The INNOCENCE of BASEBALL

Professional sports are ugly. They're a big business full of egos and corruption. They sell a product based on lies. The saddest part are the kids who follow the sports and the "stars" who are overpaid and too often void of basic moral standards. It's not going to change no matter who they point the finger at. It's a business and it's sad.

All of this of course says nothing about the actual sports. The sports can still be played for fun and not profit, their purest form. But let's admit that even Little League games can be full of ego and ugly behavior, mostly by the parents who themselves have forgotten it's just a game and for some reason see their kid out on the field as a victim or, in some maniacal way, playing at the level of the "show."

Here we have a group of guys, probably sometime after 1911, who formed a team.


Click on image to see it larger.

I'm curious about the two players dressed in uniforms. Were they on pro teams and just playing a pickup game with these guys? We'll never know because there's no information written on the back. They look like old fashioned baseball cards. I once worked for a fellow who bought a Honus Wagner card with Wayne Gretzky. I think it was at that moment I understood that some ephemera could be worth a lot of money; just a simple piece of paper.



And the only way I dated this image was by looking at the logo on the bat on the left. It was made by J. F. Hillerich & Sons in Louisville, Kentucky, famous for making the Louisville Slugger.



Whenever I find vintage photos of baseball “teams” they’re always adults; I never find photos of kids with teammates. This isn’t to say I don’t find them with the tools of baseball. In one of my maternal grandfather’s class photos he is holding a baseball glove sometime around 1910. I never saw this photo until after he'd passed so I never got to hear stories of the games he played.