Sandlots, Kranks, and Muffins
This article was written by Dick Dobbins
This article was published in Northern California Baseball History (SABR 28, 1998)
One of the greatest charms of baseball is that it has changed so little in the past 150 years. Of course, there have been subtle changes, particularly in the terminology.
“Sandlot baseball is a term that originated in San Francisco. In 1850, when San Francisco was charted as a city, what is now the greater Civic Center area was then a large sand hill designated as Yerba Buena Cemetery. By 1860 the Board of Supervisors authorized the removal of the graves and !he leveling of the hill, making the area a somewhat bare park. By 1869 the City was ready to move City Hall from Portsmouth Square to the Civic Center, but in the intervening ten years the ”Sand-Lot” had become a training ground for young ballplayers. San Francisco sportswriters coined the term “sandlotters” for young ballplayers. And by the beginning of !he 1900s the term bad spread everywhere.
Other baseball terms didn’t make it. The term “muffin” was once used to describe a mediocre or error-prone player; today it survives in a different form, as in, “he muffed an easy catch.”
Another unique 19th century term is “kranks” for fans. Its usage developed as a word out of the installation of turnstiles in eastern ballparks in the 1870s: One ”crank” of the turnstile let in one customer. Kranks then were much like devoted fans now, not only attending games but keeping score, tracking statistics and players and reading newspaper accounts of the game.
“Hippodroming” meant play-acting and throwing the game, usually for gamblers. Hippodroming and drunkenness were factors — along with the lure of money — that led to efforts to properly regulate the game in the latter part of the 19th century.
The ultimate humiliation in early baseball was to be “Chicagoed,” or shut out. On July 23, 1870, the New York Mutuals defeated the Chicago Club by then the remarkable score of 9-0. In all of 1870 there were only three “Chicagos,” while in 1871, the National Association’s first year, there were all of six shutouts.
The reasons for the high scores seen in early games are logical. Fielders did not wear gloves, playing surfaces were primitive, balls were sheepskin-covered rubber and yarn; pitchers still tossed underhand and the batter could request the placement of pitches.