Cubs Historic Photos: 25th In A Series

None required for this one!

Thanks!

;)

in a book I just recently read I saw some photographs of old advertisements from the 1870’s for balls and bats. I was surprised the that ball ad read “Carr’s Professional $1.00 Dead Ball”. I hadn’t realized the balls were actually called dead balls. I thought that was just a nickname for the era because of how the game was played.

btw sorry about Illinois

In some ways, they probably liked it, because they were put up in first-class accomodations owned by the Wrigleys. On the other hand, they were isolated on an island and didn’t get to play other teams for a month.

Have not read any first-hand reports from any of the players of that era about spring training.

Woody English: " For my first Spring Training to Catalina, I took the train from Colombus, Ohio to Los Angeles, then a two-hour boat ride to Catalina. William Wrigley owned the island lock, stock, and barrel, and everything on it except a few homes. He had a little bank. Everything belonged to Mr. Wrigley."

" Mr. Wrigley’s home was up on a cliff, a beautiful, big estate, and he owned a nice big hotel there where the players stayed, and he had a bird aviary on the property, and there was a golf course. You couldn’t see one flag from the tree. And he had a lot of quail, and they’d feed the quail everything behind the big hotel. There were hundreds of those quail."

 " We changed clothes in what we called the bathhouse down on the ocean there on the dock, where the ships docked and then we walked up maybe three blocks to the ballpark, and it had a nice fence around it, a huge place, although the stands weren’t large. And I remember there were palm trees out by the fence."

" We didn’t play a lot of exhibition games. There weren’t too many teams training on the coast. The New York Giants were about the only team who played over there."

“I had never been to a place like that before (Catalina Island). It seemed like I had always heard about Honolulu, Hawaii and that’s the first thing that entered my mind. The water was so clean and blue it really struck me. I thought, I must be in heaven.”

If it wasn’t a word before, it should be.