While getting material for the previous post that provided a bibliography of sociology at Oberlin prepared by John R. Commons in 1891-92, I came across two instances when baseball was important enough to warrant mention in his autobiography. There is an allegory in Commons’ belief that he had discovered the “curve ball” in 1886, only to discover that it, like fire and the wheel, it had been discovered earlier. (See, “The story of baseball’s first curveball“). It defies belief, but yes, in 1898 it was considered radical for someone to argue that workers had a right to play baseball on a Sunday, so radical as to result in the elimination of a professorship!
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Curve Ball and Bean Ball
“I had read in the printing office at Leesburg, Florida, in the year 1885-86, that Herbert Spencer had recently maintained that, according to the science of physics, it was impossible to pitch a curved ball. He knew not the seams on the ball and forgot the friction of the air. His was evidently a single-track mind. Ever after, I looked for the omitted factors, or the ones taken for granted and therefore omitted, by the great leaders in the science of economics. That was how I became an economic skeptic.
My brother and I experimented on Spencer’s omitted factors, with our log house as backstop. I learned all four curves. When I returned to Oberlin in April, 1886, the baseball season was on. The seniors, my former classmates, were sweeping everything. My brilliant friend, Job Fish, was their pitcher. He could get his lessons in a third of the time it took me, and then gave the rest of the time to preparing me for recitations. His was a huge muscular frame and he could throw a straight ball like a cannon. Nobody, it seems, had ever heard of a curved ball. The catcher on the junior side discovered my twisters. He made the signs to me. The slow up-curve did the business. Job Fish got the only “out” that I pitched. It came straight to me like a thunderbolt. Somehow, unconsciously, from boyhood habit, I reached out my left hand and held it. I could not use that hand for two weeks. My friend, the catcher, did not make the “out” sign to me again. He stuck to the “up” sign, though my “ups” were slow. Nobody got to first base in the first eight innings. The score stood 7 to 0 in our favor. Then Job got mad. He quit throwing over the base and threw at me. Certainly he rattled me when I came to the bat. He hit me on the side of the head, adjoining the temple. Evidently I was not an all-round ball player. My playing was academic, like Herbert Spencer’s theory. I had not learned to dodge straight lightning. I insisted on pitching the ninth inning. But the boys of my own team physically held me down. They took me to the doctor. He encouraged us all by saying that such a blow did not usually show its results until ten years later. They forced me to bed, where my indigestion returned for a week. My substitute pitcher, Harry Brown, afterwards chaplain to Roosevelt’s Rough Riders, could not, by his straight ball, keep the seniors from making ten runs in the ninth inning. But the Athletic
Association held a mass-meeting that afternoon. They voted Job unanimously out of baseball forever.
Ten years later I had a letter from Job, then a high official with the Otis Elevator Company. He wrote that he had been worrying about me these ten years, but seeing that I was not yet dead, or insane, he must tell me how ashamed and glad he was. We returned to our good friendship. Poor fellow, he died within a year or two, and here I am, forty years after the doctor’s allotted ten years, though with the same indigestion.
I never played baseball again.
In this old age of mine I began to brag about pitching the first curved ball in America. I was able to get away with it on a visit to Oberlin, where I was currying favor with the students to listen to my lecture on political economy. There were two witnesses on the faculty who got up and testified. They had seen the game. Then I tried to brag it out, in Madison, on my fifty-year-old Town and Gown Club. One member figured out that he had seen a curved ball in 1884. Therefore, I was the first at Oberlin but not the first in America. So it is ever thus. I may do something stunning or unexpected, but, if so, I soon drop out because somebody else does it better or has already done it. I have found my most brilliant thoughts anticipated long before, in my study of earlier economists in the original.”
Source: John R. Commons. Myself. New York: Macmillan, 1934. Pp. 28-30.
Play Ball…on Sunday (on your own account)
“One Sunday morning, at Syracuse, I arrived on the night train from a two-weeks’ residence at the University Settlement in New York. In the morning newspaper, on the train, I read an announcement that on that Sunday evening there would be a union meeting of all the churches at the municipal auditorium to protest against the mayor’s refusal to enforce the law against Sunday baseball. I was named as one of the speakers. I was startled because I had not received any invitation to speak. The Catholic mayor was my friend, and I was trying to omit modern religion from sociology and stick only to ethnology. I went around immediately to see my friend, the Methodist minister, whose name appeared in the paper as manager of the meeting. I asked him how it came that I was announced as one of the speakers without previous invitation. He said they had been trying to get a workingman to speak but could find only one who was willing. He turned out to believe that the biblical Sunday was Saturday, and that our Sunday came over from the heathen who worshiped the Sun-god. Evidently he was a scholar, but evidently also disqualified as an opponent of Sunday baseball. So they thought I was as near being a working man as they could find, and announced me because it was too late to ask me by wire.
Chancellor Day was to be the chairman and principal speaker of the mass meeting. There was also the city attorney representing the mayor. His speech was quite political and evasive. I was too timid to speak at the meeting, but finally the minister persuaded me. I looked up one of my labor acquaintances to take me around to all the ball grounds on that Sunday afternoon. We found there large crowds of sober workingmen with their families, with no admission fees, and with pick-up teams of players from the various industries. At the mass meeting of about 3,000 I spoke after the politician. I recited what I had seen during the day. I opposed professional baseball with admission fees on Sunday, but contended that the city should open up free parks, on the abandoned saltpans of the old town of Salina, for all kinds of athletic games for workingmen on that day. As long as employers kept workingmen from having a Saturday half-holiday, the only relief for exercise and sobriety was Sunday. I was hissed by the audience. The Chancellor made no criticism but rather excused me. The daily newspapers stood for me.
A few days afterwards the Chancellor called me to his office. He told me of letters received from ministers and others declaring they would withdraw their children if I were not removed. His reply to them was that I had perfect liberty to speak what I thought, though he would be sorry to lose their children.
A year or so later, in the month of March, 1899, he called me in again. He said that the trustees, at their preceding meeting in December, had voted to discontinue the chair in sociology. I was not dismissed but my chair was pulled out from under me. I did not know about it until three months later. He explained that when he went out on his trips to obtain money for the University from hoped-for contributors, they refused as long as I held a chair in the University. Also, at a recent national meeting of college presidents which he attended, all had agreed that no person with radical tendencies should be appointed to their faculties. Therefore I had no hope for another college position. He was convincing and I never tried to get another teaching job.
I began to draw some inferences …. It was not religion, it was capitalism, that governed Christian colleges. Afterwards I sought the fundamental reason, and included it in my historical development of Institutional Economics. The older economists based their definitions of wealth on holding something useful for one’s own use and exchange. I distinguished a double meaning. The other meaning was, withholding from others what they need but do not own. This was something real to me and the Chancellor. It made possible a distinction of Wealth from Assets which I began to think economists and laity had failed to distinguish.”
Source: John R. Commons. Myself. New York: Macmillan, 1934. Pp. 56-58.
Image Source: Ibid. p. 38.