epub Baseball Research Journal: Volume 54 #2 (English Edition)

With this issue of the Baseball Research Journal, SABR welcomes new editor Elizabeth Roscher. The cover features an illustration of Lou Gehrig in his Columbia University baseball uniform by artist Gary Cieradkowski. Among this issue’s featured articles:

• Lou Gehrig’s Three “Lost” Columbia Home Runs

Robert Muldoon

It only took a few months at Columbia for Lou Gehrig, 19-year-old hitting prodigy, to be compared to the greatest slugger in the game. One publication said Gehrig "lived up to his reputation as the Babe Ruth of Columbia." But his college baseball career didn't have such an auspicious start. In his first official college game on April 3, Gehrig was ejected. Relieving in the eighth, Gehrig was tossed for protesting a pitch.

• The Disappearance of the Nippon Cup: Early Japanese Participation in Australian Baseball

Ray Nickson

After 1941, the Nippon Cup disappears from the records. It is not mentioned in subsequent baseball reports by state associations and enquiries with the last club to win the Nippon Cup have gone unanswered. The Nippon Cup vanishes, reflecting the limited recognition of the role the Japanese expatriate community played in Australian baseball. Their history was actively erased during and immediately after World War II. The Nippon Baseball Club, who played in Sydney from 1917 to 1919, gave the NSW Baseball Association and its members the Nippon Cup as a gesture of the positive relations that existed between the Japanese residents and the wider baseball community.

• The 1915 Army Baseball Team at West Point: Five Future Generals and an 18–3 Record

Stephen V. Rice

The United States Military Academy was established at West Point, New York, in 1802, and has fielded a baseball team every year since 1890. The 1915 team, with an 18–3 record, was arguably the greatest in the school’s history: five of the nine starters went on to serve as Army generals during World War II. The most prominent of these was Omar Bradley, a left fielder with a rifle arm, who commanded US ground forces invading Germany and rose to the rank of five-star general.

• Swifts, Slows, and Batteries: A Chronology of the 1868 Championship Season

David Rader

It may be helpful to think of the championship like an unsanctioned boxing title. The championship could change hands multiple times during a season, as it did in 1868. Any club was allowed to challenge the champion club, who then chose which challenges they accepted. Only the social norms of the era served as oversight. Championship matches were determined in a best-of-three series colloquially known as “home-and-home” series, so named because each club hosted one of the first two matches (and took the gate receipts). A third match, if necessary, was to be held at a neutral ballfield.

• The End of the Spitball: Sloppy, Dirty, Disgusting…and Almost Impossible to Get Rid Of

Mike Lackey

Like the spitball itself, its last legal purveyors were long-running throwbacks to deadball days. Frank Shellenback was typical; he won nine games for the Chicago White Sox as a 19-year-old rookie in 1918. But when two of the Sox top pitchers returned from World War I service, Shellenback figured less prominently in the team’s plans. Then, just as baseball was moving to ban the spitball, the White Sox decided they didn’t need him. However, there might have been an element of spite in the decision. The pitcher recalled years later that as the deadline approached for finalizing the list of established spitballers who would be permitted to continue using the pitch in the major leagues, he was involved in “a little contract wrangle” with the White Sox. Demoted to the minor leagues, Shellenback was ineligible to be grandfathered.