Midwinter - dreaming of baseball

"There are only two seasons – winter and baseball." 

~ Bill Veeck ~

                                                        former owner of the Cleveland Indians, St. Louis Cardinals and Chicago White Sox

 

Tinker to Evers to Chance

http://fineartamerica.com/featured/tinker-to-evers-to-chance-lianne-schneider.html

The poem, "Baseball's Sad Lexicon", also known as "Tinker to Evers to Chance" after its refrain, is a 1910 baseball poem by Franklin Pierce Adams. The poem is presented as a single, rueful stanza from the point of view of a New York Giants fan watching the Chicago Cubs infield complete a double play.

Chicago Cubs infielders Joe Tinker, Johnny Evers, and Frank Chance began playing together with the Cubs in 1902, and formed a double play combination that lasted through April 1912. Their consistently solid fielding and hitting led the Cubs to four National League pennants (1906-8, 1910) and two World Series wins (1907-8). In 1910, New York newspaper columnist Franklin Pierce Adams immortalized the three ballplayers in a short verse. The Cubs won the National League pennant four times between 1906 and 1910, often defeating the Giants en route to the World Series. In fact, the 1907 Chicago Cubs are often referred to as “the best team ever” and there is a book by that name that celebrates this talented team in its entirety.

Adams’ poem was first published in the New York Evening Mail on July 12, 1910. Popular among sportswriters, numerous additional verses were written. The poem gave Tinker, Evers, and Chance increased popularity. It has been credited with their elections to the National Baseball Hall of Fame in 1946.

Off the field, two of the three never spoke to one another – Joe Tinker and John Evers disliked each other immensely and no sign of rapprochement appeared until both were asked to visit Chance as he lay dying. 

  

"Baseball's Sad Lexicon"

These are the saddest of possible words:
"Tinker to Evers to Chance."
Trio of bear cubs, and fleeter than birds,
Tinker and Evers and Chance.
Ruthlessly pricking our gonfalon bubble,*
Making a Giant hit into a double--
Words that are heavy with nothing but trouble:
"Tinker to Evers to Chance."**

* The term "gonfalon" refers to a flag or pennant, and Adams uses the phrase "pricking our gonfalon bubble" to describe the repeated success of the Chicago Cubs and their celebrated infield against their National League rivals, his beloved New York Giants.

** Reprinted in the book In Other Words by Franklin P. Adams (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, Page & Co., 1912)

Credit for the details of the story goes to Wikipedia (entry Tinker to Evers to Chance) and to the Baseball Almanac.

A complete departure for me in terms of subject matter – but the history buff in me couldn’t resist the challenge. The images in this triptych were painted using baseball card pictures taken by photographer Paul Thompson who owned the copyright only for the gold borders that surrounded the original cards. An article in the Smithsonian described the significant departure of Thompson’s portraits from those on other baseball cards – distributed by the American Tobacco Company among other tobacco companies. Thompson’s were chromolithographs which could be printed in color while earlier cards had been black and white.