The First Historian Of Baseball
by Herbert Johnson
In the late twenties my family lived right on the edge of the historic Parade Grounds. I must have been about eight or nine when I found myself utterly fascinated with the top team of those days, the Argyles.
Continue reading “Parade Grounds Memories”
Over the years we corresponded with some well-known people in baseball. You’ll recognize these names, which are signed to letters in our correspondence file: Ford Frick, Charlie Segar, Dave Grote, Charles “Chub” Feeney, Larry MacPhail, Albert B. “Happy” Chandler, Bowie Kuhn, Marty Appel. These letters were written in response to our requests for information to be used in the Seymour books, information that many businesses other than baseball businesses would be glad to distribute. But most of the answers these famous people gave were in this vein: No, we can’t give you that information; it’s not our policy to do it. Only Larry MacPhail and Marty Appel of the Yankees said Yes, we’ll send what you need.
Lawrence “Larry” Yaffa, like many Brooklyn boys of the twenties and thirties, wanted to become a ball player. Here is his story.
Continue reading “Memories of Brooklyn Baseball”
Over the years Seymour, with my help, published many articles, most of them on baseball history. In 1956 The New-York Historical Society Quarterly printed his “How Baseball Began,” explaining that the game came originally from England and had been played there long before Abner Doubleday supposedly “invented” it in Cooperstown in 1839.
Continue reading “Baseball Articles and Speeches”
In 1991 The People’s Game won The Casey Award, given annually by Spitball: The Literary Baseball Magazine. Editor Mike Shannon said it won conclusively over all finalists, including George Will’s Men at Work. Since Seymour didn’t feel up to traveling to accept the award at the Spitball banquet, I arranged to have a local photographer make a videotape of his necessarily-short acceptance speech; by then his health was in steep decline. I prepared his remarks in about five short sentences, writing them in very large type on a card, so that he could read them before the camera. He did so, weakly and ineffectively, but he accomplished the task. The Cooperstown Hall of Fame asked for a copy of this video for its archives, and I sent it.
Partly because we were living in the New York area when the second volume came out, Oxford University Press obtained considerable media attention for it, including radio and TV interviews. Mike Wallace interviewed Seymour on his radio show in August of 1971, complimenting Seymour afterwards on a good performance.
Fenn College in Cleveland became Seymour’s second college-level teaching position; he had taught at Presbyterian College in South Carolina, and during world War II he left teaching to run his father’s marine contracting business in New York City.
At the time Seymour was about to be awarded his Ph.D. for the first dissertation on the history of American baseball, he was interviewed by the Cleveland News. After all, “The Rise of Major League Baseball to 1891” was a highly unusual title for a doctoral dissertation! News reporter Joe Madigan quoted Seymour as explaining, “No historian has ever deemed the subject worthy of scholarly investigation, despite the fact that baseball is a reflection of the development of American life. Learned men are sometimes very stuffy, you know.”
Before he was able to find a teaching position at the college level, Seymour taught junior high school history in Norwich, New York. He accepted the position with the assurance that he would also be coaching baseball, but when he arrived to start work he learned that the chemistry teacher had been given the baseball position and that he, Seymour, was to coach wrestling-about which he knew nothing! So he enlisted the star wrestler to help him, learned the moves and how to help his boys, coached them and traveled to meets with them, and produced a winning team, popularly called “The Purple Matmen.”
Continue reading “Coaching Wrestling, Not Baseball”
By Harold Seymour, Ph. D.
“Wanna mind the bats for Cincinnati today?”
The voice was that of Babe Hamburger, a Brooklyn clubhouse attendant, who had just passed me with his hands full of food one Sunday afternoon about 1925 as I was standing near the Ebbets Field pass gate on Cedar Place.