Several events from the life of George Herman “Babe” Ruth had a connection to Britain, and two are dealt with here. The first is the “Bellyache Heard Round the World”. This was a bout of illness suffered by the Bambino during spring training of 1925; this was later diagnosed as an intestinal abscess. Much thought has been put into the “bellyache” component of the incident’s moniker. At the time it was claimed that excessive consumption of hot dogs and soda pops was to blame. More recently, it has been publicly speculated that gonorrhoea was in fact the cause. Continue reading →

Matt, the esteemed BaseballGB editor, has kindly promoted the Cobbette feature to get a permanent berth in the sidebar down the right of the site. To repay his (misplaced?) faith in my ability to make this into a more regular “regular feature”, I thought I better put together a new one quickly, to avoid him changing his mind within the “cooling off period”. I’ve even gone as far as making this one relevant to his native East Anglia. Continue reading →

Today, fans of baseball in Britain might get frustrated by a train cancellation or traffic jam depriving them of seeing the opening innings of a game. For one fan back in 1938, though, the greatest fear would have been a puncture.

The Hull resident HJ Sanderson followed the 1938 baseball season on his bicycle. He clocked up mile after mile on his way to and from games, and his arrival at the national cup final in Rochdale marked his completion of 800 miles in the saddle that season. In one report on that final, he is described as the “No 1 baseball fan,” and it is hard to argue with this title.

His efforts that day were rewarded with a gem of a game. The only run was plated in the top of the 16th frame, and it handed the Rochdale Greys a 1-0 victory over the Oldham Greyhounds.

If you have an interesting history snippet to share with a link to Britain then please send a message to Joe Gray through the Get in contact page.

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle is best known for creating one of crime fiction’s most enduring characters, Sherlock Holmes. The Scot’s accomplishments ranged from his prolific writing to the practising of medicine. Conan Doyle’s intellect was not, however, a sufficient safeguard against being duped to believe in the existence of fairies. In his book The Coming of the Fairies, Conan Doyle collaborated with the spiritualist Edward Gardner to publish photos taken by a 16-year-old schoolgirl, Elsie Wright, of her 10-year-old cousin, Frances Griffiths, using cut-outs of fairies as props. Conan Doyle and Gardner vigorously defended the authenticity of the images. Continue reading →

“Cobbette” is a bit of a cheap pun, I will admit – a “corny” pun, even, if you’ll humour me further. Also, I should warn that you that it’s probably not in your desktop dictionary, and it’s certainly not going to get you any points on the Scrabble board. The esteemed scholar W I Kipedia doesn’t even recognize the term. It seems to have been invented by the Colonel, or one of his catering comrades, as a way of making kernels sound more amaizeing (enough with the word play, already).

However, it does neatly describe a new BaseballGB feature that I’ve been planning to get going for some time. Simply put, a “Cobbette” is a baseball “history snippet” with some link to Britain, strong or tenuous. They’re provided by Project Cobb (the Project for the Chronicling of British Baseball), which is a SABR Chartered Community.

If anyone has any ideas they want to suggest or even write up themselves, please share them in the comments below or contact me through this link.

To kick it off, and just to prove that tenuous is perfectly acceptable, I’ve got something from a man with a very special name. Continue reading →