told me, “two graphic designers called to settle an argument over which of two fonts was used for the numbers on the backs of New York Yankee uniforms in the 1970s. The answer was, the Yankees created their own font, so they both lost.
“Another time a woman called from Florida. Her boss, she said, had bought four baseballs at an auction, each signed by a Hall of Famer. The boss was getting ready to mount them and he wanted some information about the players.
“I asked who he had and she said: Bob Feller, Yogi Berra, Stan Musial, and Jose Alvarez. I told her there was no such player as Jose Alvarez. Later she called me back and said oh, it was Jesus Alvarez, as if that made a difference. The only Jesus Alvarez we could find played high school baseball in Texas.”
Although he never existed, Alvarez has attained a kind of immortality in the Hall of Fame archives. “Whenever we come across a photo of an unidentified player, we call him ‘Jose Alvarez,’ ” Schechter told me.
Freddy Berowski is another of the research monks. He was born in Brooklyn, so I naturally turned to him to solve the mystery of another son of the borough, Lipman Pike, and his phantom Coopers-town vote.
Lip Pike was reputedly the first man to play baseball for money. When he first broke in, around the end of the Civil War, baseball was supposedly an amateur sport, played for fun and exercise and the delight of the occasional crowd. Unmarried ladies, at that time, were regarded as virgins, too, unless proven otherwise, and bankers were generally regarded as models of probity if they were not actually in prison. In short, it was a credulous era, and it is possible that players before Pike were paid under the table. But Lip, the son of a Jewish haberdasher, was reported to take his money up front, like any honest workingman. In 1866, the Athletics of Philadelphia got busted for paying him twenty dollars a week.
It was a bargain at twice the price. Pike was one of the best players of the prehistoric era. A left-handed second baseman, he led the league in home runs three straight years, hit .321 between 1871 and 1881, and starred in Brooklyn, Philadelphia, Hartford, Atlantic City, St. Louis, and other venues. His career ended ignominiously in 1881, when he was banned from the National League for suspi-cious “underperfor mance.” * Despite this, Pike remained a very pop ular fellow in Brooklyn, where he eventually opened his own haberdashery. Thousands attended his funeral service at Temple Israel in 1893.
A lot of baseball sources say that Lip Pike got one vote in the 1936 balloting for the Hall of Fame. But the Web site of the Hall itself doesn’t list him among the fourteen players who were mentioned on at least one ballot that year.
It took Freddy less than a day to get back with an explanation. It turns out that in the early days of the Hall, Veterans Committee members were allowed to vote along with the BBWAA. But those votes were only counted and made public once, in the 1936 election.
“So,” I asked Freddy, “is it correct or incorrect to say that Pike got one vote?”
“Can’t say for sure. He might have gotten votes from the veterans in other years, but those were secret ballots. And they’re still sealed.”
So we may never know how many votes Lipman Pike got. Like I said, there are mysteries in every shrine.
Tim Wiles is the director of research at the National Baseball Hall of Fame library, but he is a literary man at heart, the editor of a book of baseball poetry, Line Drives, who performs dramatic readings of “Casey at the Bat.” Wiles is a connoisseur of Cooperstown whimsy. He told me, for example, that there are restaurants in town owned by men called DiMaggio and Yastrzemski, neither of whom is related to his Hall of Fame namesake.
“The Hall of Fame players are great, but the guys I really love meeting are the ones who only played a year or two,” he says. “The big stars, a lot of times their profession is
“Another time a woman called from Florida. Her boss, she said, had bought four baseballs at an auction, each signed by a Hall of Famer. The boss was getting ready to mount them and he wanted some information about the players.
“I asked who he had and she said: Bob Feller, Yogi Berra, Stan Musial, and Jose Alvarez. I told her there was no such player as Jose Alvarez. Later she called me back and said oh, it was Jesus Alvarez, as if that made a difference. The only Jesus Alvarez we could find played high school baseball in Texas.”
Although he never existed, Alvarez has attained a kind of immortality in the Hall of Fame archives. “Whenever we come across a photo of an unidentified player, we call him ‘Jose Alvarez,’ ” Schechter told me.
Freddy Berowski is another of the research monks. He was born in Brooklyn, so I naturally turned to him to solve the mystery of another son of the borough, Lipman Pike, and his phantom Coopers-town vote.
Lip Pike was reputedly the first man to play baseball for money. When he first broke in, around the end of the Civil War, baseball was supposedly an amateur sport, played for fun and exercise and the delight of the occasional crowd. Unmarried ladies, at that time, were regarded as virgins, too, unless proven otherwise, and bankers were generally regarded as models of probity if they were not actually in prison. In short, it was a credulous era, and it is possible that players before Pike were paid under the table. But Lip, the son of a Jewish haberdasher, was reported to take his money up front, like any honest workingman. In 1866, the Athletics of Philadelphia got busted for paying him twenty dollars a week.
It was a bargain at twice the price. Pike was one of the best players of the prehistoric era. A left-handed second baseman, he led the league in home runs three straight years, hit .321 between 1871 and 1881, and starred in Brooklyn, Philadelphia, Hartford, Atlantic City, St. Louis, and other venues. His career ended ignominiously in 1881, when he was banned from the National League for suspi-cious “underperfor mance.” * Despite this, Pike remained a very pop ular fellow in Brooklyn, where he eventually opened his own haberdashery. Thousands attended his funeral service at Temple Israel in 1893.
A lot of baseball sources say that Lip Pike got one vote in the 1936 balloting for the Hall of Fame. But the Web site of the Hall itself doesn’t list him among the fourteen players who were mentioned on at least one ballot that year.
It took Freddy less than a day to get back with an explanation. It turns out that in the early days of the Hall, Veterans Committee members were allowed to vote along with the BBWAA. But those votes were only counted and made public once, in the 1936 election.
“So,” I asked Freddy, “is it correct or incorrect to say that Pike got one vote?”
“Can’t say for sure. He might have gotten votes from the veterans in other years, but those were secret ballots. And they’re still sealed.”
So we may never know how many votes Lipman Pike got. Like I said, there are mysteries in every shrine.
Tim Wiles is the director of research at the National Baseball Hall of Fame library, but he is a literary man at heart, the editor of a book of baseball poetry, Line Drives, who performs dramatic readings of “Casey at the Bat.” Wiles is a connoisseur of Cooperstown whimsy. He told me, for example, that there are restaurants in town owned by men called DiMaggio and Yastrzemski, neither of whom is related to his Hall of Fame namesake.
“The Hall of Fame players are great, but the guys I really love meeting are the ones who only played a year or two,” he says. “The big stars, a lot of times their profession is
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