One big surprise I omitted from my account last month of John Thorn’s annual post-Series talk was his revelation that he’s a big 19th century guy. This probably shouldn’t be a shock—he is, after all, MLB’s official historian, so you’d expect he’d be more conversant in 19th century baseball lore than you or me or practically anybody this side of the late Bob Gregory—but I was shocked nonetheless to hear him answer a question about his prime candidate for election to the Hall of Fame with a blithe "Jim Creighton."
Who, you ask? The name may be familiar to some of you—it wasn’t one I’d never heard before—but I definitely needed to look him up to make my own call on his credentials for induction into the HoF.
I had assumed he was some early slugger, but no, his fame is mostly due to his pitching: Creighton was the first to bend the rules about pitching with a straight underhand motion, the elbow fully extended throughout. He invented the snapping of the wrist, adding the first of many innovations to the pitching motion, primarily the concept of making pitches difficult to hit. Before Creighton got started, it seems, pitchers were there to help the batter connect smoothly with pitches, so he began the whole idea of pitchers as batters’ adversaries, for which we owe him a debt of gratitude. The concept of the game, before Jim Creighton, seemed to be "Batters vs. Fielders," with "pitchers" acting more or less as neutral functionaries, neither on the batters’ side nor the fielders', which is a contradictory concept, given that pitchers become fielders the instant the ball is released. So Creighton is a very important changer of the way the game of baseball is conceived of, and he was a great practitioner of his innovative techniques for his entire major league career.
Still, I think it’s a tough sell, Jim Creighton for the Hall of Fame, and I’m not entirely sure that John Thorn’s entire conception of what the Hall of Fame is intended to honor meshes with my conception.
Or with the Hall’s, for that matter. The whole debate about the ten-year-minimum-career rule of theirs (which I have argued vehemently against, in another context) kind of gets blown out the window with Creighton, whose entire major league career ended in his fourth year of pitching. Creighton’s "entire major league career," that I just referred to, is something of a joke: he played only from 1859 through 1862, and his pitching career consists of exactly 32 games, or one full season by 162-game-season standards. I say "exactly" but in fact we don’t know very exactly what Creighton did on the mound, or anywhere else, because records from his day are 1) not very thorough and are 2) not exactly what we would normally consider "records." Creighton, who died a few months after turning 21 years of age, has a page on baseball reference.com but there are no records on that page, just his biographical info, which is pretty scanty. Most of the info I’m citing here comes from an article in "The National Pastime"’s website, and that article is entitled "The Legend of Jim Creighton." https://www.thenationalpastimemuseum.com/article/legend-jim-creighton We have legends, not records, to attest to his baseball career, and I can hardly comprehend, much less support, anyone’s case for Baseball’s Hall of Fame on the basis of legends, which is one remove from "old wives’ tales" and two removes from "out-and-out BS."
I have several different objections even to considering a player like Jim Creighton for induction into Hall of Fame, but it’s a pretty silly argument, in that I would either be arguing with those who concede what I’m saying to begin with or with those who have entirely different standards for inclusion in the Cooperstown pantheon. To discuss the question of whether Cooperstown has a place for such as Creighton is itself a separate argument, before we even look at his (or other 19th-century players’) credentials. I categorically deny that 19th century baseball has a close enough resemblance to the game we’re honoring with a Hall of Fame to merit its players a place in that Hall, and you’ll have to convince me that 19th century players are major leaguers before I’ll want to discuss any of their particular arguments.
Creighton is, perhaps, the perfect case. By any standard I want to use, he has no case to make at all: 32 games? Throwing underhand? From 45 feet? No, and No, and No. Next?
By John Thorn’s standards, though, that stuff is irrelevant. The important question from his perspective is something like: did this man have a significant impact on the game’s evolution? If "Yes" (and I would concede a "Yes" is in order), then Creighton is an overlooked giant who clearly belongs in any Baseball Hall of Fame.
What I dispute is whether that question is the right one to ask.
I find the question utterly irrelevant. I don’t care a fig for what anyone’s contemporaries felt about their man at the time, or his purely historical contributions. Creighton was obviously highly thought-of, according to "The Legend of Jim Creighton." The article’s lead illustration is of some sort of baseball pantheon from 1865, prominently featuring a shrouded image of the late Jim Creighton in the top center of the drawing, plainly showing him as a man among men, a god among gods, the single greatest player of all time. ("Time," of course, ending in 1865.)
I just see a kid who came up with a very useful idea, that of actually pitching the ball, as opposed to lobbing it up there for the batter to whack away at. Great idea! Fabulous! Without that idea, the modern game of baseball couldn’t attract flies! Bravo! Kudos!
But draw an analogy, say, with cooking. Say we had a Hall of Fame of Chefs (there probably is one) and it honored great men without whom cooking would not exist. If they could identify the first man in recorded history to boil an egg, would they honor him with a plaque in their pantheon of greats? Say that some day we happen upon an ancient hieroglyphic from 45,595 B.C. marveling that Ugg-man solidified a pigeon egg by inserting it into a clay pot filled with very hot water and Lo! It assumed semi-solid form, and Lo! It was good to eat. Yum!
Is this man a great chef? Well, for his time, maybe, but his time sucked eggs. (Literally.) And IN his time, he was considered a genius, probably, an intuitive, perceptive, God-like inventor of chefly technique that put everyone else to shame. But I think we would feel comfortable concluding So What?
I mean, are we next going to honor the man who invented fire, because without that invention Ugg-man couldn’t possibly have had water hot enough to dunk his pigeon egg into? And how about that pigeon, anyway? Shouldn’t we devise a plaque honoring it as well, since Ugg-man could scarcely have boiled his three-minute egg without first having something to boil, after all?
Or do we conclude that someone (or some chimp) had to have discovered that eggs were tasty (or as was said about the first man to eat an oyster, "Brave fellow!"), someone inevitably had to discover how to make a fire, someone had to put two and two together, and it really doesn’t matter if we know his name or not, he ain’t getting a plaque in the Culinary Hall of Fame. (Apparently, there really is a Culinary Hall Of Fame, btw-- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Culinary_Hall_of_Fame-- located in Colorado for some reason, inducting chefs, websites, blogs, restaurants, cooking schools, recipes, you name it. No cavemen, though, as far as I can tell.)
It makes about as much sense to honor Creighton for inventing the pitched ball (as opposed to the lobbed ball) as it does to honor the umpire (if there was one) who ruled "Yeah, that’s okay, what the kid is doing there." Seems to me that the other team probably howled like scalded dogs the first time Creighton threw a fast, moving, challenging pitch over the plate, and somebody had to decide that it was okay to throw like that. Otherwise, the game couldn’t have evolved as it has, unless someone came along later on and it was decided at that point, "Okay, he can do that, even though we agreed that when that punk from Brooklyn tried it back before the War, that fast pitching was a no-go in a slow-pitch game." Do we want to honor that umpire, too? (Actually, I just found out from William Ryczek, the author of "The Legend of Jim Creighton," that the HoF has already honored that umpire, though this is before the concept of umpires: "The Brooklyn Eagle [a newspaper, not a bird] sent a reporter, probably [Henry] Chadwick, to study Creighton’s motion, and the reporter declared his delivery to be legal." Chadwick, part-time arbiter of rules, part-time sports reporter, part-time Father of Baseball (or at least a defendant in the paternity case), of course, actually does have a plaque in Cooperstown.
This is pretty loopy, far as I can tell. We literally have a reporter making perhaps the most crucial rules decision in baseball history: the pitcher is allowed to try to get the batter out. If Creighton is pitching against teams whose pitchers are still trying to let the batters smack the ball as best they can, then aren’t Creighton’s victories a little bit tainted? Ryczek goes on for a bit about how fabulous a performance Creighton had that first season, 1860, though he admits that he can’t really compute Creighton’s ERA on account of no one kept track of errors in those days. (He credits Creighton with a really good ERA anyway, on the basis of probability, guesswork, and speculation.) Even if the other pitchers soon caught on to what Creighton was doing out there, they probably took a few games to change their own deliveries, refine their technique in copying him, etc.—and of course Creighton only pitched 20 games in 1860 anyway, so you’d have to figure the season was half shot before the word got around the league (if "league" there was) what the kid was up to.
Honestly, I just don’t see what was the big deal about Creighton, admirable though he might have been. (When I was in junior high, I had to read a play entitled "The Admirable Crichton," about a butler who became a sort of king to an aristocratic family stuck on a desert isle. After they got rescued, he reverted to his status as a servant. Haven’t thought of that in years—seems somehow appropriate here.) There’s just so much stuff in baseball history that was done for the first time, that we never stop to think about. Who came up with the idea of wearing uniforms? Did the players wear caps in the earliest games? How about caps with brims, shielding their eyes from the sun? How about the inventor of the jockstrap, Jacques S. Tropp? There’s a man who has saved many a player from an unnecessary orchiectomy, but do we honor him? Noooooo.
The whole idea of "invention" is kinda fascinating, mainly because if something’s around when we’re born, we tend to assume that it’s always been around, and of course "always" is an awfully long time. Every piece of equipment in the game, every strategy, every convention, had to have been invented at some point, and probably resisted, argued over, derided, rejected, before finally coming into common use. Woody Allen‘s funniest story describes the invention of the sandwich, turning the story of the Earl of Sandwich (the guy who supposedly came up with the idea of keeping his hands grease-free during a card game by holding his slab of meat between two slices of bread) into a lifelong epic-tragic struggle involving an Edisonian series of mishaps (two consecutive pieces of meat and one slice of bread, setting the good Earl back years in his diligent research) and insights (the Earl marries "Nell, a greengrocer’s daughter, who was to teach him everything he would know about lettuce") before devising the world’s first sandwich. It’s really an idiotic concept, "the man who invented the sandwich," like if he didn’t do it, we would never have had sandwiches.
When I taught journalism, I used to have to explain the technological breakthroughs that were needed to develop the modern concept of the newspaper. My own favorite involved the "discovery" of the reporter, which we now would consider basic to the whole concept of journalism, but someone actually had to come up with the idea of sending men to cover stories as they happened. Before some genius came up with the idea, newspapers essentially covered stories by writing up accounts of things that people came into their offices and told their versions of—none of this first-hand interviewing of principals, fact-checking, verification. Early newspapers were rumor-mills, sloppy as all-get-out, totally unreliable --and politically biased? Like crazy. They made Fox News look, well, "fair and balanced." Editors had their perspective, and slanted the "news" to fit their biases, quite openly. Early newspapers were mostly essays written by whoever owned a printing press. Nobody saw anything wrong in any of this, until some early newspaper editor decided that it might be valuable to send a man out into the street to look at a house burning down, and not just wait until some fireman (a volunteer, natch—fire departments had yet to be invented) popped by the office to tell him when and where and who and how and why. "Covering a story" had to be invented, but my students would look at me like I’d gone insane. How do you publish a newspaper without any reporters, Professor, and who would want to read one? Dunno, but New Yorkers did just that for a century or two.
My university is actually built on the site of several early New York City newspapers (my office is in the former New York Times headquarters but the campus also includes the sites of Pulitzer’s World, Greeley’s Tribune and several others), plus the site of Tammany Hall (the center of NYC party politics in the 19th century) and an early bar or two, which explains why newspaper staffs could just hang around the office all day long—the pols would give them dirt on politics, or someone in the bar (called "The Pewter Mug"—Pace’s parking lot stands on the spot today) would pass along a different version of the dirt over a glass of ale. City Hall is right across the street, and the whole metropolis was pretty much right where the first newspapers stood, so there was little need for a reporter to run around town looking for material, but when that early genius came up with the idea (James Gordon Bennett? I forget who came up with it, it’s been years since I taught journalism) the whole occupation of "reporter" as we know it was quickly copied by other newspapers, including the Brooklyn Eagle where Henry Chadwick worked, and became a standard part of late 19th century journalism.
Likewise with every other standard of journalism—they all had to have been invented, out of whole cloth sometimes, and usually with a great deal of resistance, all for stuff that we today assume has always been around. But most of the no-brainers that we understand about history in general were actually developed at some point in time—very few of them can be traced to a single light-bulb-going-off moment, and most were probably tried out several times before the right conditions arose to allow them to reach wide acceptance.
That’s what I make of most early baseball innovations: how much ingenuity did it require for some pitcher to get sick of tossing up weak shit, and see what he could do to make it harder for opposing batters to light him up like the tree in Rockefeller Plaza? I mean, he was a player for his own team, right? He wanted to win. But the screwy rules of his early day required him to toss up weak shit, so it seems inevitable to me that someone at some point would have decided "Oh, hell with this!" Creighton was just pitching at a place and time that let him get away with breaking the rules and the practices of pitchers of his day. He was good at it—for a year or two, until he died.
The story goes that he died from swinging a bat—he seems to have ruptured something vital in his gut. (The "Legend" page says it was an "inguinal hernia." I hate when I get those. While there, I also learned that Creighton died in his parents’ home at 307 Henry Street in Brooklyn Heights, a block over from where I used to live on Hicks Street—I’ve probably passed the still-standing brownstone he died in a few thousand times in my life, clueless as to its historical significance.) So you’ve got this young handsome guy dominating a league of amateur ballplayers for a season, 20 starts, at the age of 20, who drops dead tragically the next season (when he pitches all of 6 games), and the baseball-crazy world, such as it was, goes mad (or madder) with grief. Somehow I don’t add this up and get "Hall of Fame" out of the deal.
John Thorn does, however, and I have a lot of respect for Thorn’s thinking in general, so I got my hands on his book about 19th century baseball. Jim Creighton’s Wikipedia page shows the kind of thought he brings to Creighton’s candidacy:
Baseball writer John Thorn commented in his book, Baseball in the Garden of Eden: The Secret History of the Early Game, that Creighton "was baseball's first hero, and I believe, the most important player not inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame."
So he wasn't just giving a flip comment to the guy who asked him for his most-neglected HoF candidate--Thorn truly feels that Jim Creighton belongs in Cooperstown. Note the terms he applies to Creighton’s HoF case: "hero" and "most important player." In other words, John Thorn’s standards for induction are all about "fame" in the broadest historical sense, not about greatness as a baseball player: was he well-known in his time? Was he admired? Were his achievements significant?
This is perfectly valid, and to a degree, baseball has accepted these perfectly valid standards, which I choose to reject, in inducting many of its earliest HoFers. Nothing to be done about that (though I favor a process that deducts one player for everyone it inducts, at least for a while, until we get some of the more outlandish Bozos ejected from the clown car) but Thorn himself makes a pretty good case for the utterly messed-up way that the history of early baseball is hopelessly flawed in Baseball in the Garden of Eden: The Secret History of the Early Game, the subject of my next article, on "Baseball and History."