44 APRIL 13 - APRIL 19, 2018 BROOKLYN MEDIA GROUP
Green-Wood’s requiem to baseball’s beginnings
Crossword
Across
1. Resting places
5. Healthful retreats
9. Fink
13. ___ cheese
14. Casts
16. Maui dance
17. Viewed with
approval or pleasure
19. "Iliad" warrior
20. Two-seater
21. Back, in a way
22. Saws with the
grain
23. Goes on and on
25. Fox relative
27. Thin wires with tiny
tufts of yarn
31. "Much ___ About
Nothing"
32. Course
33. Chest material
37. "___ we forget"
39. Hot spot
42. Baby
43. Song of joy
45. Achy
47. Absorbed, as a
cost
48. Short tables
accompanying sofas
52. Disperse
55. 100 kurus
56. Farfetched
57. Sylvester, to
Tweety
59. Big step
63. ___-bodied
64. Hardly ordinary
66. Bottom of the
barrel
67. Slope of loose
rock debris
68. ___ Scotia
69. Coastal raptors
70. Aims
71. Form of matter
Down
1. Doozy
2. Icelandic epic
3. Angry outburst
4. Small amount
5. Clutter; a total mess
6. Quote, part 3
7. "Mi chiamano Mimi,"
e.g.
8. Product motto
9. Keen or eager
10. Papal court
11. Beth's preceder
12. Boito's Mefi stofele,
e.g.
15. Dorm annoyance
18. Change,
chemically
24. "Buona ___"
(Italian greeting)
26. Parenthesis,
essentially
27. Segmented
organ near mouth of
invertebrates
28. "I had no ___!"
29. Ask
30. Charm
34. Call
35. A chip, maybe
36. Bakery selections
38. Indiscreet,
inconsiderate
40. "O Sanctissima,"
e.g.
41. Skilled performers
44. "___ a chance"
46. Our "mother"
49. Unborn embryo
50. Home of Paris
51. Large estate or
manor
52. Flat
53. Wooden pole used
in Scottish games
54. ___ wrench
58. Confl icted
60. "American ___"
61. Hawk's opposite
62. Final, e.g.
65. Cabernet, e.g.
Answers
BY JIM DOLAN
Just as Major League Baseball
opened its parks to fans across
the nation to start the 2018 season,
Green-Wood Cemetery also opened its
gates for its annual “Baseball Greats of
Green-Wood” tour hosted by Brooklyn
Baseball Historian Tom Gilbert.
Stopping at the gravesites of Henry
Chadwick, the Father of baseball, Jim
Creighton, baseball’s fi rst star and
Charlie Ebbets, the innovative Dodgers
owner, Gilbert explained these
pioneers’ early contributions to the
game as we know it today.
According to Gilbert, as an alternative
to cricket the game of “base
ball” involving a bat, ball and bases
was played with a lot of variations
throughout an emerging America;
fi rst by children in the 1820s and then
by adults during the 1840s.
However, it would be the brand of
baseball known as “The New York
Game” — that emerged from Brooklyn
and Manhattan and which grew in
popularity — that would eventually
become the nation’s standard.
Initially the game of “base ball” was
a “pickup” style game that evolved into
an amateur game where players formed
baseball clubs with fi nancial backers
much like today’s Olympic sponsored
athletes. Players were oft en lawyers,
merchants and politicians who had to
have enough free time to play and travel.
By the 1850s, regional competition
was well underway as Brooklyn’s
premiere team, the Excelsiors, hosted
Manhattan’s Knickerbockers in a
game that attracted over 1,000 fans
at present-day Carroll Park on Court
Street in Carroll Gardens.
Big games like that caught the attention
of Chadwick, a sports journalist
who featured game results in the
Brooklyn Daily Eagle.
Chadwick would go beyond reporting
to codify the game eventually
with rules for teams to follow in his
handbook, The Game of Base Ball. He
was the chair of the National Rules
Committee and drew up such innovations
as the box score, batting average
and earned run average, just to name
a few measurements for players’
performance.
Among those whose name appeared
oft en in the Brooklyn Daily Eagle was
Creighton from the Brooklyn Excelsiors.
Creighton is known as the game’s
first superstar having developed
baseball’s fi rst fastball.
At that time, the pitcher threw underhanded
with the idea of watching
the artistry of the fi elders throw a runner
out. However without breaking
the rules, Creighton revolutionized
the game by throwing his underhanded
“speed pitch” to strike out batters
instead of serving up an easy pitch for
batters to hit.
Bringing baseball into the 20th
century, the young Ebbets rose from
ticket taker to shareowner and then
to the owner of the Brooklyn Dodgers
to become one the innovators of the
modern game.
Replacing the always fire-prone
wooden ballparks of the time, Ebbets
built Ebbets Field, one of the game’s
fi rst steel and concrete stadiums. He
also introduced, the rain check, “Ladies
Day” and numbered uniforms,
and built one of the fi rst clubhouses
for visiting teams.
Although the wrecking ball took
down Ebbets Field in 1960 aft er the
Dodgers moved to Los Angeles in
1958, a little-known surviving relic
to Brooklyn baseball still stands near
Green-Wood Cemetery.
As part of the Con Edison parking
lot perimeter at the corner of First
Street and Third Avenue, the inconspicuous
1899 brick outfi eld wall of
Washington Park still stands at the site
where the Dodgers played before they
moved to Ebbets Field in 1913.
According to historians, it is believed
that the Washington Park Wall
is oldest standing piece of a major
league ballpark in the country.
Photo by Jim Dolan
Holding a copy of Chadwick’s Rules of Baseball during his
tour of Green-Wood Cemetery, Baseball Historian Tom Gilbert
stands alongside of the obelisk grave marker of Henry
Chadwick, known as the Father of Baseball.