ODD-BALL ST. LOUIS DISPLAYS "A LOVE FOR MUTANT BASEBALL"

PubDate: Sunday, 8/20/2000

Category: EVERYDAY MAGAZINE
By John M. McGuire of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch

Indian ball is just one of the peculiar games that have made St. Louis the center of the odd-ball universe. Or as Esquire magazine noted, "St. Louis has been giddily creative in constructing games around the concept of hitting a thrown object with a bat."

The best known and oldest is the hardball variation called corkball, a game so St. Louis that it gave the city a curious reputation during World War II when local corkballers played the game on the decks of aircraft carriers or on military parade grounds. Back then, homegrown corkball was played in "cages," most of them attached to the side of a tavern.

Other local variations are fuzz-ball, featuring a singed tennis ball that moves like a sphere possessed, and perhaps the oddest game of all, a batter-pitcher diversion called crowns or caps. In this game, usually played against the exterior wall of a saloon, the batter uses a broomstick and tries to hit a beer-bottle cap that is hurled with a vengeance, bobbing about like a crazed dragonfly.

These distinctly St. Louis games have one thing in common - kegs of beer, taverns and buckets of chili.

How did it all begin? The most precise story is that corkball was born at Mueller's, a boardinghouse and saloon at Grand Boulevard and Greer Avenue. The year was 1890, and the story is that some members of the St. Louis Browns — an American Association team that a few years later would be rechristened the Cardinals in the National League — were sitting on the porch at Mueller's polishing off a keg of brew. Chris Von der Ahe, a colorful saloonkeeper who called himself "Der Poss Bresident," owned the team, which featured a player who would go on to become a baseball legend. He was Charley Comiskey, founder of the Chicago White Sox.

Comiskey might have been there the night that one of the players decided he needed exercise. He took the bung out of the keg, carved it into the shape of a ball, while another Brownie found a broom handle for a bat. Five players, not so tipsy, set the ground rules: One would be a pitcher, the other a catcher, with the remaining three playing the outfield. Like Indian ball, there was no running.

Eventually, the game evolved into organized leagues and manufactured equipment. For a time, the corkballs — baseballs slightly larger than golf balls — and slender bats used in the game were made by Rawlings Sporting Goods. Rawlings, based in St. Louis, dropped the line years ago, and now Markwort Sporting Goods on Forest Park Boulevard carries on the tradition.

Leagues such as Sportsman's Corkball, South St. Louis and Santa Maria or Lemay Corkball became so identified with St. Louis that Bill Vaughn, the late Kansas City syndicated columnist, wrote: "St. Louis without corkball is San Francisco without cable cars, Baltimore without crabcakes or Boston without spaghetti," noting that Bostonians eat more spaghetti than beans.

Corkball's popularity has faded, but it's still played at Jefferson Barracks Park, and there are seven teams and some 42 players, according to Len Renfrow Jr., 34, of Oakville, a second-generation corkballer with the Sportsman's organization.

In June, corkball and St. Louis were featured in an Esquire article headlined "The Sport That Time Forgot." Writer Charles P. Pierce noted that "St. Louis has a love for mutant baseball that is richer and more diverse than even that of New York, which has produced stickball, which hardly anyone plays anymore."

From the South Saint Louis Corkball Club site:

There is no pastime more native to St. Louis than the game of Corkball. While experts disagree on the date and precise location of the first game; one thing is certain; it was played right here on the banks of the Mississippi River sometime around the turn of the century. Forty-five years ago, journalistic accounts estimate the game's disciples in the thousands. As noted by the Late Don "Mr. Corkball" Young, there are several hundred players in a number of leagues around town, and corkball is beginning to flourish as far away as California, New Jersey, and Florida.

World War II did much to disseminate the game. Howard Rackley, of the 66-year-old South St. Louis Corkball League (formerly Grupp Corkball League) located at Jefferson Barracks Park, introduced the game to non-St. Louisians on the deck of the aircraft carrier Bunker Hill during the war. But basically, the games remains a local pastime passed down from father to son. In fact, the South St. Louis Corkball club currently has two grandsons and one great grandson of the founders playing.

All that is required to play are a bat (34" to 38" long and 11/2" wide), a ball (2" diameter 1.6 oz. miniature baseball) and at least two players per team. This is what makes the game so great; you can play with just two players, or, as many as you wish. The same goes for the field. You can play on an open field, or, in an alley or, as in the old days, a cage. There is only one distributor of corkballs and corkball bats in the country and that is Markwort Sporting Goods located in St. Louis Missouri.

There are three outs per inning, as in baseball, but unlike baseball, just one swinging strike is an out, if the catcher does not drop the ball. Two called strikes constitute an out, again, if the catcher "holds" the ball. Five called balls is considered a walk. Foul balls and any fly ball caught are outs. Any ground ball is a hit, provided it travels 15 feet and remains in fair territory. There are no base-runners (an aspect of the game which makes it well suited for the hot St. Louis summers) hence, all hits are singles unless otherwise designated in the league rules as at Jefferson Barracks Park (home of the South St. Louis Corkball League) where chalk lines designate distances from home plate that represent double, triple, and home run zones. A batter hit by a pitch is given a base.

Base runners are kept track of on paper and advance as many bases as the hit. For example, batter #1 gets a base hit and is on first. Batter #2 hits a double. The man on first advances two bases and you now have a man on second (batter #2) and third (batter #1). Batter #3 walks. Since there was an open base, batter #3 did not "force" the runners, and you now have bases loaded. If batter #3 would have gotten a base hit, all runners would have advanced one base and there would have been a first and third situation with a run scored.

St. Louis corkball is a fast-pitch game. The distance from home plate to the pitching rubber is 55 ft. (60 ft 6" in baseball). Pitchers throw overhand, from a mound, and feature fastballs, curveballs, knuckleballs, changeups, and, in some leagues, are even allowed to add substance to the ball.

Because of the miniscule size of the bat and ball, hits are relatively rare, and runs even more so. The late Don "Mr. Corkball" Young claims to have set the record for the lowest score ever recorded in a corkball game. "I hit a ball one time that split down the middle. One half of it went for a home run, but the other half was caught by Butch Stege for the out. After some debate it was decided to give my team a half run, and we wound up winning the game one-half to nothing."

There has never been a St. Louisian found willing to contradict this story; but then again no St. Louisian has ever denied that "Hammering" Hank Stoverink once hit a ball over the road at Jefferson Barracks, down a long LONG hill into the Mississippi river where it floated down to the golf of Mexico and out into the Caribbean and eventually lost in the Bermuda Triangle … Talk about the long ball!!!! Yeah!

Corkball fanatics are absolutely addicted to tales like these, and there was no one better, or, who had the stories to tell than Don Young. No one has put more energy into tracing the origin of Corkball than Don. Don told us the game originated from a game brewery workers and tavern goers used to play. At that time, beer was packaged in wooden barrels plugged with a cork called a "Bung". Players would use the bung for a ball, and a mop handle for a bat. Others maintain the game evolved from another St. Louis game called bottle caps in which a batter tries to make contact with a pitched bottle cap. As time goes on it only becomes a more a mystery.

The mystery of corkball is exciting. You can have twenty guys in a discussion about corkball, and you might come up with 15 stories on its origin. As stated before, no one has put as much time and effort trying to trace the game of corkball than Don Young. He had rulebooks and articles right at his fingertips. He had a photo album dating back to the early 1930s. Don had stacks of articles on corkball, and even a catalog from Rawlings Sporting Goods store from 1903. He once used this to prove to a reporter that there was electrical tape in those days used to tape up a cork.

Additionally, there were a couple more whimsical explanations of corkball origin stated by Don: It is claimed that the early Spanish explorers played a similar game with small wooden balls and long poles, before Pierre Laclede Liguest founded the city of St. Louis in 1763. Don Young has always maintained that might be so, but what about the Indians along the northern border of the U.S. that used tree branches and gum-balls made from the bark of the trees?

Maybe—just maybe—that was the start?????

Needless to say, corkball aficionados just eat up this sort of stuff. When a reporter once mentioned to Don about the 6,000 year old fertility rites involving hitting stones with sticks, Don responded: "Yeah? Hey, that's great". Nobody knows exactly when the game started. I mean, I know I talked to an old gentleman who played the game as a young boy in 1910, and he told me his father played before him. It may have started much earlier than this, and, you know if I could tell you exactly when and where, I'm not sure I would; a little mystery is good for people".

From Don's records the following chronology in the evolution of the sport has been obtained:

• 1900–1910 — First game played, either with bottle caps or beer barrel bungs.
• Circa 1910 — First ball, a fishing cork weighted with BBs and covered with electrical tape.
• 1920 — First modern ball, horsehide covered, designed for R.H. Grady Company by Bill Pleitner.
• 1930 — First organized leagues began to form.
• 1940–1950 — First cages, Howard Rackley introduces the game to servicemen aboard the aircraft carrier Bunker Hill.
• 1941 — Balls and strikes introduced in the old Grupp Corkball League by former Cardinals player Heine Mueller.
• 1965 — Introduction of extra-base hits by the South St. Louis Corkball League.

We know Alexander Cartwright invented baseball, and that newspaperman Henery Chadwick, through his coverage of it, became known as the "Father of Baseball." But, we shall never know who invented the game of corkball, and perhaps that's as it should be.