START HERE: How About a Baseball Story?
We know a few good ones.
Hey there! We’re glad you found us. Can we help you find something?
Here at Project 3.18, we tell strange and surprising baseball stories, pulled from history and lovingly, meticulously recreated for modern-day readers to enjoy anew.
Baseball gives us a lot to work with. From amateur beginnings in the 19th century, to America’s first professional team sport, through a long period of cultural domination and the dawn of Big Money, to a high-technology, analytically dominated game in a pluralistic sports landscape, baseball has been it all and then some.
When professional baseball began in 1876, stories were all there were to capture it. Cameras were too slow. There were no films, no radio broadcasts, and nothing went viral except for influenza. Baseball and its gallery of heroes and rogues lived on in narrative newspaper accounts and stories told among the participants and the fans, passed down through generations.
“Story” is a key word here. You tell a story to entertain, to have fun, to share insight, to impart a lesson, to leave the audience a little smarter and still thinking. You tell a story so somebody else can tell it later. You tell a story so somebody else can tell one of theirs.
Fair warning, though: We think a baseball story can be about nearly anything.
Sometimes baseball is the story, like the day pitcher Ken Holtzman threw a no-hitter. With a bit of help from Ken himself, we tell the thrilling story of one of his best moments.
And then there’s the between-innings entertainment. Take, for instance, the 1970s fad of “Hot Pants” days at ballparks across the country, a ridiculous story that reaches into fashion and first-wave feminism.
In nearly every major historical event that happened between the months of April and October, baseball was impacted. During the 1977 New York Blackout, the New York Mets and Chicago Cubs were playing at Shea Stadium, and you bet we told that story.
How about a baseball story of Victorian superstition and the dangers of hypnotism, with an ending you will not see coming?
Did you know Chicago’s Wrigley Field had a bit of a gangster problem in the 1920s?
Let us tell you about the time the Chicago White Sox caused a lot of noise in the Atomic Age conversation around civil defense.
How about a war story? Pick a global conflict. World War I? World War II?
Or, if you like your conflicts more symbolic and ritualized, let us tell you about the beanball war between the Atlanta Braves and San Diego Padres in 1984.
We’ve done a baseball story with more than a toe in Canadian ecological preservation, and another one about aerial bombardment at Dodger Stadium.
Do you want to know how Wrigley Field got its outfield “basket” fence? It’s a heck of a story.
The game’s history is festooned with strange and fascinating characters, and even a sample of their lives can quickly become an epic. Let us tell you a story about Gaylord Perry, master of both the “wet pitch” and psychological warfare more broadly. Or Pete Rose, who thought—wrongly—that he was too big to punish in the late 1980s.
Forfeits? One of our favorite subjects.
Ejections? A guilty pleasure.
We bet you haven’t heard the one about the year the manager of the Detroit Tigers became famous for fighting for his right to whistle from the coaching box during the World Series. And while we’re on the subject of Detroit—fans behaving badly is one of our specialties.
And our favorite stories are ones we get to tell with fans, just like us, the people who were there for the glorious and the notorious, who saw it all and bring a personal spin that the best stories have.
Maybe you’ve got a story like that. Maybe we can help you tell it, sometime.