I'm on a roll blasphemously bashing baseball (see post below), so I might as well dig myself even deeper and award the Friday comment contest a day early before I spend the rest of this Thursday doing my side job as a newspaper columnist/reporter.
(Hint: I'm on Mark Jackson's trail!)
Our winner is Jim Clark, for sharing this quote on Theodore Roosevelt's view of the sport, from someone who should know. Turns out he was no Teddy Ballgame.
"Father and all of us regarded baseball as a mollycoddle game. Tennis, football, lacrosse, boxing, polo, yes; they are violent, which appealed to us. But baseball? Father wouldn't watch it, not even at Harvard."
- Alice Roosevelt Longworth, 1961
Comments (3)
Tennis? Violent?
That must have been before they added the rule change to prevent the Avery-type players from jumping the net prior to the conclusion of the match.
And I suppose even I'd be turned off from baseball if I had to watch a couple of Ivy League schools try to finish a game without busting out their slide rules.
I regret never dragging myself to the Cornell baseball field to watch Ron Darling pitch against us. Well, not really. But it would be cool now to say I did. If Darling had played hockey, I'd have seen him.
Maybe Theodore Roosevelt had problems with pitchers applying tobacco juice to baseballs which increased the time to 2:00 for every game. As President he did intervene to reduce injuries in college football which unfortunately 70 years later resulted in Beano Cook having a job.