[201/365] baseball monolith

[cosmolinguist]

I nearly didn't click on this link (shared by the Manchester Baseball Club on Facebook!) but I'm so fucking glad I did.

I was hooked at the first quote from the sculptor of this monolith:

“I watched Game 7 of the World Series (a major baseball event in the USA) between the [Atlanta] Braves and [Minnesota] Twins, John Smoltz pitching against Jack Morris, and became fascinated by it. I read books, studied the game, the history, the legends, the ball parks, all the curses and incidents”.

The best game ever! I hope it's one of the MLB archive games I can get with my subscription because I want to make diffrentcolours watch it one day. (His baseball education is coming along swimmingly! And he's the one who found out there's a Manchester Baseball Club at all! We've even seen them play a little.)

The article goes on, each sentence almost more adorable than the last. This guy made the 162-ball tower out of home-run balls abandoned by the local Richmond baseball club.

Cleaning, drying, polishing with bike shoe polish or toothpaste, before finally using a leather preserver, he painstakingly and lovingly restored each one... “I love the feel of a baseball and the colour, and I wanted to show off every single baseball because it took a lot of time and effort to find these balls and bring them back to life”.

Going through several design ideas for the tower, which included building a scale model using ping pong balls and a broomstick, Goldsmith settled on a design made up of multiple modules of 12 baseballs totalling 162 altogether (coincidentally the same number of regular season games played in Major League Baseball).

“it’s simply just a way to display baseballs, giving them a second life, and building something from lost and found objects”.

Comments

[jesse_the_k]

I loved how baseball facts are handled with tactful curiosity

I watched Game 7 of the World Series (a major baseball event in the USA)

And I really love that there's homegrown baseball fans in the UK!

[jesse_the_k]

I loved how baseball facts are handled with tactful curiosity

I watched Game 7 of the World Series (a major baseball event in the USA)

And I really love that there's homegrown baseball fans in the UK!

[legionseagle]

I believe the tradition of baseball in Lancashire* goes back to before WWII; I recall being very impressed when I took my parents to a Blue Jays game when they came out to visit me in Toronto, and my father knew far more than me about the rules, which he attributed to watching the local league in the 1930s. (My mother said balefully that she had not been allowed to watch the local league due to her own mother's fear that watching baseball was a first step in being kidnapped by Mormons and taken out to Salt Lake City to be forced into polyamory. What my grandmother was smoking is left as an exercise for the reader.)

*See also lacrosse. I've worked with several (male) lacrosse players of county standards and higher.

[po8crg]

Derby County FC's old home ground was called the Baseball Ground because it was originally built for the professional baseball club of the same name in 1890.

1890 was the only fully professional season of baseball in British history. Derby County were expelled mid-season for fielding too many Americans.

Baseball apparently declined somewhat, but revived during WWI and was slowly growing in the 20s and 30s. There was a deliberate effort to push people into cricket after WWII, which contributed to the massive cricket boom of the 1950s.

[otter]

Neato!

[silveradept]

That is a curiosity that is well worthy of the game of baseball. I hope the club displays it with pride.