Daily Dose from Dr. Odd: Superbly Unusual and Beautiful Baseball Portraits

JF Ptak Science Books   Post 1831

(Please also see this blog's post on Women in Sports, from about the same era, here as well as here)

Strolling through the New York Public Library Digital Collection (here), I came across many hundreds of images of baseball players.  What struck me with some of them were their stubborn, unabashed pride, images made of the ballplayers standing squarely in front of the camera, mostly looking directly into the lens, shoulders set squarely under that, a straight, dead-on shot.  Its not just in cartoons where the full frontal is rare--my experience shows it to be uncommon almost across the board. 

[Jim Devlin, 1866-1900, for the Philadelphia Quakers.]

There are plenty of superbly unusual  images that are not necessarily full-frontal, and we'll get to them in due course.  One subset of this collection  that feature 19th century ballplayers looking at a seemingly levitating ball, making the image look like a (perhaps) early "Action" shot, like so:

but the effect is strained, or at least looks so to the 21st century observer.  Lenses and film weren't fast enough at the end of the century to catch a ball in flight--nor a clear vision of a batter swinging or a pitcher pitching--and so the photographer would have to improvise the sports shot.  The result in 2012 is a beautifully quaint image. 

But, the floating ball series will come later.  On to the full-frontal oddness:

Charlie Buffington.

Dan Casey

Jack Clements

Sid Farrar, 1859-1935, Philadelphia Quakers.

Tom Gunning.

Lee Gibson.

This last is a bit of a cheat, but the defender is at least looking into the camera.  And the runner has his hand stretched out full, calm and very flat.  Its just a great photo. 

Thomas McCarthy, Boston Reds