Illegal Foreign Object

In the late 1800s, despite playing the game with a ball that was largely constructed of melted shoes, wishful thinking, and soiled socks, baseball catchers remained ambivalent to the idea of being hit in the mush with foul tips. So, on April 12th, 1877, after one too many games of having a baseball clang off his face, Harvard’s James Alexander “Jim” Tyng, along with fellow teammate and Harvard team captain, Fred Thayer, decided to protect the last three good teeth in Tyng’s head with something the men had been experimenting with away from the field of play.

Said protection, a converted fencer’s mask, ensured that Tyng would look his dapper best for the Great Railroad Strike riots* that would befall the country just three months later, leading to somewhere around 1000 arrests and 100 deaths at the hands of shillelagh-swinging cops.

As you may have gleaned, the strike was a miserable failure, but the mask was a massive success! Just one year later, after Thayer was granted a patent for his invention, word of it spread like wildfire. Perpetually concussed major league catchers were only too happy to make use of it! Simultaneously, Spalding’s Sporting Goods began selling a modified version of the mask, the “Thayer’s Patent Harvard Catcher’s Mask”, for $3 ($116 in today’s money) in the brand’s catalog.

So, the next time you find yourself admiring the 1000 watt smile of Colombian catching great (and current Boston Red Sox player), Jorge Alfaro, take a moment to offer thanks to the triple dead ghosts of Tyng and Thayer for all that they gave the great game of baseball.

*I have no clue if Tyng was a part of the Great Railroad Strike of 1877, but I sure like the idea of this mustachioed gentleman, replete with athletic purpose and covered in the “tools of ignorance”, throwing haymakers at an oncoming sea of baton-flailing blue.