There are many interesting things about baseball. Some are funny, some are strange, some are just plain spooky. Others are outrageous, others are fantastic. Some are sentimental, some are historical. Here are some more:
On July 27, 1938, despondent John Warde, age twenty-five, perched on the seventeenth floor of the Gotham hotel in Manhattan and threatened to jump. For eleven hours Warde kept thousands of onlookers and a live radio audience is suspense. His sister arrived to try to talk Warde off the ledge, but he ignored her. A friend, Patrick Valentine, arrived on the seventeenth floor and also tried to help. "Come on in, and let's go over to the ballgame," said valentine. "The Dodgers are at Ebbets field this afternoon." Warde sighed gloomily. "I'd rather jump than watch those dodgers." -Taken from Peanuts and Crackerjack, by David Catane
In all the life of professional baseball, there have only been 14 perfect games. The art of retiring 27 batters in a row -no walks, no errors- demands such perfection that it's easy to see why only 14 have been thrown. Two of them have been thrown by Yankees. One was thrown by Don Larsen in the World Series, the other by David Wells on a beanie baby day. They have a lot in common. For instance, they both love the night-life in New York, though Larsen drank a little more heavily than Wells. They both also grew up in San Diego. What's more than that, they both went to Point Loma high school.
Yankee stadium has always been a place of tradition and of honor, and has paid it's respects to great players past by awarding them a monument which now lie beyond the centerfield wall. Still, before the stadium was refurbished in the mid-70s, stars of the day were even close to the yankee legends. In centerfield, the monuments of Babe Ruth, Lou Gehrig and Miller Huggins stood, in fair territory. These statues awed young and old alike, as well as the players who took the field. Children, in the days of Mantle, held to the belief that those three greats were in fact buried below their statues. "My dad would be trying to convince me that it was just a monument," Billy Crystal recalls, "but I thought honest to God that Babe Ruth was buried beneath my feet."
It's part of US history, world history as well. It's from the time when there was almost a World War III... sometime in the 60s. In baseball, stars were rising. Mays and the Mick were close to retiring, and the finest point of the Yankee dynasty was ending. In Cuba, Fidel Castro was an immediate threat to Florida and the rest of America with Nuclear weapons being shipped to him. More than three decades later, young baseball fans know him as the man who kept forced El Duque to defect in a 17-foot raft, while politicians keep a wary eye on the forlorn Cuba. What's so ironic, though, is that the whole thing could have been avoided---if struggling minor leaguer Fidel Castro had ever made it to the Bigs.
The Chicago Cubs, at the turn of the century, were a great team. Throughout the late 1800s and through 1908, they garnered the first, second, third and fourth highest winning percentages. In the 1906 season, they won a still-standing record 116 games. Yet, since 1908, the cubs haven't won a single world series. And, what's even more odd, some people claim that any team with three or more Cubs on it haven't either.
Also, if anybody can prove or disprove any of this, let me know!!!!!
Praise the almighty commissioner. Everyone knows about the black sox scandal that threatened to destroy baseball. In it, eight black sox were have said to have made a deal with gamblers to throw the world series. These eight were thrown out by judge Kenesaw Mountain Landis. Among them was "Shoeless" Joe Jackson, a very popular ballplayer at the time. In the series, he had a .325 average, 12 hits, and led all the batters for both teams. When the deal was uncovered in the 1920 season, Jackson maintained he had not gone through with the deal, and had played his heart out in the series. Landis banned him anyway, and one of the greatest players that ever lived was kept from playing the game he loved---without a shred of proof.