11/23/2006

Baseball History -- November 23

Complete entry for November 23 is at BaseballLibrary.com HERE.

Highlighted entries:

1943
Commissioner Landis rules that Phils owner William D. Cox is permanently ineligible to hold office or be employed in baseball for having bet on his own team. The Carpenter family of Delaware will buy the Philadelphia club and Bob Carpenter, age 28, will become president. The Phils, in an effort to change their image, will conduct a contest for a new name. The winning entry, the Blue Jays, submitted by a Mrs. John Crooks, will be the unofficial team name for 1944-45 until abandoned in 1946.

Philadelphia Blue Jays? That's just wrong.

1889
Before what one writer claims is "the largest gathering in California history" (15,000 - 20,000), Oakland wins the California League pennant by beating San Francisco amid much confusion on the final day of the season. San Francisco tied for the pennant by winning three in a row, so for the final game Oakland hires ringers
Willard Brown, George Van Haltran, and Cliff Carroll. San Francisco refuses to play so the ump awards the game to Oakland. To appease the crowd, the clubs play a game with their regular nines. Oakland wins, 5–4, behind 32-game winner Bill Coughlan.

Baseball in the 19th Century must have been wonderfully strange. Bringing in some ringers sounds strangley like the end of Slap Shot, when the Syracuse Bulldogos brought back Clarence "Screaming Buffalo" Swamptown, Andre "Poodle" Lussier, Gilmore Tuttle, and Ogie Oglethorpe for the Federal League Championship game against the Chiefs.

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