Here are just a few:
Pitchers Could Cover Balls With Just About Anything
Before 1920, pitchers could cover the ball with spit, Vaseline, road kill, Nickelodeon slime or whatever the hell else they wanted. It apparently worked. That Babe Ruth guy didn’t start hitting a billion home runs a year until they outlawed it. We don’t actually know for a fact they used road kill, but that whole ‘Dead Ball Era’ thing would make more sense if they did.
Pitchers Threw Underhand
That should blow your mind. Major League Baseball officially started in 1876, but it wasn’t until 1883 that pitchers were allowed to throw overhand. The initial rules of baseball stated that pitchers had to throw the ball as if they were pitching a horseshoe. So these old batters got to call for their pitch and get it thrown to them underhand. They couldn’t step towards the plate. No wonder the pitchers covered the balls in battery acid and pig manure.
Catchers Had Zero Protection
See that old timey idiot in the picture below? It’s not his fault. Chest protectors weren’t introduced into baseball until 1885. It wasn’t until six years after that when catchers got to wear padded mitts. These poor bastards just had to stand there in a dumb stance and wait to get their goddamn faces blown off with a foul tip. But, then again, you’ll see from #1 that these guys weren’t really facing ‘the heat’ from pitchers until 1883. It’s just amazing it took the rules committee two years to realize that catching was a fairly dangerous job.
We went to a Cincy Reds game a few years ago, and after the game, they had an exhibition game that showed what baseball was like when the Reds were the first professional team.
The ball was different and easier to catch, so noone had gloves. The cool thing was that there was one umpire, and he stayed behind home plate. If he could not tell if the runner was out, he would ask the runner–and the runner was expected to be a gentleman and tell the truth on whether he was out.
Too bad their is little to none of that gentlemanness / sportsmanship in the game today.
I love baseball, both the game and the fact it justifies that fact that I am 24 and still read comic books!