Cait Murphy > Quotes

“As he approaches third, Art Devlin of the Giants—an honors graduate of the McGraw school of baseball—slows him down with an artful elbow. Tinker shrugs him off and keeps going. The next barrier is his own coach, infielder Heinie Zimmerman, who grabs him and tries to drag him back toward third. Tinker breaks the tackle and beats the peg to the plate86 as the crowd “wailed, roared, guffawed, and squalied.”87 In the excitement, fourteen-year-old William Hudson, leaning over to get a better view, falls fifty feet from the roof of a nearby apartment building. So engrossed are his fellow spectators in watching the race around the bases that no one even notices for several minutes. The boy dies of a fractured skull.88 The players are unaware of the first (but not last) death by baseball in 1908, and Brown gives up a single hit the rest of the way. The Cubs win 1–0.”
― Cait Murphy, Crazy '08: How a Cast of Cranks, Rogues, Boneheads, and Magnates Created the Greatest Year in Baseball History

“The owners do fiddle with a few things. In the American League, John Taylor, owner of the Boston team, decides to redesign the team’s uniform, switching from light-blue stockings to red ones. Taylor jokes, “You newspaper men will have to pick a new nickname for my team,”10 then known as the Pilgrims, and previously as the Collinsites, Puritans, Somersets, and even Yankees(!). He modestly proposes one possibility: Red Sox.11”
― Cait Murphy, Crazy '08: How a Cast of Cranks, Rogues, Boneheads, and Magnates Created the Greatest Year in Baseball History