As snow blanketed New Jersey and much of the Northeast on Friday, I headed to the Princeton University campus for a wonderful treat: a special class showcasing rare and unusual baseball artifacts and memorabilia donated to the university over the years.
The class was part of Wintersession, the annual between-the-semesters opportunity for students, faculty and staff to take non-credit enrichment courses on a wide range of topics. For example, the previous evening, I joined a colleague in teaching in about 30 students and staff how to brew beer at home.
But on snowy Friday, the focus was on baseball. In the Special Collections area of Firestone Library, University archivist and Dan Linke and another colleague (both hard-core Phillies fans) had pulled a fascinating sample of baseballiana (is that a word?) and arranged the objects on a couple of tables for 20 students and staff to see.
First up was facsimile 13th century Spanish manuscript showing nuns and priests at a convent playing a game with a ball and stick. Was this the origin of America’s national pastime? Probably not, but it proved that bat-and-ball games have been around for centuries.
Next we were shown a booklet from 1787 with the first printed mention of baseball in an American book, a copy of Jane Austen’s “Northanger Abbey” (1817) with a reference to a character who played “base ball,” and a first edition of Walt Whitman’s “Leaves of Grass,” also mentioning the game.
In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, Princeton was a powerhouse in collegiate baseball, and we saw several artifacts spanning those decades. Included were a tattered 1914 photograph of the freshman baseball team, which included Hobey Baker, a star football and hockey player in whose honor the annual collegiate hockey player of the year award is named. There was a shellacked baseball commemorating an intramural ballgame between the classes of 1876 and 1874. The photograph at the top of this post is of what is believed to be a cap that an alumnus wore to a Class of 1928 reunion.
We transitioned from the college game to the emergence of professional baseball. Among the highlights was a ticket to a New York Giants baseball game circa 1905, placed in a scrapbook by an alumnus who included a Pennsylvania Railroad excursion ticket that he presumably used to get to New York from Princeton.
Another fascinating item was a 1923 subway placard promoting the game and how to get to see the teams playing at Ebbets Field, the Polo Grounds and Yankee Stadium.
Later items included a Japanese magazine about Jackie Robinson, materials on the Nebraska Indians barnstorming ball club and a ticket to a National Colored League game at Hinchcliffe Stadium in Paterson, New Jersey, home town of Larry Doby.
For those of us who attended, the class was a great opportunity to discuss the game we love, and it was a wonderful tonic to chase away the mid-winter blues. Pitchers and catchers report next month, which can’t come soon enough.
The Ball Caps Blog 