Baseball by George Vecsey Read Free Book Online

and John Montgomery Ward, giving New York three future Hall of Famers at the top of its lineup. In 1885, the team brought in a new manager, Jim Mutrie, who referred to his stars as “my giants,” which soon led to the official nickname of that historic franchise.
    A deft first baseman who stole 244 bases and hit 233 triples, Connor smashed one home run completely out of the old Polo Grounds in New York, upon which the wealthy box-seat patrons took up a collection and bought Connor a gold watch said to be worth $500. When Connor retired, nobody fussed over his total of 138 homers, clearly the most anybody had ever hit. He went back to Waterbury and bought the local minor league team, and later worked in the school system.
    “The family old-timers said he was just a regular family man afterhis playing days who often helped friends and family out of financial hardships,” a grand-nephew, Garrett Squires, recollected early in the twenty-first century. “So he had a good life from all accounts.”
    Perhaps it was a good life but it was also uncelebrated. In 1921, when Babe Ruth was swatting home runs for the Yankees in the second version of the Polo Grounds, Roger Connor was living a couple of hours away in northern Connecticut. When the Babe hit his 138th home run and then his 139th, Connor was not invited to sit in a box seat of honor to graciously applaud the Babe, as is the custom today when records are broken. He was not mentioned at all. When Connor died in 1931, the obituary in the Waterbury paper played up his contribution to local baseball after he had left the major leagues but it did not note that Connor had once held the record for home runs before Babe Ruth. In 1976, a Waterbury sportswriter hectored the Veterans Committee to vote Roger Connor into the Baseball Hall of Fame. The plaque says Connor was the home run king of the nineteenth century.
    The lack of attention paid to Connor was due to the low status of the home run rather than any obscurity of baseball itself. Although generally perceived as rough-hewn characters who would disrupt a hotel or restaurant with their rowdy arrival, many players in the last quadrant of the nineteenth century were celebrities, the subjects of songs, articles, and gossip. Having shed their amateur status, baseball players were regarded in the same class as laborers or tradesmen or music hall performers, with none of the college-boy aura that would later become attached to football or the country-club glamour associated with tennis and golf. In fact, a small percentage of baseball players were college men, like Ward, a lawyer out of Columbia University in New York.
    The patronizing air from the stockbrokers and businessmen who bought box seats to the games is detected in the
New York Times
's coverage of the Delmonico's dinner in April of 1889. Cap Anson, the manager of the White Stockings, who had spent a year at Notre Dame University, was described as appearing “considerably embarrassed when he rose to his feet, but was also thankful that he had been permitted to assist in teaching the world what it most neededto know.” In the eyes of the nameless reporter, Anson came off as a humble oaf, which may or may not have had any connection to his staunch opposition to blacks' participating in the major leagues. The
Times
then described how Ward “seemed glad of the opportunity given him to display his singularly correct knowledge of the English language,” with the reporter using the better vocabulary of this college man to contrast with the vast majority of the players. Baseball players are still regarded by the public as day laborers, generally of modest class and pedigree, partially because of the rising number of Hispanics in the game, coupled with resentment of high salaries and the strength of the union. When the players do not report for work, they are perceived as committing an injustice to the population, like gardeners and nannies not reporting for work. How can they