By day, Greg Simons works an engineering manager.
When the weekend hits, he goes by his old-timey “Southpaw”
nickname in his cream-and-navy colored Indianapolis Blues uniform.
For 17 years, Greg has toured the region playing Vintage
Base Ball, an exhibition of how America’s pastime used to be played in its
earliest days. Greg and the Blues will be rolling through French Lick Resort
next weekend on September 15-16 for our Vintage Weekend featuring a range of
events with a throwback spin. Whether you’re staying at the resort for the
weekend or making a day trip here, check out the Vintage Base Ball exhibitions
and experience a fascinating portal to the past.
Admission is free. Food trucks will be nearby selling
old-school concessions. Bring a blanket or chair and enjoy the show, and for a
little background about the baseball festivities, “Southpaw” Greg fills us in
during this Q&A:
For someone who’s
never seen Vintage Base Ball, what can they expect?
This is 1860s-era baseball. We’re just trying to re-enact
the way the game was played back then, and show people what the game was like
back in its earliest development. A few differences you’ll see — the uniforms
we use are based on teams that played back in that period. The pitching is
underhand; the job of the pitcher back then was to get the action started, so
there’s very few strikeouts. They’re trying to deliver the ball where the
batter wants it. And of course they didn’t wear gloves, so that’s a definite
difference from modern baseball.
And the old-school wool uniforms too, right?
The material varies team to team. There’s going to be a team
from up in Noblesville that wears a heavy, navy blue wool uniform, which has
got to be miserable when it’s 100 degrees out. Our team has a cotton/canvas
material. We wear knickers, so you have the short pants with the very exposed
socks, and it’s actually modeled after the 1878 Indianapolis Blues who were in
the National League for one season.
And you probably get a lot of questions about this, but it is “base ball” — two words.
Base ball came from cricket, from town ball, from a few
other sports that were popular in the 1700s and 1800s. At that time, it was two
different words. It was another “ball” game. Kind of like shortstop used be two
words, and that got blended together too. It’s just kind of an evolution of the
game’s language over time.
As players, how much
do you research your roles and the game’s history before you start playing?
People can dive in as deep as they choose to. Some people just
want to come out and play, so they learn the rules, they wear the uniform and
they play the game. Some players are more heavily into the history and are in
Facebook groups and others that discuss the minutiae and the details, and they’re
constantly finding new things about the way the game was played.
Photo courtesy of Maureen Electa Monte
What have you learned from some of those details you’ve studied?
Teams generally have shield on the uniforms, and those are
inspired by firemen of the time. … When I first started playing, first, second
and third basemen would always play within two steps of your base. And the more
research they’ve done, they found that defense was really open and players could
play a position wherever they wanted to. … We’re learning more and more that
pitchers were bringing it with a decent amount of speed back then, but they
were also in their teens, 20s, 30s while (today in Vintage Base Ball) we have
players up to their 60s and 70s playing, so our pitching is relatively slow.
You also use baseball
slang from the era. What are some of your favorites?
If you want to go quickly, players will yell to “leg it” or “show
some ginger.” Some people refer to the fans or spectators as “cranks,” and that’s
actually a term from the 1870s or 1880s originally as a derogatory term for
some fans who didn’t have very good behavior.
What other little details should people keep an eye out for?
One thing, the rules we play by are from 1864, so any ball
caught on one bounce was an out. And it goes back to the whole, “this ball is
really hard, let’s make it a little easier to catch.” And the ball is fair or
foul based on where it first hits the ground. A lot of new fans won’t
understand why a batter’s standing on first when he hit a ball that went foul.
There are a lot of little things like that, that people seeing it for the first
time might not understand. We’ll try to explain it. If anyone has a question,
players are very happy to talk about the game, so you can ask someone if you
don’t understand what happened.
If people aren’t necessarily
sports fans, would Vintage Base Ball still interest them?
I would say so. If they’re interested in history, it’s a way
to see a part of American culture from 150 years ago. There’s going to be a
Dixieland Band playing throughout the day on both days, and there’s a lot of
other vintage-based activities going on around the French Lick/West Baden area
all weekend, so there’s a lot of opportunities to check that out as well.