JF Ptak Science Books Quick Post
Baseball season is either here or almost here, so picking around in old patents on baseball games in December is perfectly allowable. This game (found at Google Patents) probably has more text on it than just about any game of any sort I’ve ever seen (and that may actually include Scrabble), and its lazy-staccato descriptions of the “play” are really quite lovely for a board game1. For example:
- “too hot for the right fielder’s hands”
- “a hot one caught”
- “2nd baseman not fast enough”
- “fine running catch” and “beautiful running catch” and “pretty left hand catch”
- “good stop, poor throw”
- “would have been a 3-bagger but for the fast fielding by the right fielder”
- “slow work and wild throw”
- “fly muffed”
[Source: https://www.google.com/patents/US772344?dq=catcher+baseball&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwiz0–e5L7JAhXK7CYKHWt_CPwQ6wEIVjAI]
Notes:
1. I haven’t read many books on sports in my reading history, but from what I have seen over the years is that baseball literature is good enough to have its own genre. If you’re going to read only one or two baseball books in your life, consider one of these: Roger Kahn, The Boys of Summer (1972); Eliot Asinof, Eight Men Out: The Black Sox and the 1919 World Series (1965); Jimmy Breslin, Can’t Anybody Here Play This Game? (1963); Robert Creamer, Babe: The Legend Comes to Life (1974); Arnold Hano, A Day in the Bleachers (1955); Donald Honig, Baseball When the Grass Was Real: Baseball from the Twenties to the Forties, Told by the Men Who Played It (1975); Bernard Malamud, The Natural, (1952).