Vintage Baseball
Bay Area Baseball Vintage League. A league played by the rules of 1886. Why 1886? The best reason I’ve been told, and I have no reason to doubt it, is because 1886 was the first year that the pitchers threw overhanded to the plate. The bats and balls are a little different, the batter can ask for a high or low strike zone, a walk takes seven balls, the pitcher can’t bring his foot above his shin on his motion to the plate and some other differences but if you thumb through the rule book of 1886 you’ll see that many of the rules written in baseball’s infancy are still in play today. Everyone has an old timey baseball name too, a field name. It’s a league rule. I think. Tools, Goldie, Mayor, Hollywood, Gritty, Worm, Scout, Fancy, Stumbles, Chops, Bull, Rosey, Glen.
I met Rosey, second basemen for the Oakland Colonels, through a friend and he starting going on about this vintage baseball league he played in and I was fascinated. I gotta see this. I gotta take pictures of this. So I went to Alameda two days later, Sundays are when they play their games, to take it in. They liked the pictures I took so they asked me to come out to the next game at Raimondi Park in West Oakland against the San Francisco Pelicans. Raimondi Park is home to the Oakland Ballers, a team in the Independent Pioneer League, but this little amateur stadium might as well have been Yankee Stadium by vintage league standards and the players were as fizzy as a Sarsaparilla to play between the lines. These pictures are from that game on Sunday July 20.
Before the game many of the players let me take, what I hope turn out as baseball card type photos, on film. Those pictures are not in this folder because they haven’t been developed yet.
Ps - No one’s field name is Glen,
