Strange Customes of Ye Bronx

If you read the New Yorker, you may have seen Jill Lepore's article about John Smith, the English adventurer who governed the Jamestown colony for a while in the early 17th century. I don't think it's available online - but it includes an interesting discussion of whether or not Smith's reports about the New World were accurate.

Two historians, James West Davidson and Mark Mailton Lytle, once tried to imagine how Smith might have reported a July afternoon spent at Yankee Stadium:

Being assembled about a great field of open grass, a score of their greatest men ran out upon the field, adorned each in brightly hued jackets and breeches, with letters cunningly woven upont their Chestes, and wearing caps ... upon their heades, of a sort I know not what. One of their chiefs stood in the midst and would at his pleasure hurl a white ball at another chief, whose attire was of a different colour, and whether by chance or artifyce I know not the ball flew exceeding close to the man yet never injured him, but sometimes he would strike att it with a wooden club and so giveing it a hard blow would throw down his club and run away.

In other words, you could count on Smith for abundant detail and admirable accuracy, but he's fairly likely to leave out what you most want to know: "Yankees 10, Red Sox 3."

On the other hand, he would probably still have been better than listening to Joe Morgan.

Labels: baseball

  ¶ Posted by Paul Curtis 12:49 PM