They’re fans. Check it out. It made me super-happy.
White Sox fans will adore the chapter on groundskeeping, largely devoted to Emil Bossard. His son Roger is the White Sox groundskeeper. As early as 1911 in St. Paul, Emil Bossard was doctoring baseball fields to players’ requests. Zumsteg reports that Joe DiMaggio blamed the Bossards for ending his 56-game hitting streak at Cleveland’s Municipal Stadium by watering the infield so much it slowed the ground balls he hit.
So is that cheating?
Zumsteg writes, “Some people argue that any lie is an immoral act and that any time you lie to gain an advantage, you’ve sinned.
“Those people get really bad deals on consumer electronics.”
If it’s not obvious, I love, love, love the Bossards. I would put an entry about them here every day.
There’s also a request:
Hard core fans will quarrel with errors like referring to A.J. Pierzynski as “then-Oakland A’s catcher” (he never played for the A’s) and Zumsteg ignoring gimmicks like players who wear tons of armor in order to get hit by a pitch (as in the Astros’ future Hall of Famer Craig Biggio), or the great Ron Hunt, who merely knew how to lean into a pitch.
I talk about AJ in today’s errors post, and I promise that body-armor cheating’s on the to-do list here at the blog. The short version is that I didn’t cover it in part because I hugely cut down and scattered an “equipment” chapter because the book manuscript was way too long. But I’ll get to it.
Anyway, pretty awesome.
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