Eternally trying to post more and to allow myself to post more scattered thoughts and fragments. Thus, a small note from Ritter’s fanastic The Glory of Their Times. For those who’ve forgotten, the book is an oral history of baseball at the turn of the century and, in my opinion, the best thing written on the sport.
Reading Tommy Leach’s1 story, I was very surprised to run into a mention of my hometown and its short-lived professional baseball team:
I still remember in 1896 when I was playing semipro ball with Hanover, Pennsylvania, in the Cumberland Valley League. I couldn’t hit a lick on earth. One day I struck out four straight times. Some fellow got a piece of wood about half a foot wide and four or five feet long from someplace–that’s when they used to have those rail fences–and when I came up for the fifth time he presented it to me at home plate. I didn’t even have enough sense to laugh.
The Glory of Their Times, 24
Before reading, I had no idea Hanover once had a minor league team, much less, as I was to find out, that it had two of them: the short-lived Tigers of 18962 and the Hanover Raiders, a D-Level Minor League team that lasted from 1915-1930.
It’s sad that the memory of these teams has faded from the consciousness of the town.3 A place without memory is no place at all, for it is only memory that separates place from wilderness. I fear too many places today have become barren and empty, bereft of history, without stories.
Medieval writers understood the importance of memory to place very well. We can see this fact in, to name one of many examples, Gerald of Wales’s Journey Through Wales. Gerald is practically bursting at the seams to tell us every local legend, every odd geological, zoological, and botanical tidbit he comes across on his travels. As he writes,
This little work is like a highly polished mirror. In it I have portrayed the pathless places which we trod, named each mountain torrent and each purling spring, recorded the witty things we said, set down the hazards of our journey and our various travails, included an account of such noteworthy events as occurred in those parts, some in our times, others long ago, with much natural description and remarkable excursions into natural history, adding at the end a word-picture of the country itself.
Gerald of Wales, The Journey Through Wales, 70
Wales comes to life not in his descriptions of the land–or rather not only in them, a number of these are rather evocative and beautiful–but in the memory passed down to him and on to us in his writing. A mirror, the book reflects reality, a reality that includes witty remarks and noteworthy events, just as much a part of the landscape as the woods and waters. The work’s fundamental purpose is to commemorate Wales in all its thickness, and it’s in this commemoration that the place, any place, truly exists.
1. Fun fact, Leach led the NL in home runs in 1902, hitting a staggering 6 home runs, all of them inside-the-park.
2. According to baseball reference, Leach was actually fourth on the team in total hits, though I suspect his average was not particularly high considering he garnered only 26 in 37 games. The Tigers do not appear to have been an offensive juggernaut.
3. Thought I must mention that a local author has written a history of the Raiders and maintains a modest, charming website with some photos and information on the team.
