{"id":9318,"date":"2010-12-11T05:00:16","date_gmt":"2010-12-11T05:00:16","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/baseballgb.co.uk\/?p=9318"},"modified":"2010-12-12T20:12:31","modified_gmt":"2010-12-12T20:12:31","slug":"countdown-to-sabr-day-2011-1960s-cobbette-did-david-bowie-play-for-the-bluejays-dulwich","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/baseballgb.co.uk\/?p=9318","title":{"rendered":"Countdown to SABR Day 2011: 1960s Cobbette – Did David Bowie play for the Bluejays (Dulwich)?"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Cobbette-(128x128)\"This is post\u00c2\u00a0four in a ten-post countdown to SABR Day 2011<\/a>. The series is going through the decades of the 20th Century, backwards from the 1990s. On SABR Day itself, there will be a special feature on the 1890s,\u00c2\u00a0which will celebrate the significant link between keeping score and baseball history. This article will be published at 05:00 British time in order to coincide with the start of the day in the time-zone of the Cleveland-based SABR office. To view all the Cobbettes published to date, click here<\/a>.<\/strong><\/p>\n

1960s<\/h1>\n

In an interview posted on the website\u00c2\u00a0of the music magazine Rolling Stone<\/em> in 1999, David Bowie was asked the following question: “Are you a baseball fan?”<\/p>\n

Here was his reply:<\/p>\n

\n

“When I was fourteen, I was a member of a group of expatriate Canadians who had a team called the Dulwich Blue Jays, and they’d play on weekends, and I used to play outfield for them.”<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

\n

The “Dulwich Blue Jays” to whom Bowie referred were a British club from south London. They were founded as the “Bluejays (Dulwich)” in 1949, but the team\u00c2\u00a0changed its name in 1964 to the Beckenham Bluejays,\u00c2\u00a0which better reflected the fact that Beckenham Place\u00c2\u00a0Park was the home ground. After another name change, to the Croydon Bluejays this time, the club eventually won their first national title. This came in 1984, 35 years after their original formation (it should be noted that very few British clubs last into a fourth decade).<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

The final, in which the Bluejays (pictured above)\u00c2\u00a0defeated the Hull Mets, was one of the most exciting ever played in Britain, being settled in the ninth frame on a two-out double down the foul line. Now, back to Bowie.<\/p>\n

The summer that the soon-to-be rock star spent as a 14-year-old was in 1961. Keen to cross-check the statement made in the interview, I contacted Jean Crook of the Old Timers Baseball Club, a team of veteran players from the British league. Having passed on my question about Bowie’s involvement to a Bluejays player of that era called Phil Laing, she replied to me with the following information.<\/p>\n

Laing, who was born in the same year as Bowie, started out with the Bluejays in 1961. The two met through mutual friends at Bowie’s school, Bromley Technical College, and through this connection Bowie began to attend baseball games, gradually becoming an avid supporter. However, according to Laing’s recollections, he never played in an official game for the team.<\/p>\n

While this is disappointing, the two stories are not necessarily contradictory: Bowie may well have manned the outfield during training and pre-game drills, but just not in games.<\/p>\n

As an afterthought, when Bowie was 15 years old he suffered an eye injury in a fight at school that impaired his depth perception. Perhaps this was something that prevented Bowie playing baseball any more, forcing him down the path of rock stardom?<\/p>\n

If you have an interesting history snippet to share\u00c2\u00a0that has\u00c2\u00a0a link to Britain then please send a message to Joe Gray through the <\/em>Get in contact<\/em><\/a> page. To see all of the work of Project Cobb, which is a Chartered Community of SABR (the Society for American Baseball Research), click here<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

This is post\u00c2\u00a0four in a ten-post countdown to SABR Day 2011. The series is going through the decades of the 20th Century, backwards from the 1990s. On SABR Day itself, there will be a special feature on the 1890s,\u00c2\u00a0which will celebrate the significant link between keeping score and baseball history. This article will be published […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[40],"tags":[254,130,253,251,252,255,256],"class_list":["post-9318","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-project-cobb","tag-beckenham-bluejays","tag-cobbette","tag-croydon-bluejays","tag-david-bowie","tag-dulwich-bluejays","tag-hull-aces","tag-phil-laing"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/baseballgb.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9318","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/baseballgb.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/baseballgb.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/baseballgb.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/baseballgb.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=9318"}],"version-history":[{"count":27,"href":"https:\/\/baseballgb.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9318\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":9531,"href":"https:\/\/baseballgb.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9318\/revisions\/9531"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/baseballgb.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=9318"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/baseballgb.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=9318"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/baseballgb.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=9318"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}