The Pecan Park Eagle

Babe Ruth (L) and Lou Gehrig
(You didn’t really need the help, did you?)

It happened on April 11, 1931. The New York Yankees made a short trip to Brooklyn to play the Dodgers in an exhibition game at Ebbets Field and Fox Movietone was there to get this great film footage (with sound) of Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig taking batting practice prior to a growing stadium crowd. It’s just what it appears to be ~ a fortunate capture of the two great Yankee sluggers back in 1931, simply doing their ordinary pre-game routine for the action to follow.

The Gehrig-Ruth BP Film Link:

Video of Babe Ruth, Lou Gehrig's batting practice shows how bizarre their swings were

Filmed from behind the two left-handed batters as they took their cuts, we also get a pretty good view of the lower near home plate left field side  of home box seats and the stir of early fan and concession sales personnel. Hardly anyone seems to be paying much full attention to either of the two swat-meisters taking their practice cuts. That’s right! Even though they may have not bragged about it even then, New York fans always have been self-entitled to more than one team “sultan of swat” at a time. And besides, nobody pays big-ticket bucks just to go watch batting practice anywhere ~ even at these exhibition games. ~ Unless ….

Unless what? ~ We’ll get to that question soon, but just a word or two more about the crowd first.

People are dressed to the nines. Women are adorned in beautiful stepping-out long skirts and caps; men are dressed in suits and ties and hats. The food sales guys are the younger worker and older rummy type men in the white jackets and caps who all seem to share the ability to statue-of-liberty a hot dog with their shouts of “right here” appeal to the fans.

Many people in the stands sit and talk in twos and threes, with eyes facing each other, while others stare out beyond the infield on a thought path that may run as short as ~ “should I eat now or later” ~ to ~ “is baseball the meaning of life for everyone that it is for me?”

The fans in the Ruth-Gehrig film clip also share another common trait that is immediately noticeable to all of us who’ve almost made it through the first decades of the 21st century. ~ No one is talking or playing digital games or texting or taking selfies on a cell phone. If they are not watching Ruth and Gehrig take a few knob-nubber hacks, it’s as we said at the start here, these early 20th century fans didn’t come to the ballpark to watch the big boys practice. In 1931, If they were Yankee fans, they came to watch their club destroy the not-so-good Brooklyn Robins, whose 1931 nickname for the eventual Dodgers trademark moniker was still in use as an homage to their revered long-time manager, Wilbert Robinson.

Now let’s get back to our “unless what” qualifier from above.

Maybe a fan, or a small group thereof, wouldn’t pay more for their best tickets unless this one trip to see Ruth and Gehrig was possibly going to be their only opportunity to ever see them live again! ~ And why so? ~ Because of the possibility that these rare game viewers were time travellers from the future who might either get lost when they tried to return to their own future era of origin. Look for the ones who seem to be paying constant attention to Ruth and Gehrig as much as you or I might.

Now, before you call to place my commitment in action, please be aware that even the great genius mind of the late Stephen Hawking conceded in his last book that time travel to the past is theoretically possible. In fact, the light from earth for every second in history already recorded still exists at an unspeakably high number of light years away from us now ~ and all we have to do to retrieve it is to bring our time and space technology up to the task of its full recovery and then take the next step into energy conversion that will allow us to enter into those recovered fields as though we were already there when they originally occurred. Congruent time and space travel will make that possible, if we can work out some of the bugs that got in the way of that basic step attempt in the 1958 Vincent Price movie, “The Fly”.

Simple as that! ~ Simply enjoy this gift to our times. The short film shows two of the greatest players in baseball history going through “a day at the office” in their very different era.

As for the present or near availability of time travel, we’ll just have to wait and see what happens. By now, we all know from both fictional and philosophical works that the major danger of time travel at full interactive capacity with people or past events is that anything we might change ~ changes everything else ~ and all it would take is for our presence in the past mix to alter the conditions that made our existence today even possible.

And why in the world would any of us want to be rendered non-entities by time travel when anyone among us can stay in their own time zone and be rendered has beens or non-entities in our normal flesh location?

It ought to be a no-brainer! 🙂

” Two words about me going back in time to correct my mistakes and then becoming the greatest pitcher in history ~ ‘You never know!’ ” ~ Anonymous.

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Bill McCurdy

Principal Writer, Editor, Publisher

The Pecan Park Eagle