2ND NYGPS MEETING OF 2017-MAY 25
The second NYGPS meeting of 2017 will take place on Thursday, May 25, 2017, at 6:30PM at our home base the Bergino Baseball Clubhouse. We will have 2 guest speakers for the evening. Leading off will be NYGPS Member Jerry Liebowitz who is a NYG and SF Giant memorabilia collector with over 2,000 pieces of Giants history/memories many of which he will share with us on this day. Jerry’s collection is second to none and he has talked about and displayed the pieces at many events. Jerry is pictured with a John J. McGraw Bronze plaque. It was awarded to John McGraw on March 12, 1927, at a Silver Jubilee Dinner at the Hotel Venice in Venice, Florida, in honor of his 25th consecutive year as Manager of The New York Giants. He also owns the original dinner program and a number of photos of the event and two different photos of Mrs. McGraw posing in front of the plaque in the McGraw apartment.
Provenance: John McGraw, Mrs. McGraw, Barry Halper and Liebowitz.
Concluding the evening’s festivities will be author Hal Bock. Hal Bock was an award-winning sports writer at The Associated Press for 40 years covering 30 World Series, 30 Super Bowls and 11 Olympic Games. He grew up a Giants fan and spent many happy days with his father at the Polo Grounds. Oct. 3, 1951 remains a highlight of his childhood.
He has written 16 books including the narratives for The Associated Press Pictorial History of Baseball and Willard Mullin’s Golden Age of Baseball Drawings. His latest book is “Banned Baseball’s Blacklist of All-Stars and Also-Rans,” and it includes some tales about our favorite team. Here are a few:
Willie Kauff was a star in the Federal League and then for McGraw’s Giants. Unfortunately, he went from stolen bases to stolen cars, leading Judge Landis to suspend him for life.
Shufflin’ Phil Douglas had an affinity for liquid refreshment causing frequent clashes with McGraw. Angered by his manager’s repeated fines and lectures, he wrote a letter to an opposing player, offering to disappear in order to cost the Giants the pennant. When Landis found this out, he shuffled Douglas out of baseball.
Dr. Joseph Creamer tried to bribe umpire Bill Klem before the 1908 playoff game between the Cubs and Giants. He is the only team physician ever banned from baseball.
Bock will discuss these and other episodes in his book at our May 25 meeting at Bergino’s Baseball Clubhouse. His book will be available for sale/autographed that evening.
Please RSVP ASAP as this event will surely be well attended. Once again, we thank Jay Goldberg for allowing his Bergino Baseball Clubhouse www.bergino.com to be our home base for the evening.

MYSTERY OF THE POLO GROUNDS-
By Bill Francis (a Library Associate at the National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum) This article was in the Memories and Dreams Magazine published by the National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum, Opening Day 2017. Thanks for sharing this Bill!!
“Monument to Eddie Grant graced the Giants’ home for decades before going missing after the team left for San Francisco.”
Big league third baseman Eddie Grant’s death took place almost 100 years ago, one of the thousands of United States casualties in the war to end all wars. Today, a missing plaque honoring his sacrifice remains one of the game’s most enduring unsolved mysteries.
Grant, nicknamed “Harvard Eddie” because he was one of the few ballplayers of the time who had attended college, spent 10 years in the majors, making his big league debut with the Cleveland Naps in 1905, then splitting the seasons between 1907 and 1915 with the Philadelphia Phillies, Cincinnati Reds and New York Giants. Steadier with the glove than the bat, the Massachusetts native ended his career with a .249 batting average.

But it was his selfless character that distinguished Grant in the game of life. Prior to the start of the 1916 season, the Harvard graduate announced he was quitting the game in order to devote more time to his law practice, first in Boston and then in New York. And while he remained part of baseball, serving as a part-time scout with the Giants, the 34-year-old Grant, past the age when he might be drafted, responded when the United States joined its allies to fight in World War I in April 1917.
“I am going to try to be an officer,” Grant wrote to a friend while attending a military training camp in Plattsburgh, N.Y. “I don’t know how much of a success I shall make of it. I had determined from the start to be in this war if it came to us, and if I am not successful as an officer I shall enlist as a private, for I believe there is no greater duty that I owe for being that which I am – an American citizen.”

By April 1918, Grant had landed in France as a captain with Company H of the 307th Infantry Regiment in the 77th Division. But only a few months later, on October 22, 1918, newspapers across America announced that Grant had died in action two weeks earlier, on October 5, the first big league ballplayer to make the supreme sacrifice for his country in the Great War in Europe. A month after Grant’s death, the armistice was signed ending World War I. Continue reading →