Entertainment desk
< June 21	<< May \| June \| Jul >>	Current desk >

Welcome to the Wikipedia Entertainment Reference Desk Archives
The page you are currently viewing is a transcluded archive page. While you can leave answers for any questions shown below, please ask new questions on one of the current reference desk pages.

June 22

Early baseball boundaries

I found a Facebook post by some random person with an early picture, claimed to be the Polo Grounds in 1905, showing spectators (from behind) watching the game from beyond the outfield. The poster claims that there is no outfield wall, and supposedly there's nothing comparable to a cricket boundary rope, so a long ground ball would hit the spectators or go beyond them.

Is it true that some early Major League baseball fields had no defined terminus to the outfield? If so, how did the spectators know where they should and shouldn't stand, and how did the players retrieve balls that were hit beyond the spectators? It runs in my mind that a single ball would be used for a much longer portion of the game than today (due to the expense of buying more), so one wouldn't want to have it get lost if a simple boundary could keep it from escaping. Nyttend (talk) 11:58, 22 June 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Major league ball park fields have always had boundaries of one kind or another. Can you point us to that picture on Facebook? ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 12:50, 22 June 2023 (UTC)[reply]

I found this picture of baseball at the polo grounds in 1905 on the Library of Congress page: https://www.loc.gov/resource/pan.6a28531/

If it were to be cropped to show just a portion of the crowd, no barriers would be seen. But when looking at the whole thing, an obvious demarcation is present. I would assume that the Facebook post is a misrepresentation of the facts. --User:Khajidha (talk) (contributions) 13:31, 22 June 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Can't point you to that precise picture. Thank you, Khajidha, for the LOC link; I can't imagine a reason that they would have removed the fence after this picture (May) and before the other picture (World Series). Nyttend (talk) 13:46, 22 June 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Found this: https://www.digitalcommonwealth.org/search/commonwealth:sf2687686

The crowd appears to have been allowed closer in (you can see an arc of pylons/bollards/whatever they ares behind the spectators), but there are policemen deployed to control the crowd. Perhaps the fans of the time were considered better behaved so that the presence of the police was enough to establish the point of closest approach. --User:Khajidha (talk) (contributions) 14:04, 22 June 2023 (UTC)[reply]

The Polo Grounds had a permanent outer fence and a couple of "cigar box" bleacher sections in deep center field. The inner fence visible in those pics was kind of like a series of hitching posts with ropes or chains stretched between them. There are automobiles interspersed with the crowd in those pics. I've seen earlier pics of that same area where there were carriages parked. 1905 was an especially good year for the Giants. By May 20, they were already sitting at 22-6. They finished well ahead in the pennant race with a 105-48 record. They then dominated the Philadelphia A's in the Series, 4 games to 1, with Christy Mathewson pitching three complete game shutouts! ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 16:51, 22 June 2023 (UTC)[reply]

In the very early days of baseball, there were indeed no outfield boundaries in many ballparks. This was before fully enclosed ballparks were built, and at a time when balls hit to the deepest parts of the outfield were very rare. Thus, most home runs were hit inside-the-park. With enclosed ballparks becoming the norm around the 1890s, there was always a demarcation of the outfield fence, as Bugs mentions. However, the distance could vary significantly, largely based on the configuration of the grounds, and there were sometimes unusual structures that were in play, such as a clubhouse, a flag pole, and even a dog house in one infamous case; these were far enough from home plate that they only rarely interfered with a batted ball. In many cases, when there were overflow crowds, the additional spectators would be lined up in the outfield, behind a rope or cordon, with policemen ensuring that they remained in place; special ground rules were adopted to deal with the situation of a ball being hit into the crowd (the hit would count as a double or a triple, depending on where the cordon was placed). This continued until the 1950s - for example, it is a plot point in the 1956 novel Bang the Drum Slowly. In the days when only one ball was used, spectators were enjoined to throw back any ball that landed in the stands, and this would have applied not just to the grandstand but to any cordoned-off section of the outfield as well. A spectator stealing the game ball was an almost unheard-of occurrence. Xuxl (talk) 15:12, 22 June 2023 (UTC)[reply]

How would you be able to achieve a home run without hitting the ball to the deepest part of the outfield? Of course I understand that a ball reaching the deepest part of the outfield on the fly would be very unlikely, but it seems like it would be extremely difficult to run all the way around the bases while the fielders are trying to pick up the ball and return it to the infield, unless you've hit it far from them and it ends up in the deepest part of the outfield. Nyttend (talk) 15:25, 22 June 2023 (UTC)[reply]

The same way they achieve inside-the-park homers now: by hitting it between the outfielders and dashing around the bases, hence the term "home run". Homers were fairly rare in the early years. For example, the league leader in 1876, in a 70-game season, had 5.[1] ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 16:33, 22 June 2023 (UTC)[reply]

But if you don't hit it to the deepest part of the outfielders, what chance do you have that the outfielders (or infielders!) won't be able to get it? If it stops in the middle of the outfield, it could be picked up by another outfielder even if the first one totally missed it. Nyttend (talk) 05:19, 24 June 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Which is why there weren't very many home runs in the early professional years. ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 09:44, 24 June 2023 (UTC)[reply]