The Boards Of Summer

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The pioneers, the heroes, the titans who can do things we can't. They're always out there, on the go, breaking records and pushing the envelope of what it means to be a human. But it's the guys who say "Hey, I bet people would pay to hear about this" that end up changing the world. Homer, Shakespeare, James Cameron, it's always the storyteller who makes the quick buck and ensures that their legend-of-choice lives on.

Of course, in that awkward space between "roving bards" and "pay-per-view", it was much harder to convince dozens of people to pay up for a baseball game that wasn't even there. Even the most gifted storyteller was going to have trouble attracting a stadium full of paying customers. Unless, of course, that storyteller was using George S. Coleman's marvelous "Life-Life Baseball Players" machine.

 

 

Pretty cool for 1924, isn't it? As the scores came in via steampunk internet (a.k.a. the telegraph) five guys playing Oz would pull the wires and flip the switches and reproduce the game with only a slight time delay, so that the crowd could still enjoy each and every moment, from the joy of a last inning grand slam to the heartbreak of losing to those clowns on the other side of town that just need a good smack in the eye to take 'em down a peg. Why, the machine would probably still be running today, if it weren't for that riot at Comiskey Park's "Flapper Victrola Re-constitution Night" in the late thirties. And what a loss it was.

 

 

If you'd like to learn more, you can hit here and here to see the original photos and comments on shorpy.com. Thanks to the Something Awful forums for showing us the original link to FlipFlopFlyBall which is how this whole post began.

 



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