“Let Me See That Ball!”

From Daniel Okrent’s 1989 book Baseball Anecdotes, p. 72:

You might be expecting a Bill James or Rob Neyer-style debunking in which I demonstrate that no such thing ever happened, or that the circumstances were totally different, or whatever. Actually, Okrent’s rendering of the incident seems completely accurate. Here’s the Brooklyn Daily Eagle account of it:

(Brooklyn Daily Eagle, August 8, 1915, p. 33)

So I’m not debunking this story, but I can point to a precursor. On August 22, 1907, under very similar circumstances, Rube Foster pulled the same thing on Indianapolis ABCs’ pitcher Leonard Griffin:

 

(Indianapolis Star, August 23, 1907, p. 9)

 

(Indianapolis Freeman, August 31, 1907, p.  7)

A week later, the Freeman printed a cartoon commemorating the incident:

(Indianapolis Freeman, September 6, 1907, p. 7)

Huggins’s 1915 deployment of the “let me see that ball” trick made its way into mainstream baseball lore, possibly due to its inclusion in the 1929 book Babe Ruth’s Own Story. Meanwhile, Foster’s 1907 conning of Griffin was remembered in black baseball history (though the details were sometimes left out), to be occasionally revived by later historians (such as Paul Debono in his 1997 book on the Indianapolis ABCs).

But there are many other examples of this trick stretching back into the nineteenth century. This example, pulled off in 1896 by former major league catcher Sam Laroque while playing for Dubuque in the Western Association, is noteworthy because Laroque’s phrasing is almost identical to that of Foster:

(Rockford, Illinois, Daily Register-Gazette, July 22, 1896, p. 3)

A couple of years earlier, while complaining about John “Egyptian” Healy falling prey to Mike Lehane’s request to see the ball in an Eastern League game, a Sporting Life correspondent called it an “old ‘gag’ which the writer has seen worked when he wore Knickerbockers”:

(Sporting Life, June 30, 1894, p. 6)

I haven’t attempted any kind of full archeology of this particular trick, but it wouldn’t be surprising to learn that Doc Adams had pulled it on somebody in the 1840s.

Comments

[Richard Hershberger]

My favorite trick play from early baseball is made possible by the early rule that a foul ball was dead until it was "settled in the hands of the pitcher." The essence of the trick was to create a situation where the runner lost track of whether the ball was live or dead. Here is an example showing how it worked:

[Enterprise vs. Gotham 8/20/1861] [Smith of the Enterprise at second base:] Ibbetson was the [next] striker, and began with a high foul ball over the catcher’s head. Cohen the catcher returned the ball to McKeever the pitcher, who purposely allowed it to slip through his hands towards right field, seeing which, Smith forgetting that it was a returned foul ball, and that he could not make his base until the ball had been settled in the hands of the pitcher, ran for his 3d base, when McKeever immediately picked up the ball and stood on 2d base, thus putting out Smith, it not being requisite to touch the player in such cases. This was an imperfect error, especially for a player who has been practiced in the Atlantic school. New York Clipper August 31, 1861