Mickey Mantle, one of baseball's greatest

It is the birthday of baseball legend Mickey Mantle (1931), one of the greatest players of all time. He was the finest switch hitter in the game. He hit a record 18 home runs in the World Series. His other records included 40 RBIs, 42 runs, 43 walks, 26 extra-base hits, and 123 total bases. In 1956, he won the Triple Crown, with record home runs, runs batted in, and batting average. He played center field and first base for the New York Yankees for 18 seasons, ending in 1968.

Gen. Doubleday didn't invent baseball

It is the birthday Union General Abner Doubleday (1819), who is credited with firing the first shot in the Civil War at Fort Sumter, and also registering a patent for the cable car railway that still operates in San Francisco. He may be more widely remembered, however, for something historians say he didn’t do: invent baseball. The story of Doubleday’s invention of baseball persisted for generations, perpetuated by a 1905 baseball commission’s report that came to that conclusion. Recent scholarship, though, calls that story a myth and presents evidence that the principal source for it was highly unreliable. Nevertheless, the Baseball Hall of Fame is located in Doubleday’s boyhood home of Cooperstown, New York, and a baseball stadium and a minor league team are named for him. Doubleday did publish two important Civil War volumes: Reminiscences of Forts Sumter and Moultrie (1876), and Chancellorsville and Gettysburg (1882).

Jim Thorpe: 20th century's greatest athlete

It is the birthday of Jim Thorpe (1888), who is considered the greatest athlete of the 20th century. He won two Olympic gold medals (pentathlon and decathlon) in 1912, and played college football as well as professional football, basketball, and baseball. Though he lost his gold medals when it was revealed he had played semi-pro baseball before competing in the Olympics, they were restored in 1983. Thorpe’s father was Irish and Sac and Fox Indian. His mother was French and Potawatomi. He was born in Indian Territory in Oklahoma. At 16, he was coached by the legendary Pop Warner, who was reluctant at first to let his best track and field man play rough and tumble football. Thorpe outran the defense team in practice and made the team. His career ended as the Great Depression began. His sad last years were spent in a variety of odd jobs, including ditch digger, bouncer, construction worker, and security guard. He died at age 64, a victim of heart disease and alcoholism.

Happy birthday, Billy Sunday

It is the birthday of baseball-star-turned-evangelist Billy Sunday (1862), who parlayed his celebrity as a major league base-stealer into a two-decade career as a fiery conservative preacher who could draw thousands to his revivals in the days before electronic sound systems. In his day, he was the most popular preacher in America, and friends with rich and famous people. He is credited with helping to set the national mood for passage of the Eighteenth Amendment and Prohibition in 1919. Even after Prohibition was repealed in 1933, Sunday continued to preach conservative philosophy, as he does in this video of a 1929 speech.

Pitcher Spalding built sporting goods career

A.G. Spalding

Albert G. Spalding was already a star baseball pitcher for the Boston Red Stockings when baseball pioneer William Hulbert quietly approached him to switch to the Chicago White Stockings and to help form the organization that would become the National League.

Spalding signed to play with Chicago in 1876, and led his team to the NL’s first championship. He also started a sporting goods store with his brother and the following year started wearing a glove on his catching hand. It was just like the ones he and his brother happened to have for sale in their store.

That was the beginning of a sporting goods empire that continues today, for A.G. Spalding turned out to be a star entrepreneur as well as baseball champ. He promoted baseball and sporting goods on a trip with Major League players around the world. Under contract with the NL, he published the first official rules and regulations for baseball, which included a statement that only Spalding balls could be used for official games. Then he started publishing Spalding’s Official Baseball Guide, which wasn’t official at all but quickly became the most widely read baseball periodical.

Spalding’s success in sporting goods continued throughout his life. In 1911, long after his baseball career had ended, Spalding published America’s National Game, a history of the game that contributed to that success. Naturally, he offered the book for sale in his annual sport goods catalog. A copy of the 1914 catalog is in the collection of rare and unusual items at Lighthouse Books, ABAA.

The catalog is a testament to the sprawling Spalding sport goods enterprise, featuring pages devoted to football, basketball, ice skating, sledding, weightlifting, Indian clubs, boxing, and, of course, baseball.

Here you’ll find footballs that seem oddly round by today’s standards, those black leather helmets you might remember seeing on Ronald Reagan and Pat O’Brien in Knute Rockne, All American, the megaphones that were required equipment for cheerleaders of the era, and much more.

Spalding didn’t miss the opportunity for ancillary products for sports fans. There is an array of sporting caps and pennants to choose from as well.

Spalding knew Americans weren’t going to confine themselves to the major sports of the day. He offered toboggans, dumb bells and exercise equipment for a country just beginning to become concerned with fitness.

Spalding was once so well known throughout the country that the Boston Herald was moved to write in 1900:

“Next to Abraham Lincoln and George Washington, the name of A.G. Spalding is the most famous in American literature. It has been blazing forth on the cover of guides to all sorts of sports, upon bats and gloves. . . for many years. Young America gets its knowledge of the past in the world of athletics from something that has "Al Spalding" on it in big black letters, and for that reason, as much as any other, he is one of the national figures of our times.”

Baseball memories and diamond dreams

W.P. Kinsella seems obsessed with baseball. The Canadian writer’s work frequently highlights the game.

One of his short stories, Shoeless Joe Jackson Comes to Iowa, is the foundation of his most well-known novel, Shoeless Joe.  A copy of the first edition of the 1982 novel is in the collection of rare and unusual books at Lighthouse Books, ABAA.

Jim Murray, the sportswriter, loved it. “Any book that has Shoeless Joe Jackson, J.D. Salinger, Fenway Park and Moonlight Graham in it almost before you can pause to catch your breath has got to be more fun than Reggie Jackson under a high fly,” he wrote.

Indeed, Kinsella’s book is much more than a baseball book, though for many devotees of the game that would be enough. It is a story of redemption and lost dreams and second chances.

On the surface, newbie farmer Ray Kinsella hears a voice telling him to plow his cornfield and build a baseball stadium, which he does, and it begins a fantasy adventure that brings him face-to-face with the ghost of disgraced baseball player Shoeless Joe and sends him on a quest to find reclusive author J.D. Salinger and baseball footnote Moonlight Graham.

In the book, Kinsella (the farmer) kidnaps Salinger and takes him on the odyssey to find Graham. In fact, Kinsella (the author) and Salinger were friends and Salinger went with him to Chisolm, Minn., in 1975 to search for Graham. They discovered that the baseball player had died 10 years earlier.

There are more Salinger connections as well. The main character, Ray Kinsella, was the name of a character in Salinger’s short story A Young Girl in 1941 With No Waist at All. Ray has a twin brother named Richard. Richard Kinsella is a classmate of Holden Caulfield in Salinger’s most famous novel, The Catcher in the Rye.

In the book, Kinsella and Salinger stop off at the Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, N.Y. They encounter a bored ticket taker at the museum who perks up when Kinsella introduces his companion. "You worked for Kennedy," the ticket taker exclaims. Salinger hides his amusement at being mistaken for Pierre Salinger, who was White House Press Secretary to John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson.

Of course, moviegoers know the book was adapted for the 1989 Kevin Costner film Field of Dreams. The Salinger character was changed to 1960s writer Terence Mann, played by James Earl Jones. Amy Madigan played Kinsella’s wife Annie and Ray Liotta played Shoeless Joe.

Most of the movie was filmed in and around Dyersville, Iowa. The owners of the land kept the baseball diamond and it is still an attraction today. Baseball and film lovers from around the country visit the site.

Originally, the title for the movie was the same as the book, Shoeless Joe, but after test audiences said they thought it sounded like a movie about a bum, the studio changed the name to Field of Dreams. W.P. Kinsella was fine with the change. The publishing company had changed the title of his book to Shoeless Joe. Originally, he had called it Dream Field.