THE ENVELOPE

Ordinarily, the envelopes ("covers") sold at stamp shows have no contents. Even if they do, buyers are usually more interested in the cover, its stamp(s), cancellation, design and addresses than what might have been inside. This particular cover was given me by James Inverarity. It fit well with my already established interest in baseball-related postage stamps.

The envelope, over a century old, still contained its original letter. Charles Scribner, working at the Western Electric Company in Chicago, sent it to his wife Etta back home in Vermont. As I read the letter I began to wonder who Scribner was. This led me through a number of biographical references from which I learned that he was the man who developed modern telephone switchboards, varieties of electronic signalling equipment and the vacuum tube. He filed over 700 patents on such devices, and he developed what would later become Bell Telephone Laboratories.

In the letter Charles tells Etta that after working all Saturday morning on a patent suit he's going to go out to a ball game. He thinks the game will relax him, even though "they were badly beaten yesterday and I am afraid they are on the way to the bottom of the heap." My curiosity was up — who played these games on July 27 and 28 in 1888? How badly was the home team beaten in the first game? Were they beaten in the second, as Scribner anticipated? Where was the ballpark, and what was it like? Did the games have any significance, and how were they described at the time they were played?

Some of what I found about all this is contained here. To get started, with a peek at the letter itself, go back up and click on the envelope.

Credits:

Charles E. Scribner, the author of the letter, was hard to track down amid the many biographical references to other Scribners (especially the publisher and his family). The one I repeat here is from the National Cyclopaedia of American Biography which I found in the Western Washington University Library.

Pictures of the Teams. Early in my search I came across The Ultimate Baseball Book by Daniel Okrent and Harris Lewine (Houghton Mifflin, 1984). As it happened, the chapter on baseball in the 19th century had a picture of both the Chicago White Stockings and the Detroit Wolverines on the same page (p 22, pictured here).

I found pictures of the individual individual players on the 1878-89 "Old Judge" cigarette baseball cards in the huge baseball card collection at the Library of Congress.

The statistical records for each player are from Total Baseball which I originally owned as a thick reference book, then as a CD-ROM (from which the tables are taken), and is now available online.

The picture and description of the ballpark I obtained directly by inquiry to the National Baseball Hall of Fame. They also helped me identify some of the players in the group pictures. Assistance with the map and information about current use of the land came from the map librarian at the University of Chicago

Newspaper accounts include box scores from the New York Times (on microfiche at Western Washington Univeristy Library) and detailed stories of each game from the Chicago Tribune and the Chicago Daily News, copies of which were sent me by the University of Chicago Library. Both Chicago papers make fascinating reading - hard to imagine such creative cornball being written today. The Daily News, provides a good example of "deck heads," the structured set of headlines above the article. I've done what I can in HTML to imitate the originals.

I made the defensive position diagrams using the field layouts obtained from the Seattle Mariners' website (100 level, behind home plate>.

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