[Ads-l] "Death to (all) flying things" (1909)

[Ben Zimmer]

"Death to Flying Things" has been a nickname attached to two different
19th-century baseball players, Jack Chapman and Bob Ferguson. Richard
Hershberger wrote about the nickname in the Spring 2024 issue of Baseball
Research Journal:

https://sabr.org/journal/article/death-to-flying-things-the-life-and-times-of-a-spurious-nickname/

Tom Shieber also blogged about it in 2019:

https://baseballresearcher.blogspot.com/2019/11/the-death-of-death-to-flying-things.html

Hershberger and Shieber both trace "Death to Flying Things" to Alfred H.
Spink's 1910 book _The National Game_, wherein Spink claims that Chapman
was called that. The nickname was then applied to Ferguson in _The Baseball
Encyclopedia_ in 1969, possibly based on the editors misreading Spink's
book.

There's no evidence for the nickname being used for Chapman (let alone
Ferguson) in contemporary sources, so it would appear Spink came up with it
well after the fact. But I did find a variation evidently used by Spink a
year before the publication of _The National Game_. Spink wrote for The
Sporting News (a newspaper he founded), and I found this in the archive
available via the Paper of Record database.

---
The Sporting News, Jan. 14, 1909, p. 2, col. 3, "Players of Past"
Another remarkably clever all-around player was John C. Chapman, "Young
Jack," who is just as full of life and energy today as when he helped to
put up as stiff a fight as was ever seen on the ball field to prevent the
other fellows from "carting off the ball." "Chap" could pitch, catch, or,
in fact, play anywhere. All positions looked alike to him. But he was a
star on the outer works. Death to all "flying things."
---

The article is unsigned, but it's safe to assume Spink wrote this and
adapted it for his book, changing "Death to all flying things" to "Death to
flying things" in the process. The Sporting News article also appeared
unsigned in the Scranton Republican on Jan. 27, 1909 (Newspapers.com labels
it the Tribune):

https://www.newspapers.com/article/the-tribune-great-players-of-the-dim-pas/153138767/

(I found the Scranton item first and then skimmed through The Sporting News
on the hunch that the item was written by Spink and then syndicated. The
Paper of Record database has terrible OCR, so a targeted search on keywords
usually isn't possible, as Hershberger notes.)

--bgz

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