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

[Ben Zimmer]

Here's a clipping of the 1909 Sporting News article:

https://newspaperarchive.com/sports-clipping-jan-14-1909-4633421/

And now I see the article was signed after all -- the byline "W.M. Rankin"
appears at the end. In _The National Game_, Spink calls William M. Rankin
"dean of New York baseball writers" and says Rankin "went over the book
carefully from end to end, made many corrections and additions and also
sent in a story of his own, giving sketches of the men he had known in his
time as writers of baseball."

https://books.google.com/books?id=cClHAQAAMAAJ&pg=PR64

Notably, though, while Rankin wrote "Death to all 'flying things'" in his
description of Chapman in the Sporting News article, he didn't say it was
Chapman's nickname. That appears to be Spink's embellishment for the 1910
book.

On Wed, Aug 21, 2024 at 1:17 AM Ben Zimmer <bgzimmer at gmail.com> wrote:

> "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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