Fwd: Murderer's Row

[Jesse Sheidlower]

On Wed, Oct 23, 2002 at 08:30:35PM -0500, Gerald Cohen wrote:
> Here's an item from the 19th Century Baseball discussion group:
> >
> >While the usual etymology for this term is plausible--that it derives from
> >a
> >row of cells in New York's Tombs reserved for the most dastardly of
> >criminals--this fact gleaned from Charles AHemstreet's Nooks and Cranies of
> >old New York (Scribner, 1899) might give pause:

Jerry,

I thought that the baseball sense predated the Tombs sense by
about fifteen years. Is that not the case, or is the assumption
that the Tombs sense is earlier but unrecorded?

Jesse Sheidlower