look for their recruits to the colleges...

...Just a few years ago there was a strike of the shopmen among the New York newspapers, and for a time the proprietors published a single paper with much reduced space...

...In 1919 the Cooperstown Chamber of Commerce purchased the field where the first game of baseball was played, called it Doubleday Field, and turned it over for the use of the boys of the town...

...The result was the launching of the Eastern Intercollegiate Baseball League with the following members: Columbia, Yale, Princeton, Pennsylvania, Dartmouth and Cornell...

...The element of chance, which is of the very bone and sinew of baseball, is also much more in evidence among the colleges...

...whereas the dependable golf "pro" is likely to be fairly well fixed for life...

...But the fact remains that Abner Doubleday designed and marked out the first baseball diamond...

...The advantage of this situation has recently been recognized by leaders among the non-Catholic colleges, notably Burnside Winslow, of Yale, and Sidney E. Hutchinson, of Pennsylvania...

...The army was fighting the Indians in Florida and on the plains...

...The old "natural rivalries," YaleHarvard, Yale-Princeton, etc., are still features of commencement week, but the very nature of the game itself demanded a wider, but closely knit rivalry...

...In most of the college stadia, too, because of the smaller seating facilities, there are few short outfields, and any home run is inevitably of the honest-to-goodness variety...