Art, meet baseball card

Michael Miller

It is a peculiar stance for a baseball player, even in a posed shot.

Jim Fogarty, a star for the Philadelphia Quakers in the 1880s,

appears on his Goodwin & Co. tobacco card in a snakelike poise,

sprawled in front of a base. The photographer may have wanted to

catch him in a headfirst slide, but he appears to be creeping up on

the base, rather than diving into it.

UC Irvine senior EvaMarie Rodriguez thinks she may have the shot

figured out, though. For reference, she points to a 1901 painting by frontier artist Frederic Remington entitled “Fight for Water Hole,”

which features a soldier peering over a ridge with a rifle in almost

the same position as Fogarty leaning on his base. The painting, made

more than a decade after Fogarty’s card, couldn’t have served as an

inspiration. But both appear to draw from the same visual concepts:

stealth, danger, defense.

As legend Ty Cobb famously put it, “Baseball is something like a

war.”

“Baseball cards were definitely not high art,” Rodriguez said,

relaxing at UC Irvine’s Cornerstone Cafe the day before flying to

Cooperstown, N.Y., to speak at the Baseball Hall of Fame’s 17th

annual research symposium. “They were part of consumerism. But

looking through these books of paintings, it was amazing to compare

the images.”

Thursday, Rodriguez, a 37-year-old mother of two who’s from Aliso

Viejo, became the only undergraduate to speak this year at the Hall

of Fame’s Symposium on Baseball and American Culture. Her speech,

delivered in the Hall of Fame’s Bullpen Theater, touched on

baseball’s roots in American concepts of masculinity. Today, baseball

players garner million-dollar salaries and undergo expert training. A

hundred years earlier, they were viewed more as warriors.

Every year, the Hall of Fame invites applications from students,

professors and historians to speak at the annual symposium.

Rodriguez’s presentation was one of three dozen chosen from around

the country in a blind peer review session earlier this year.

“As an undergraduate, I was speaking to a room full of Ph.D.’s,”

said Rodriguez, who talked for about 45 minutes and then fielded

questions from the audience.

The three-day event at the Hall of Fame did not feature

discussions of baseball on the field -- no arguments about the

designated hitter, no speculation on Barry Bonds’ home run record.

Instead, the Hall of Fame invited speakers to talk about the game in

a social, political and literary context. Rodriguez, who will

graduate from UCI this month, found her ticket to Cooperstown in an

essay she wrote for a history class last year.

A lifelong baseball fan who grew up around her father’s collection

of memorabilia, Rodriguez took a two-part course on 1890s American

history with professor Alice Fahs. At one point, she read the book

“Manliness and Civilization” by Gail Bederman and was struck by a

passage in which the author cited baseball as a turn-of-the-century

symbol of manhood. Recalling the early baseball cards that her father

used to collect, Rodriguez set out to match them with other images of

the period.

Fahs, who has written and edited several books about the Civil

War, recommended that Rodriguez study war paintings of the era.

“I think it keeps being reinvented, the 1890s mind-set regarding

masculinity,” Fahs said. “We certainly have masculine images being

reinvented today in a time of war.”

Rodriguez’s inquiry took her to the Library of Congress’ website,

which had hundreds of antique baseball card images, and then into the

art world. Over several months, she consulted UCI professors about

19th-century artists and visited the online collections of the

Smithsonian Institution and Bowling Green University. When she

discovered the works of Remington, the painter and sculptor whose

images helped immortalize the Wild West, she found the connection she

had sought.

The cards and paintings in Rodriguez’s presentation show some

remarkable similarities -- even though, in some cases, the researcher

had to dig for them. One card depicts Hall of Famer Billy Hamilton

standing with his bat tilted upwards like a rifle; Remington’s “The

Last Stand,” a battlefield scene from 1890, features a solder in a

crowd holding his weapon in the same position. In another Remington

work, a soldier reclining on the ground in the back of the shot

virtually mirrors the image of Mike Mattimore sliding into second

base.

The warlike images on old baseball cards, Rodriguez believes,

relates to their role in 19th-century culture. Unlike the glossy

productions of today, trading cards of 100 years ago were pop art,

sold cheaply in tobacco pouches and cigarette boxes. Baseball card

conventions and price guides were unthinkable then.

“Today’s cards are for a different audience,” Rodriguez said.

“They’re targeted at collectors. A pack of 10 at my local Wal-Mart

averages $2.50 or $3.50. It’s become a pricey hobby.”

According to Hall of Fame library director Jim Gates, baseball

cards may have originated to help legitimize a shady industry.

Tobacco pouches in the 19th century contained all kinds of images,

and baseball players made up only a small percentage of them.

“Most were actress cards -- girlie cards, for lack of a better

term,” Gates said. “The famous American generals and Indians and

athletes were playing the role comedians were playing at the

vaudeville show. They were there to keep the cops out. The baseball

and golf, boxing, and so on, were kind of there so it wasn’t all

girlie cards -- so they wouldn’t close the cards down as a kind of

soft porn industry.”

Gates, who has a file in his office on the history of baseball

cards, compared notes with Rodriguez after her presentation Thursday.

He said he had not considered the connections between war paintings

and ballplayer images, but he’ll look into it.

Over the last year, Rodriguez has continued her study of baseball

cards with funding from UCI’s Undergraduate Research Opportunities

Program. After finishing the Remington project, she turned her sights

on the commercialization of baseball cards in the 1930s and the

history of Negro League Hall of Famer Satchel Paige. Her dream, after

graduation, is to be a documentary filmmaker.

While at the Hall of Fame, Rodriguez and her two sons -- one of

whom, despite having cerebral palsy, plays Little League baseball --

got to participate in an old-fashioned “town ball” game, with

baseball played according to 1847 rules. Rodriguez singled and scored

in the match, then took a plane back to Irvine and the 21st century.

“I got back in time to make finals at UCI, unfortunately,” she

said.