The Lost Art Of The Autograph

Baseball and autographs go hand in hand. If you've been fortunate enough to have gotten a ball signed the last time you were at the park, you may have also asked the player to write down their number on it. Chances are, if you haven't, other people may have a hard time distinguishing whose autograph that actually belong to. Case in point, this autograph:

Figured it out yet?






This Johnny Hancock belongs to none other than former Cy Young winner Tim Lincecum of the San Francisco Giants. It would be hard for almost anyone who wasn't familiar with his style of signature to be able to say it belonged to him. He isn't alone. As players today are asked more and more often to sign autographs for fans, baseball card companies, and other promotions, they are forced to make a decision: With the small amount of time allotted for autographs, should I sign less autographs, or should I modify my signature to something quicker to sign, in order to increase the amount of things I can sign? Most players these days choose the latter.

It wasn't always this. Feast your eyes on these two autographs and see if you have better luck figuring out who they belonged to:

That was a lot easier, right? Up top, you have the dean of the dignified autograph, former Minnesota Twins great Harmon Killebrew. At the bottom? I really hope I don't have to tell you that that belongs to the Great Bambino, Babe Ruth.

For more reading, check out this recent New York Times article.

The Girl Who Struck Out The Babe

Jackie Mitchell was one of the first professional female pitcher in baseball history. Her claim to fame lies in the fact that not only did she strike out Babe Ruth, but followed up that K with a three-pitch strikeout of the Iron Horse, Lou Gehrig.

During the 1931 season, the seventeen-year-old Mitchell pitched for the Chattanooga Lookouts. The Lookouts and the New York Yankees were scheduled to play an exhibition game at the Lookouts home, on April 1, 1931. Rain postponed the game until the next day, and that's when Mitchell took the mound, with the Babe up to bat. The story goes he took the first pitch for a ball. The next two were curves, which he swung and missed at, and the fourth pitch caught him looking for a called third strike. Lou Gehrig was up next, and swung through three straight pitches for the strikeout.

The greatest travesty about this was that a few days after this happened. the commissioner at the time, Kenesaw Landis, voided her contract and declared women unfit to play baseball as the game was "too strenuous." She retired in 1937 at age 23, frustrated that she never received the respect she deserved from the game.

Baseball officially banned women in 1952, a ban which lasted until the 1992 season.