Tagged: baseball

Sandlot Baseball in St. Louis

Several weeks back I saw a post on Facebook from a guy looking to get a bunch of people together on an upcoming Saturday at a local park to play some sandlot baseball, with the intention of not only playing a game but also to discuss the formation of an actual sandlot league in St. Louis. My eyes lit up and I immediately posted my interest in attending and went about spreading the invite among my followers on my personal Facebook page as well as other social media sites that I’m plugged into.

For me, playing some kind of ball has been in the back of my mind ever since I last played corkball at Tower Grove Park back in 2009. While the corkball thing was fun, it was also *really* difficult to get people to participate in. It seemed like, at best, we’d have maybe two or three people show up, and oftentimes it was just me and maybe my son there. So despite my best efforts at the time, I decided to throw in the towel. The arrival of another kid in the winter of 2010 also extinguished a good portion of my free time to continue the endeavor into subsequent summers. So that was pretty much the end of Tower Grove Corkball.

So fast-forward to the pandemic and I began to catch wind of pickup or “sandlot” baseball teams and even leagues forming across the U.S. and Canada. The first of these that I found was through my connection with the baseball-punk band the Isotopes, and that was the East Van Baseball in Vancouver, BC. I liked what I saw and, even though I was rapidly aging through my 50s, longed to see something like this form in St. Louis. Well, lo and behold, we have something now! Born out of a post on the Cherokee Park Hit & Catch All-Stars Facebook group is St. Louis Sandlot! Headed up by a Twin Cities export, Josh Stulen, this new group of ballplayers and its Southside Slingers offshoot (the only “team” to spring forth thus far) have begun playing on random-if-not-more-regularly-as-of-late Saturdays or Sundays at Fox Park in the city of St. Louis. There’s a really nice baseball diamond there that rarely ever gets used called PAL Memorial Park (the Cardinals built it over 20 years ago using money from a grant from the late Daryl Kyle). Still very casual but we run the bases, keep score, etc. Will try to play into December if the weather allows for it.

If you’re interested in playing, follow @stlouissandlot on Instagram (where it’s also recommended to follow the #sandlotrevolution tag in general). Apparently Instagram is the go-to app for finding all things sandlot baseball-related as far as social media is concerned… so far. Longer term goal is to get involved with the Sandlot Revolution next summer. Anyway, if you’d like to come out and play some ball, please join us! Bring your gloves, bats (wood only), and drink(s) of your choice. Our next gathering is this coming Sunday morning (November 12) at 10am at Fox Park.

Origin of the Name “World Series”

Stolen from roadsidephotos.sabr.org by Doug Pappas because his site is apparently defunct:

One baseball myth that just won’t die is that the “World Series” was named for the New York World newspaper, which supposedly sponsored the earliest contests. It didn’t, and it wasn’t.

In fact, the postseason series between the AL and NL champs was originally known as the “Championship of the World” or “World’s Championship Series.” That was shortened through usage to “World’s Series” and finally to “World Series.”

This usage can be traced through the annual baseball guides. Spalding’s Base Ball Guide for 1887 reported the results of the 1886 postseason series between Chicago, champions of the National League, and St. Louis, champions of the American Association, under the heading “The World’s Championship.” As the editor noted, the two leagues “both entitle their championship contests each season as those for the base ball championship of the United States,” so a more grandiose name was required to describe the postseason showdown between the two “champions of the United States.”

But the Spalding Guide — which, after all, was published by one of the world’s largest sporting goods companies, with a vested interest in bringing baseball to other lands — had grander ambitions. By 1890, the Spalding Guide was explaining that “[t]he base ball championship of the United States necessarily includes that of the entire world, though the time will come when Australia will step in as a rival, and after that country will come Great Britain; but all that is for the future.”

This didn’t happen, but the name “World’s Championship Series” stuck. Reporting on the first modern postseason series, the Red Sox-Pirates battle of 1903, the 1904 Reach Guide called it the “World’s Championship Series.” By 1912, Reach’s headline spoke of the “World’s Series,” while editor Francis Richter’s text still referred to the “World’s Championship Series.” The Reach Guide switched from “World’s Series” to “World Series” in 1931, retaining the modern usage through its merger with the Spalding Guide and through its final issue in 1941. The separately-edited Spalding Guide used “World’s Series” through 1916, switching to “World Series” in the 1917 edition.

The Spalding-Reach Guide was replaced as Major League Baseball’s semi-official annual by the Sporting News Guide, first published in 1942. The Sporting News Guide used “World’s Series” from 1942 through 1963, changing to “World Series” in the 1964 edition.

Moreover, the New York World never claimed any connection with postseason baseball. The World was a tabloid much given to flamboyant self-promotion. If it had been involved in any way with sponsoring a championship series, the fact would have been emblazoned across its sports pages for months. I reviewed every issue of the World for the months leading up to the 1903 and 1905 World’s Championship Series — there’s not a word suggesting any link between the paper and the series.

Punk Rock & Baseball

So, as I noted in my first blog post here, I’ve been a baseball fan since I was a wee lad. That’s a given. Pretty normal part of many kids’ lives growing up, especially in such a baseball-centric city as St. Louis. What wasn’t particularly normal, however, was my budding interest in punk and new wave that I developed after discovering a radio show called “Freeform” on KWK in the early ’80s. I’d always loved music, but this stuff totally blew me away and it wasn’t long before I was a full-fledged punk rocker with the weird hair, clothes, and record collection to match. Punk rock also introduced me to a completely different way of looking at the world than I’d been used to growing up in the white, upper middle-class suburbs of West St. Louis County. I started to question not only authority, but religion, politics, and culture/society in general as they’d been presented to me my entire life. In college I began reading lots of left-leaning punk-rock fanzines, not the least influential of these being Maximum Rock’n’Roll. My new religion was hardcore punk, and I’d drive myself and whatever hodgepodge group of “punks” that I could round up at CMSU to see dozens of great, obscure bands at hole-in-the-wall dives, basements, and VFW halls in places like Columbia, Kansas City, Lawrence, and, of course, back home in St. Louis.

Luckily my love of baseball and of my home team, the Cardinals, didn’t waver during this volatile, dynamic period of my life. That’s probably mainly due to the fact that the Cardinals of the ’80s were a pretty successful team, and a helluva lot of fun to cheer for, especially since I was positioned in college just 50 miles east of Kansas City and the home of the Royals, so the 1985 I-70 Series did wonders to keep the baseball flame burning in my belly as the campus of CMSU was divided pretty much right down the middle on team allegiances. And, oh, what a heartbreak it was to lose that Series… and then again just two years later during my senior year. But I digress.

But it was a bit odd to be such a big fan of baseball (hockey, too, for that matter) and to be a “punk rocker” at the same time. After all, a lot of punks had very negative impressions of jocks or “sports fans” in general, and rightly so. Those types of people were often the most intolerant group of people you could find when it came to being accepting of us freaks and weirdos of the punk/new wave persuasion. But it didn’t stop me from just being myself and enjoying both. I mean, because I was a “punk” and therefore a fiercely independent free spirit, I wasn’t about to let anybody else—punk or otherwise—tell me what I should like or how I should live my life. And I’ve been that way ever since. It also didn’t hurt that I discovered that an MRR columnist and musician, Ben Weasel, was also a big baseball fan and even wrote a column once (which I’d love to be able to dig up and repost here if anyone reading this knows where I can get a copy!) where he wrote about the subject of punk rock and baseball.

Baseball, in my humble opinion, anyway, has always been a pretty important part of life in America, and it’s because of that that it is also a microcosm of society. Within the game you will find all sorts of players and fans who mirror what you find in “real life.” That’s important to remember. Baseball fans are impossible to stereotype or pigeonhole. The love of the game transcends all races, cultures, religions, classes, creeds, political divisions and, yes, believe it or not, even musical tastes.