Are You Sure This Is The Deadball Era?
Red Sox at Highlanders, April 28, 1908
Are You Sure This Is The Deadball Era?
You know, the New York Evening World wasn’t quite the same newspaper in 1908 that it was in 1900.
In 1900 you could always find something wild on the front page. Every single ballgame seemed vitally important. The first page usually looked something like this:
The baseball score — though faded in this scan — was certainly eye catching, assuming you could ignore the “clickbait” screaming headline above it.
In 1908 it was a bit more subdued:
And, no, you’re not seeing things: the paper did indeed print sporting news on the front page. They knew what would sell, after all.
The Story
Of course, I’m mostly writing all of this to stall for time.
I didn’t get much by way of highlights out of this one. It’s harder to get good Skeetersoft highlights, unfortunately. We’ll just jump to the boxscore:
Sure, this was a close game — but the more interesting part is just how much offense we saw. There were 25 hits between the two teams. Highlights include Doc Gessler improving his batting average to .396 after going 3 for 5, Heinie Wagner also going 3 for 5, and the unheralded Harry Lord going 3 for 4 for Boston.
New York didn’t have quite as many offensive highlights, despite managing to score 4 runs in the bottom of the second. One of the reasons why I didn’t wind up with any highlights is because the Highlanders pretty much gave up after scoring their 5th run in the bottom of the 5th inning. They got hits, sure, but they were mostly bunched together in the early innings.
Even with all the hits, we wound up with 2 successful bunts, one for each team. There were also 3 stolen bases and 4 men caught stealing in all, which just feels right.
We’re not going to see a ton of games like this in 1908. I figured it was worth pointing this one out.