He changed the game. This is why Curt Flood belongs in the Baseball Hall of Fame.

If you ask me, Bowie Kuhn and Bud Selig in the Baseball Hall of Fame is far more repulsive than Donald Trump being president.

Long read: "Major league baseball has a long but little-known history of rebels, reformers, and radicals."

In the late, great Jim Bouton's seminal Ball Four, he observes that the famously eccentric (and highly talented) genius/pitcher Mike Marshall once authored a university term paper titled "Baseball Is An Ass."

Marshall's paper would have been written during the mid-1960s, just before Curt Flood challenged the reserve clause -- and as the late Marvin Miller took the reins of the players union.

Quite simply, Miller belongs in the upper tier of most transformational figures in the history of baseball. Only this year did Miller gain admittance to the Hall of Fame, primarily because of the owners' resentment of a man who enabled them to garner unprecedented wealth by first forcing them to share some of it with the men on the field who made it all possible.

Flood belongs, too. Thanks to IAmHoosier for the link.

Fifty years ago on Christmas Eve, Curt Flood mailed a letter that changed baseball history, by Derrick Goold (St. Louis Post-Dispatch)

Baseball’s declaration of independence, as brief and blunt as it has proven impactful, was sent to the commissioner’s office on Christmas Eve, 50 years ago, and it had St. Louis as the return address.

The brick building with its six white Ionic columns still sits at 8007 Clayton Road, and behind its “For Lease” sign is The Creative Services Building, home to a company that specializes in promotional products to help companies establish their brand, create awards for employees, or fashion gifts for anniversaries. On Dec. 24, 1969, Curt Flood & Assoc. Inc. and Curt Flood Studios resided there, and under its letterhead and that date the former Cardinals outfielder typed a letter that changed baseball history.

“After twelve years in the Major Leagues,” Flood’s letter began, “I do not feel that I am a piece of property to be bought and sold irrespective of my wishes.”

Flood’s rejection of a trade to the Phillies ignited the labor relations revolution that cost him his career. Between addressing commissioner Bowie Kuhn and signing his name, in an economical 127 words, Flood launched what would help create this winter’s billion-dollar free agent market ...

Lunch & Learn at the Carnegie Center: "Baseball in a River Town," presented by Justin Endres.

Justin Endres is going to be talking about the history of local baseball at lunchtime on Tuesday next week, and if you missed Justin at Pints&union in April, best RSVP the Carnegie Center immediately.

Lunch & Learn: Baseball in a River Town: From New Albany’s First Game to its First Superstar, presented by Justin Endres.
Tuesday, August 20, 2019 ... Noon - 1:00 p.m.

Baseball, with its revered history of players, teams, and statistics, has early roots in Indiana. Justin Endres investigated the origins of the sport in the region. Learn about its local development, from the first pitch thrown on September 29, 1866 to New Albany’s first sports superstar, Jouett Meekin (son of the famous riverboat pilot James Meekin.) Lunch and Learn is free and open to the public, but registration is required.

Actually Justin's appearance at the Carnegie is an encore performance. Previously he lectured there in April of 2016, and for all I know there may have been other times.

Tomorrow at the Carnegie: "Base Ball in a River Town: New Albany."

Cubs fans, here's a good one for you: The Devil and Frank Chance.

Some amazing sleuthing by Baseball Researcher, and I'm glad Keith Olbermann mentioned it on Twitter. The topic is a photo of Frank "Tinker to Evers to" Chance chatting with none other than the Devil.

I first saw the photo around five years ago and my initial reaction was “What the hell?” And that has basically been my reaction every time I revisited the photo, as I tried to solve the mystery behind just what is going on. It has taken me a while to crack this nut, but here's what I've determined.

Get the full story right here: The Devil and Frank Chance.

With the baseball season winding down, a few thoughts about Bill Veeck.

On Wednesday night, a few of us got together to eat nachos, drink beer and maybe even watch a few innings of the second game in this year's World Series.

Somehow Bill Veeck's name came up.

Here are the bare facts.

In the 1980s, in the bleachers (Wrigley Field).

William Louis Veeck Jr. (/ˈvɛk/; February 9, 1914 – January 2, 1986), also known as "Sport Shirt", was an American Major League Baseball franchise owner and promoter. Veeck was at various times the owner of the Cleveland Indians, St. Louis Browns and Chicago White Sox. As owner and team president of the Indians in 1947, Veeck signed Larry Doby, thus beginning the integration of the American League, and the following year won a World Series title as Cleveland's owner/president.

Veeck was the last owner to purchase a baseball franchise without an independent fortune, and is responsible for many innovations and contributions to baseball.

Finding it hard to financially compete, Veeck retired after the 1980 Chicago White Sox season. He was inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame in 1991.

Veeck's most famous stunt came when he sent a little person to bat for the St. Louis Browns.

A Can of Beer, a Slice of Cake—and Thou, Eddie Gaedel

(An excerpt from Veeck—As In Wreck: The Autobiography of Bill Veeck, with Ed Linn)

In 1951, in a moment of madness, I became owner and operator of a collection of old rags and tags known to baseball historians as the St. Louis Browns.

The Browns, according to reputable anthropologists, rank in the annals of baseball a step or two ahead of Cro-Magnon man. One thing should be made clear. A typical Brownie was more than four feet tall. Except, of course, for Eddie Gaedel, who was 3'7" and weighed 65 lbs. Eddie gave the Browns their only distinction. He was, by golly, the best darn midget who ever played big-league ball. He was also the only one.

Veeck's 1976 White Sox wore shorts in three games, and won two of them.

And who can ever forget Disco Demolition Night?

BASEBALL: The Night Disco Went Up in Smoke, by Joe Lapointe (New York Times)

In the warm air that night, baseball’s routine and soothing sounds mixed with the tribal cadence of off-color chanting, the drifting scent of marijuana and the sight of vinyl records descending through the summer dusk like Frisbees.

“They would slice around you and stick in the ground,” Rusty Staub said. “It wasn’t just one, it was many. Oh, God almighty, I’ve never seen anything so dangerous in my life. I begged the guys to put on their batting helmets.”

Staub was the player representative for the Detroit Tigers when they visited the Chicago White Sox on Disco Demolition Night, July 12, 1979, at Comiskey Park. Few sports promotions ever went so awry; few are remembered as well. Some in charge that night still defend it ...

I read Veeck's venerable autobiography while still in high school; after all, it was written in 1962. My guess it it's still worth the time. Baseball has changed in mind-numbing ways since Veeck's heyday. To me, his wisdom is timeless.

On pints, union, Jouett Meekin and a people's history of New Albany.

We saw two major league baseball games in Baltimore last week, with my Oakland A's happily winning both, and although our arrangements were made long before youthful New Albany native Josh Rogers joined the roster of the woebegone Orioles, there was at least a theoretical chance Rogers might pitch.

He didn't, but it got me thinking about the greatest pitcher New Albany has produced up until the present day: Jouett Meekin (1867-1944), who retired in 1900 just as the "modern" era in professional baseball began.

Of course "modernity" is at best an approximation. Did you know that a baseball clearing the outfield wall on one bounce still was considered a home run as recently as 1930? Since then, it has counted as an automatic double, or in the vernacular, a "ground rule double."

Over the years I've mentioned Jouett Meekin several times in this space. At six feet, one inch and 180 pounds, he possessed a murderous fastball compared by none other than stats guru Bill James to Amos Rusie's and Cy Young's, averaging 16 wins a year during a career lasting from 1891 through 1900.

Meekin undoubtedly was New Albany's most famous baseball player prior to the advent of William Jennings Bryan Herman.

Billy Herman, named by his parents for an early 20th-century politician, presidential candidate and religious zealot (frequently targeted for well-deserved abuse by H. L. Mencken), was a second baseman from 1931 to 1947, and later coached and managed.

Herman was elected to the Hall of Fame in 1975. There's a ball field downtown named for him, and his granddaughter Cherie is married to former Indiana governor Mitch Daniels.

As a baseball lifer, Herman lived on the road, and it isn't clear whether he spent any significant time in New Albany during or after his playing career, although by the mid-1960s, his permanent residence was listed as Florida.

I mention this only because Meekin returned home when his playing days were over. There's a plaque marking the house of his residence, which in spite of perennial slumlord neglect still manages to stand a mere block away from NA Confidential headquarters.

One fact unites Meekin's and Herman's eras in baseball, in that neither made very much money as baseball players. While Herman obtained employment in the game, Meekin was in his early thirties upon sporting retirement, and he needed to work, so he became a fireman and stayed a fireman for the remainder of his working days.

Ironically, a short time after Meekin's death a stylish new firehouse was built right across the street from his house, as yet in use as Rogers recorded his first win as an Oriole.

The preceding ruminations stem from a Wednesday evening with beers in a nearly deserted Camden Yards, thinking about Rogers, Herman and Meekin, and the thread of sporting continuity that links them despite crazily disparate time stamps.

The chronology wouldn't let me be, so I had to take a second look, learning that Meekin was born on February 21, 1867.

Damn it!

We missed the opportunity to honor Meekin's 150th birthday with a gala at Pints&union, except of course Pints&union didn't exist until his 151st also had passed, so the very best we can do is have a 152nd birthday party in 2019, hopefully making it an annual event in subsequent years. Meekin's birthday being February, perhaps a spring training motif is best.

Given that our friend Mark Keeler has conducted research into Meekin's life, and he's keen to share it, celebrating the pitcher's birthday might also afford the opportunity to honor a few more chapters in the "people's" history of New Albany.

As noted previously, taverns most often have occupied the 130-year-old building at 114 East Market that now houses Pints&union. Was Meekin the fireman ever a patron while off duty?

To conclude, Herman probably was the best baseball player this city has produced, at least yet. Still, we need to treat even this assertion with a disclaimer; for instance, what do we know about New Albanians who may have competed in the pre-desegregation Negro League?

It is my belief that Meekin deserves special consideration for his post-baseball career as hometown fire fighter, and taken together with his achievements in baseball, a simple plaque on a Midtown house doesn't quite do it for me. It wasn't until 2002 that Meekin's grave in Fairview Cemetery even had a proper marker, thanks to the efforts of Curtis Peters and the Floyd County Historical Society.

Stay tuned for more, and if you have any information about Meekin, please pass it along.

Learning how to kneel: "Over the past century, 'The Star-Spangled Banner' and baseball have become inextricably wed."

It wasn't necessary for Colin Kaepernick to take a knee to dissuade me from watching football. Whatever waning interest remained was jettisoned some years back when the appalling extent of brain injuries and crippling physical impairments finally started being reported.

The NFL's lies and cover-ups since then sealed the deal. By all rights, we should be protesting the nature of the sport itself, but as for those other protests currently compelling white America to boycott modern gladiators:

(Psst -- it's not about the flag or the military, and it never has been.)

If you're saying to yourself, well, I never protest, and when I do it is done tastefully, so as to be inoffensive to others ... you just might be revealing yourself as a privileged societal cog unable to fathom injustice.

Would you have participated in the American Revolution?

If so, on which side?

So much for football. I've always been a baseball fan, anyway, and I was proud as proverbial punch when Bruce Maxwell, a catcher for my beloved Oakland A's, became the first major leaguer to take a knee. He comes from a military family, and his military family gets it.

The bigger question for me is this: How did the tradition begin of the national anthem being played before sporting events?

It goes back a century, to 1918 and the Great War, which did more than another single event to inaugurate and define the parameters of American "patriotism" as we now (usually unthinkingly) accept it -- and also gave us Prohibition, among other intrusions.

America's forgotten past: "It is worth reviewing how World War I turned out so much worse than the experts and politicians promised."

 ... Wilson acted as if the congressional declaration of war against Germany was also a declaration of war against the Constitution. Harvard professor Irving Babbitt commented in 1924, “Wilson, in the pursuit of his scheme for world service, was led to make light of the constitutional checks on his authority and to reach out almost automatically for unlimited power.” Wilson even urged Congress to set up detention camps to quarantine “alien enemies.”

This entertaining 2011 account tells the rest of the story.

The song remains the same: Over the past century, "The Star-Spangled Banner" and baseball have become inextricably wed, by Luke Cyphers and Ethan Trex (ESPN The Magazine)

THE FIRST THING to remember is that it's a battle song.

The most memorable lines involve rockets and bombs, and the lesser-known verses conjure "the havoc of war" and "the gloom of the grave."

The second thing to remember? It's a taunt, a lyrical grenade chucked at a defeated opponent. "See that flag still flying, the one you tried to capture?" it famously asks the British. Then it answers: "Scoreboard."

That's why, in a country that loudly lauds actions on the battlefield and the playing field, "The Star-Spangled Banner" and American athletics have a nearly indissoluble marriage. Hatched during one war, institutionalized during another, this song has become so entrenched in our sports identity that it's almost impossible to think of one without the other.

Our nation honors war. Our nation loves sports. Our nation glorifies winning. Our national anthem strikes all three chords at the same time.

Long read: "Major league baseball has a long but little-known history of rebels, reformers, and radicals."

Bud Selig is to be inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame. That's actually more repulsive as Donald Trump being elected president.

As a corrective, this long but necessary survey, ranging from the early days to the present.

Out of Left Field, by Peter Dreier and Robert Elias (Jacobin)

Major league baseball has a long but little-known history of rebels, reformers, and radicals.

... Despite their courageous and pioneering efforts, neither (Marvin) Miller nor (Curt) Flood have been elected to the Hall of Fame. While Miller was alive, the baseball establishment blocked him from the Cooperstown shrine five times. The owners and executives who control the Hall of Fame kept changing the voting rules to keep him out.

Yet baseball experts overwhelmingly agree with Hall of Fame broadcaster Red Barber, who claimed that Miller is one of the three most important figures in baseball history, alongside Babe Ruth and Jackie Robinson.

Flood’s fifteen years of Hall of Fame eligibility ended in 1996 when he garnered just 15.1 percent of baseball writers’ votes. He died the following year at fifty-nine, which made him eligible to enter the Hall of Fame posthumously if the Veterans Committee voted him in. There’s been no effort to resuscitate his candidacy.

Cultural education: Jim Bouton's landmark book, Ball Four.

John Thorn is the Official Baseball Historian for Major League Baseball, and as Thorn rightfully gushes, Jim Bouton is the author of Ball Four, one of the most influential books of my reading life. In the early 1970s, my copy looked just like the one pictured here.

Not unexpectedly, an overview of Ball Four by Mark Armour at the Society for American Baseball Research (SABR) website is among the most complete that I've seen.

Today’s fans and writers, children or young adults when they first devoured the book, re-read it every two or three years. The book is universally viewed as well-written, provocative, thought-provoking, and funny. It is difficult to imagine that such a book could be controversial, that its author would be shunned by people within the game for many years, and in fact is still shunned. It is so.

Thorn takes the story from here.

Jim Bouton: An Improvisational Life, by John Thorn (Our Game)

... What emboldened me to approach (Jim Bouton) was my knowledge of his ongoing efforts to bring baseball back to Wahconah Park in Pittsfield, Massachusetts, which had hosted baseball on this same spot since 1892.

“It might interest you, Jim,” I offered, “that baseball was played in Pittsfield a full century earlier, and I have evidence of a prohibition against its play anywhere near a newly erected church. The actual document, I was told by the town clerk, survives.”

This stunned him. It was a great way to promote Pittsfield and his campaign. We became fast friends. He and his colleagues went on to scour the town’s archives and unearthed two manuscript copies of the “Pittsfield Prohibition” of 1791 and, barely a month after our conversation in Hackensack, we held a press conference. Because the ban placed baseball — as played by that name — in 18th-century America, the discovery turned out to be an international event. (For more about the Pittsfield story and what it means, see: https://goo.gl/BH9nOc) ...

There have been a couple "vintage" baseball games played in metro Louisville during recent years, and I've always been out of town, which is frustrating.

... A Vintage Base Ball Federation followed, with games in a number of locations for several years. I was involved in all of it, but for me the principal benefit of reviving the old ball game was the friendship with Jim that continues to this day. Though we get together with our wives regularly for dinner at a favorite neighborhood restaurant, I confess to being star-struck still — and not because Jim won twenty games for the Yankees a couple of times before I went off to college.

He is the man who wrote Ball Four.

I will not detail Jim’s life here. His biography is wonderfully sketched by Mark Armour in an entry for SABR’s Baseball Biography Project (https://goo.gl/Xre4Gs). Permit me to focus now on Ball Four: its landmark place in history; the revolution it inspired; and the importance of the impending sale at auction of its underlying notes, drafts, audiotapes, and related materials, whose very survival was largely unknown.

Sad but compelling baseball reading: "The tortured life of Eric Show."

"Show sat down after Rose's famous hit" (ESPN)

The World Series was enjoyable. As an A's fan and a history buff, it didn't matter to me which team came out on top. Either way, "old school" values were being served -- except when Jon Lester refuses to throw to first. That's just bizarre, and it's something John McGraw wouldn't have tolerated.

Sitting at home, drinking beer and watching the games, there was plenty of time to kill, and one of the joys of being a baseball fan in the electronic era is instant recall, statistically speaking. In spite of being mathematically challenged, I've always loved looking at baseball stats.

Full disclosure urges me to reveal that when it comes to baseball statistics, I'm a proud and unrepentant Luddite. WAR is where my dad was from 1942 - 1945, not "wins above replacement," the calculation of which I'd be unable to explain with the proverbial gun held to my temple.

It's unclear to me how a break in the action led me to Baseball Reference Dot Com, though it's probably because the San Diego Padres famously defeated the Chicago Cubs in the playoffs in 1984. Whatever the reason, soon I was scanning rosters from 32 years ago (say it ain't so), and there was the name of Padres pitcher Eric Show (pronounced Schau, if memory serves).

Show?

He died young, didn't he?

I had no idea just how young, or knew anything about the back story. It's a long, sad read, which begins with Show surrendering Pete Rose's career record-setting hit.

The tortured life of Eric Show, by Tom Friend (ESPN; September 11, 2010)

SAN DIEGO -- Back then, the news came in on Teletype, not over the Internet. Pete Rose had just slapped two hits at Wrigley Field, bringing his career total to 4,191, and somewhere up there, Ty Cobb was fidgeting … or having a gin and tonic. One more base hit and Rose would break Cobb's all-time hits record, a mark that had stood for nearly 60 years. Everyone in baseball wanted a bird's-eye view, but one team in particular was about to see it up close and maybe too personal: the woebegone 1985 San Diego Padres.

A year after reaching their first World Series, the Padres had gone into something of a tailspin. On Sept. 8, the day Rose tied Cobb, a talented San Diego club that featured Tony Gwynn, Steve Garvey and Goose Gossage was in third place, 10 games out. The team was toast. The only good news, depending on how you looked at it, was that the Padres were headed to Cincinnati for three games with the Reds. They'd probably get to witness history, although, on the other hand, one of their pitchers would have to serve up history. One of them was going to live in infamy.

Who was it going to be? As the team dressed in its home clubhouse that Sunday -- about to board a flight to Ohio -- all eyes turned to the next three men in the starting rotation. One of them was a left-hander, Dave Dravecky, his hair slicked back after a shower, his pulse strikingly calm. Another was LaMarr Hoyt, a former Cy Young Award winner who already was planning to jam Rose with inside fastballs. But a third pitcher sat disconnected at his locker, eyes darting, frown palpable. On his shelf were a book by Ayn Rand and a cassette player full of American jazz. His clothes were black and purple. He carried a guitar. He looked out of place. His own catcher, Terry Kennedy, liked to call him "Angry Young Man" to his face, partly to get under his skin, but also because Kennedy sensed "bad s--- always seemed to follow him around."

So this was what the Padres were going to throw at Rose the next three days in Cincinnati. And as the team bus pulled out of Jack Murphy Stadium, the players couldn't help but think of Jack Murphy's Law: Anything that can go wrong will go wrong for Eric Show.