Play Ball!: A Selective History of the Round Object That Gives the National Game Its Name

Safe at home.

Ten-year-old fan, dropping a baseball into the open coffin of Babe Ruth, at Yankee Stadium, paying his last respects, Albuquerque Journal, September 27, 1999

Gosh, it feels good just to hold and throw a baseball again.

Lester Rodney, Daily Worker, January 31, 1952

Last year, aka the McGwire-Sosa snoozeathon—Part I and/or When Are the Braves Going Back to Boston, Anyway?, comic-book magnate Todd McFarlane went on the road with a unique yet familiar exhibition. Starting in June at Dodger Stadium and ending in late September at Coors Field in Denver, McFarlane trotted out not one, not two, but ten Major League baseballs. All of them had been hit out of the park by either Mark McGwire or Sammy Sosa, those inextricably paired Ruth-Maris usurpers.

Earlier in 1999 McFarlane had outbid and outhustled the rest of the world to acquire one-tenth of McGwire's 1998 output (nos. 1, 63, 64, and 67-70) and 4 1/2 percent of Sosa's (nos. 33, 61, and 66). McGwire's final, record-establishing blast alone went for $3.05 million. As one Albuquerque sports columnist moaned, with palpable anguish, "But they're still baseballs . . . just . . . baseballs."¹

Just baseballs? Perhaps.

In the history of the game no other baseball artifact has cajoled (been artificially inflated to?) such a price. Not any of Ruth's or Aaron's bats (Aaron's last home run ball gathered in a mere $650,000 at auction), not Cobb's spikes, not even Pete Rose's winning gambling slips. Further, and notwithstanding a corked bat here and there, the ball has been the only one of the Three Tools—bat, glove, ball—to be accused of materially affecting the rhythms, not to mention the numbers, of the game. Whether it's the deadball era or the rabbit hidden in the round, the baseball cannot escape controversy.

It is a felicitous partnering, if not happy coincidence, that baseball the game and baseball the object share the same name. It's not gloveball or batball or, for goodness's sake, ballball, but baseball—for the bases or the ball? So powerful is its impact on the language and understanding of the sport that its existence is reinforced after each pitch, when the umpire records the count out loud: strikes and balls. So, neither is it called strikeball. (An early introduction to the game, Boy's and Girl's Book of Sports, published in 1835, refers to it as "goal ball.")²

Aside from McFarlane's ownership of those special spheres, there is no dearth of proprietary interest in the object itself. In August 1998 Balvino Galvez, a pitcher for the Yomiuri Giants, angered at the way the game was being called, was abruptly suspended for the season after he threw a ball at home plate umpire Atsushi Kittaka—and missed. (The ump had called a ball prior to the batter hitting a sixth inning homer.) Arguing that the tempestuous toss was "an action that went against the spirit of sportsmanship," and calling the outburst "almost madness," Central League president Sumiko Takahara declared, "The ball is supposed to be a sacred object for a pitcher. As a professional, the action was absolutely unacceptable."³

Expectorated on, surreptitiously sliced and defaced, rubbed raw and Vaseline-smoothed, and occasionally tarred if not feathered, the ball has indeed achieved the status of icon, a genuine secular-sacred object. Bill Goff, self-touted the "world leader in publishing baseball art," has produced an open edition color rendering of a baseball superimposed on a worn but venerable-looking, even battle-weary, Stars and Stripes. Called "Made in America," the 22-by-28-inch poster sells for fifteen dollars unframed, more than double the real time spherical subject matter itself.

But the baggage of the baseball, piled on as it may be with the stitchery of our poetics and polished to a sheen by the romanticism of the likes of Bob Costas...