Zack Hample - The Baseball: Stunts, Scandals, and Secrets Beneath the Stitches

ZACK HAMPLE
THE BASEBALL

Zack Hample is a baseball fan best known for having snagged 4,662 baseballs (and counting) from 48 different major league stadiums. Hample has been featured in hundreds of newspapers and magazines, including Sports Illustrated, People, Mens Health, Maxim, Playboy, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and USA Today. He has also appeared on NPR, ESPN, FOX Sports, CNN International, The Rosie ODonnell Show, the CBS Evening News with Katie Couric, and The Tonight Show with both Jay Leno and Conan OBrien. Hamples first book, How to Snag Major League Baseballs, was published in 1999 when he was 21 years old. His last book, Watching Baseball Smarter, was published in 2007 and is currently in its 16th printing. Hample, a New York City native, runs a business called Watch With Zack through which he takes people to games and guarantees them at least one ball. He also snags baseballs to raise money for the charity Pitch In For Baseball and writes a popular blog called The Baseball Collector.

www.zackhample.com

ALSO BY ZACK HAMPLE

Watching Baseball Smarter
How to Snag Major League Baseballs

AN ANCHOR SPORTS ORIGINAL, MARCH 2011

Copyright 2011 by Zack Hample

All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Anchor Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.

Anchor Books and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Hample, Zack, 1977
The baseball : stunts, scandals, and secrets beneath the stitches / by Zack Hample.
p. cm.
eISBN: 978-0-307-74208-7
1. BaseballUnited StatesHistory. 2. BaseballSocial aspects United States. I. Title. GV863.A1H36 2011
796.3570973dc22
2010043551

www.anchorbooks.com

Cover design by Base Art Co.
Cover photograph Don Hamerman

v3.1

This ones for my dad.

I know this might be asking a lot, but can we forget about steroids for a moment? And while were at it, can we stop griping about instant replay and ticket prices and everything else? Baseball is still the national pastime, and whether youre just a regular fan or a multimillionaire A-list celebrity, catching a foul ballor better yet, a home runmight be the ultimate American experience. Ask Charlie Sheen. Back in April 1996, he bought 2,615 outfield seats at an Angels game to increase his odds of snagging a home run ball.

It didnt work.

As hard as it might seem (particularly for Sheen) to leave the stadium with a souvenir, it used to be much harder. At the turn of the 20th century, fans werent even allowed to keep balls. Teams typically used just a few balls per game, so whenever one landed in the seats, a stadium employee retrieved it and put it back into play. Naturally, by the end of each game the balls were so dirty and discolored that they were tough to see, especially at dusk. No one thought much about this until 1920more than two decades before teams started wearing helmetswhen a batter named Ray Chapman was fatally hit in the head by a pitch that he barely saw. Soon after, umpires were instructed to keep new, clean balls in play.

The tradition of keeping foul balls, while impossible to trace back to one particular moment, got a major boost the following season when a 31-year-old New York Giants fan named Reuben Berman refused to return a ball, got kicked out of the Polo Grounds, sued the team for mental anguish, and won. Now, nearly a century later, catching and keeping balls is such a big part of the game that some fans enjoy this pursuit as much as the game itself.

I know because Im one of them.

Since 1990 Ive snagged 4,662 baseballs at 48 different major league stadiums. Of course, when I first started going to games, I didnt know what I was getting myself into. There werent any blogs about snagging baseballs. I didnt know what a so-called ballhawk was. The whole thing was a mystery, and I just wanted to catch one ball. But now that Ive reeled in thousands of them and had some time to reflect, Ive discovered that the ball is more than just a five-ounce sphere of cork, rubber, yarn, and cowhide. Its a major source of history and controversy and hilarity. Did you know that Babe Ruth once tried to catch a ball that was dropped from an airplane? Or that several NASA astronauts have thrown ceremonial first pitches from outer space? (See .)

Gathering these facts was lots of funit helped to have Rawlings, Major League Baseball, and the Hall of Fame on my sidebut when I first started doing the research, explaining the book to people was oddly difficult.

Its about baseballs, Id say.

Youre writing a baseball book?

No I mean yes. I mean, its about base-balls you know? The ballthe actual baseball itself.

(Cue the awkward silence.)

Oh, like, how the ball is made?

Yeah, how the ball is madebut this book covers so much more. Im still not quite sure how to describe it, but if theres one thing Ive learned from going to hundreds of games and snagging thousands of balls and meeting tens of thousands of fans, its that theres something about baseballs that makes people crazy. This book is a celebration of the balland of those people.

Base ball fansthe radicalsare so anxious to get a base ball that has history attached to it, that they willingly risk arrest for petty theft. They are willing to fight amongst themselves for such a ball, if necessary. A blackened optic or a busted breezer, in their opinion, is a mere incidentif they only can get that pellet.
Sporting Life magazine, July 22, 1916

CHAPTER 1

THE SOUVENIR CRAZE

BALL GRABBERS, READ THIS

Way back in 1915, a first-class stamp cost two cents, a gallon of gas went for a quarter, and a game-used baseball fetched three bucks. At least, that was the going rate at the Polo Grounds when a Yankee fan named Guy Clarke snagged one in the left-field bleachers, got arrested for refusing to return it, and had to pay a $3 fine. That was a lot of money back then, but were not talking about any old ball. It was a ninth-inning home run hit by Yankees shortstop Roger Peckinpaugh against the Boston Red Sox. Considering what that ball would sell for today, it was totally worth it. The editors at the New York Times, however, didnt see it that way, and on May 8, 1915one day after the incidentthe paper ran a short article called Ball Grabbers, Read This. It was a warning, and the message was clear: if you steal a baseball, youre gonna get busted.

This was old news.

And it wasnt entirely true.

Clarke was just one of the unlucky few who got prosecuted; fans had been snapping up baseballs for years, and by 1915 more than two dozen balls were disappearing at the Polo Grounds each week. Yeah, these balls were expensiveowners were paying $15 per dozenbut beyond the financial burden, it didnt really matter. If a few balls were lost here and there, the home plate umpire simply replaced them.