Ladies in Blue

I've always had a tendency to throw myself into a new subject head first - just ask my parents.  I don't know how many summers I spent going back and forth from the library reading everything I could get my hands on about a new topic.  Fortunately, as a professor's daughter, I not only had the small local library at my disposal, but also a university library for satisfying my curiosity.

Whenever a new person (usually a famous historical female) piqued my curiosity, I would pour over biography after biography, totally immersing myself.  Annie Oakley, Eva Peron, Clara Barton (okay, so maybe I had a thing for musicals as well...)  I just couldn't get enough.

I haven't entirely grown out of this.  It's why I still love learning and trying new things.  Only, now it's even easier to find the information that I used to have to scour the library for.  Now I can just turn to the Internet.  When I was younger I was unaware that I should read things critically and check for reliable sources - if it was in a book it must be true!  Older, slightly wiser, and with a history degree under my belt, I know I have to exercise caution with research on the Internet.  It's a great place to start with a new subject you know little about, but knowing how to fact-check is crucial.  Let me show you how I tackle online research.

Let's start with a topic that I know a little about, but I'd love to learn more - women in baseball.  I start where most people start, with Google.  Unless, I'm looking to buy something, I typically ignore the sponsored ads at the top of the results.  I don't begrudge Google trying to make money, they do offer a service, I'm just not going to start there with my research.

I'll begin with the next three results.  The first - the AAGPBL website is informative, but I don't want to focus on that today.  I think A League of Their Own and Diamond Dreams do a great job at promoting that.  I'm looking for something different.  The Wikipedia article about women in baseball is more modern than I'm looking for, but this third page is interesting.

The Girls of Summer takes you through a brief, entertaining history of women in baseball - and not just the AAGPBL.  What catches my eye are the featured female umpires.

I had heard that there have been a few professional female umpires, but I really don't know much about their stories.  I had no I idea that Amanda Clement was umpiring men's baseball games in the early 1900s.
  
I had read about Pam Postema before, but I honestly couldn't remember where.  I am intrigued, and I want to know more.


 This is how it starts.  I get curious and I want to know more. What starts out as an interesting article, balloons into multiple Firefox windows with various tabs, in an order that likely only I understand.  Hopefully I can guide you all through my process without losing too many of you along the way.



As I mentioned earlier, with online resources, I like to check who operates the website to see how reliable my new-found source is.  When I clicked the header on The Girls of Summer exhibit, I am taken to this page:

Project participants include Louisville Slugger and the National Baseball Hall of Fame - awesome, but where do I go from here?  The Baseball Hall of Fame also happens to be the home of the A. Bartlett Giamatti Research Center, and they have an online database.

The ABNER (American Baseball Network for Electronic Research) Library Catalog (Abner - get, it? no...okay....never mind) lets me search through the library and archive holdings.  

A quick search of Amanda Clement reveals a scrapbook with newspaper clippings, a few cartoons, and advertising handbills along with comments written by the creator.

Unfortunately, even though the Hall of Fame collection is searchable online, you can only view this item in the reading room.  Since I'm in London, Ontario and Cooperstown, New York is over nine hours away - I'll have to settle for further online research.



Now that I'm thinking along the lines of researchers I do a check-in with the Society for American Baseball Research (SABR.)  The SABR website is great, they have a lot of online resources for researchers.

SABR produces several publications including a research journal.  You can search their journal archive from the website. 

You can also open articles from archived publications.

Just to see if I could find anything else online, I checked the notes at the end of the article.  There were quite a few citations from the scrapbook I located at the BHOF, as well as other archival material from the research center.  There was also an article from Sports Illustrated that I manage to find in their vault.

From here, I go where many do when looking for quick info - Wikipedia.  Now,  Wikipedia takes a lot of heat because it is open to editing by anyone.  I'm not recommending you cite it in a paper (I wouldn't recommend you site a regular encyclopedia in a paper either) but it's often a good starting point. 

Unfortunately, this time Wikipedia fails me.  There's a mention of her in the Baseball Umpire article, as the first paid female umpire, but there is no citation.  Usually, I would read through the article and then click on all the "references" links at the bottom.  Then I could assess the reliability of those sources.  Maybe after all this online research some Wikipedia additions and editing is in my future.

This was a quick tour of how I conduct my online research and check sources.  During my research I came across four other professional female umpires and did similar searches on them as well.  It turns out there is a lot more information out there than I expected (and too much to cover in one blog post.)  Perhaps I've found my latest obsession...

Movember - Token American Style - AL East

For background on Movember see my original post.

Support the cause - donate to Steve, and the UWO Geography Gentlemen!

 
When I started my Movember series of blog posts, I didn't originally take time to consider how many I wanted to publish.  I knew I wanted to do more than one or two, so I started to ponder various numbers associated with baseball.  First, I considered nine - one for each inning - until I realized that would mean basically writing a post every other day until the end of the month, at this point that seemed a bit much.  Doing one for each fielding position wasn't an alternative, as there are nine of those as well.  Other numbers, such as games in a series - five or seven - just didn't seem like the right fit as that number may vary depending on the series.  I finally settled on a moustache from each division.  This gives me five posts in the 15 days left in the month.  Which seems reasonable.  I even sat down and chose a someone from each division (not as easy a task as one might suspect!)

Since I started out in the National League East Division with the Phillies, I decided to tackle the American League East Division next.  As much as I may loath to mention the Yankees, I can't help but bring up the mutton-style moustache of Richard Michael Gossage.

 

"Goose" Gossage

Goose is often credited with creating the role of the 'closer' in baseball, the main difference from today being that he would often pitch the last three innings of a game, compared to only the final inning most closers pitch today.  Gossage played 22 seasons for nine different clubs, spending the best of his years with the New York Yankees and the San Diego Padres.  

Before retiring in 1994, Gossage pitched in 1002 games, finishing 681, which earned him 310 saves.  He racked up 1502 strikeouts in 1809 innings, and three seasons he led the American League in saves (75, 78, and 80).  He also holds the Yankees career record for ERA (2.14) and hits per nine innings (6.59).  These stellar stats earned him nine All-Star appearances, and he took the mound in three World Series.  Goose was elected to the National Baseball Hall of Fame in 2008. 

In 1983, Yankees owner George Steinbrenner directed then-manager Yogi Berra to tell Gossage that his beard had to go.  In response, Gossage grew and extended his moustache even further down his jaw.  He was known for his "wild facial hair and gruff demeanor to go along with his blistering fastball," thus earning him a spot in my Movember Moustache Hall of Fame.

For those of you wondering how I chose Gossage as an AL East player when he pitched for nine different teams, he is enshrined in the Baseball Hall of Fame as a Yankee, so that was good enough for me.
 

Veterans Day

The 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month, found me in Victoria Park honoring veterans as part of Canada's Remembrance Day commemorations.  Military personnel - both active and retired - as well as poppy pins were plentiful.  A brisk, but beautiful morning provided a perfect backdrop.  It was a moving ceremony, much like ones I have attended in the States, with the exception of song selections.  

I would like to take a moment, on this Veterans Day, to honor and thank those closest to me who served in the military.

Private First Class Harold E. Putt - United States Army Air Corps, World War II
I do not have a photo of my grandfather in uniform, but I did manage to find his enlistment record in the National Archives Database.

Seaman First Class William L Shorts - United States Navy, World War II
I had the chance to interview my grandfather as part of the Veterans History Project through the Library of Congress. 

Lieutenant Thomas E Price United States Army, Vietnam
My godfather served in the Army with a one-year tour of duty in Vietnam.

Finally, my brother, who is currently serving as a First Lieutenant in the United States Army, safely returned from a tour of duty in Afghanistan two years ago.  He continues to make me proud to call him my little brother with his service to our country.

Lest we forget

Remember to thank the veterans in your life today.

Movember - Token American Style - NL East

Movember fever has swept the Room of Requirement . 

For those of you not familiar with Movember (as I wasn't prior to this year), it is a world-wide movement to raise funds and awareness for men's health, specifically prostate cancer.  At the beginning of November, previously clean-shaven men start growing moustaches and register on the Movember website (USA Canada) to track their progress and raise money.  Turns out it is pretty well known in Canada because last year the NHL got in on it (hockey, go figure.)

Lindsay got the ball rolling on her blog, tackling the topic with famous historical moustaches.  While brainstorming future posts, she solicited suggestions from the rest of the public history crew.  Soon names of political leaders, actors, athletes, and artists were flying about the room, everyone advocating their choices.  It became apparent that perhaps this topic was pretty broad for just one blog.  So a few of us have decided to do spin-offs.

As the Token American, I knew I had a responsibility tackle a specific area: moustaches in baseball.

Those of you who know me personally, know that there is only one man to start off this series for me - Michael Jack Schmidt.

Iron Mike

Ask your average Phillies fan who is the best player the club has ever seen, and most will say Mike Schmidt.  Schmidt spent his entire 18-year career in Philadelphia, along the way earning three National League MVPs, 12 All-Star nods, 10 Gold Gloves, and was named the The Sporting News Player of the Decade for the 1980s.  

Known for his slugging as much as his fielding, he racked up 548 career home runs, hitting 40 or more in three separate seasons, and at least 30 home runs 10 other times.  His success is frequently attributed to his signature stance  in which he would nearly turn his back to the pitcher and wave his derriere while waiting for the pitch.  In 1976, he hit four consecutive home runs in a single game, and his 48 round trippers in 1980 set a major league record for a third baseman.

On May 26, 1990 - just shy of one year after making his last MLB appearance, the Philadelphia Phillies retired Schmidt's uniform number 20.  Later they erected a statue of him outside the third base gate at Citizens Bank Park.

In 1995, Mike was inducted in the National Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, New York.  He earned an amazing 96.52% of the votes cast.

While his amazing skills on the diamond saw him into the Baseball Hall of Fame, his well known facial hair would also undoubtedly earn him a spot in any Moustache Hall of Fame.  So widely known, Nike has already immortalized it on a t-shirt.

The Wonderful Wizard of HTML

I may not be technologically savvy, but I'm not completely in the dark either.  I had heard of HTML prior to my Digital History course.  For example, I was familiar with the Compose/HTML buttons in the corner of my blog post pages.  Occasionally, when something wasn't formatting the way I wanted it to, I would switch over to HTML and try to discover the culprit.  (Sometimes this strategy worked, sometimes it lead me to start over from scratch!)

For the most part, I thought of HTML as being like the Wizard of Oz.  The face that the world sees is striking, with fantastic formatting and special effects.  But behind the curtain, it was unimpressive, odd, and a bit confusing.  I preferred to keep that curtain shut, as long as the proper buttons were being pushed and levers were being pulled, the pyrotechnics kept working as they should.

This week Toto, in the form of my Digital History professor, forced me to pull back that curtain and try my hand at the levers and buttons.  With the aid of w3schools.com, I was taken step by step through basic HTML.  The principles are pretty simple.  You have to spell out exactly what you want the text to do, and then you have to tell it to stop at the end.  It can be tricky to catch on at first - forget a " here or a /> there, and nothing happens - which is extremely frustrating!  Once you get it though, it becomes a bit addictive.  I was driven to learn how to do all kinds of little things that add nuances to your web page.

Much like my colleague Dave noticed, I was impressed with how writing in HTML tapped into my creative side.  I often separate technology and creativity, but this showed me how interrelated they could be.  I also have to admit that once I started to catch on, I got really excited.  I didn't quite have the "genius" moment that Lindsay did, but that's probably because I'd just passed the point of frustration!  Once I had caught on, it became hard to stop.  I can see now how so many people end up adding too much to their web page, its kind of fun to show off what you can do.  (This is evident from my tweet!)

With the curtain pulled back on HTML, does it still seem like the Wizard of Oz to me?  Sure, I learned that with just a few essential tools, I had the ability to do it on my own all along...