Life, 1912-09-05 · page 14 of 44
Life — September 5, 1912 — page 14: what you’re looking at
What you’re looking at
This Life magazine page satirizes how baseball had become overly complicated and militarized by 1914. The article's title—"Fourth Dimension Baseball"—mocks the sport's transformation from simple recreation into a pseudo-scientific enterprise requiring "evil engineers, corporation lawyers, professors of ballistics and wireless telegraphers." The left illustration shows a man ("Harold") rescued from drowning—a sarcastic comment on how seriously people took athletic pursuits. The right side mentions specific pitchers like Gunga Din and Green-eyed Parsons, whose innovative pitching techniques (particularly the "snake curve") had become strategically complex. The satire suggests that modern baseball had lost its simplicity, becoming an intellectualized game requiring specialized expertise rather than pure athletic skill.
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Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.
BASEBALL TALK fier a shake up they blanked. the visitors” lamentable downfall when, in the critical game of the sea- , son, the Cherokee Scouts solved his delivery by a total of ' twenty-eight hits. But all they know of the cause of this sad reversal of form is that Moriarity, the pinch-hitter sent in by Manager Beeswax for the Scouts in the fatal sixth inning. started the run getting by a tremendous home-run drive to center field. The fact may now be dis- closed that this Moriarty was none other than Gunga Din, the celebrated Hindu snake charmer, who, by the exercise of his myste powers, charmed and. straightened out Boggs's snake curve, and left him the easy prey of the hard-hitting Scouts The same year developed another pitching prodigy in the person of Green-cyed Parsons of the Oskaloosa Invin- cibles. Parson's spitball made him the despair of the surest: batters. But when the Invineibles were about to open a series in West Newton Center, the crafty attorneys ‘on the staff of the West Newton Center Tumblebugs cov- OF HAROLD, WHO CON- ertly lobed an anti-spitting ordinance through the Board ERY ATHLETIC. HE HAS JUST EEN of Selectmen, served a warrant upon Parsons as he was RESCUED FROM DROWNING BY THIS GIRL FROM VASSAR. in the act of expectorating upon the ball preparatory to delivering his dreaded curve, and thus effectively broke up the game. 1 cannot, however, admit that this stratagem Fourth Dimension was wholly sportsmanlike Nor am T among those who Baseball . T° the Initiated, Enlightened and Uplifted—that is, to the constant readers of the fifteen-cent magazines— it has long been too evident that marvelous changes have come upon our National Game. Grown weary in well- doing, jaded with their efforts for Social Betterment, the intense minds that dominate our periodicals have sought relief in shifting their attention to the sports of this fair land of ours, with the inevitable result that baseball, no longer the simple but argumentative diversion of village green and city lot, can now be properly played only with the assistance of a picked force of civil engineers, corpora- tion lawyers, professors of ballistics and wireless teleg- raphers, all directed by the counsels of a military board of SHOWING TH SIDERS HIMSELF FEELID strategy. The scientific perfection of our great pitchers ale obliged baseball campaigners to devise startling defensive measures, just as the increase in the muzzle velocity of naval guns has resulted in the invention of armor plate of greater resistance, All will remember Four-handed Roggs of the Tallahasee Sparrows, whose bafiling “ snake curve” mowed down the opposing batters of the Gulf League in the season of 1908. e has All will remember that great pitcher's “Thou shalt not steal” | comicbooks.co