In separate articles in the New York Times, one about John Ward and the other about Buck Ewing, I noted that the sliding skill of the player was cited as an attribute that made him an excellent ballplayer. This seemed interesting; sliding wouldn’t even register today. You couldn’t say there are a hundred more important things, because the truth is that sliding isn’t even a thing. That’s one thing I am quite sure we don’t have a metric for, although maybe the coaching community does.

But then I noticed that the wording of the articles overlapped maddeningly in places.

In the 2/11/1893 article about Ward: “For seven years he was a member of the New-York team, and during that period he gained a national reputation as a first-class all-round ballplayer. Some of his daring slides, timely hits, speedy base running, and scientific bunts are fresh in the memory of the baseball public here, and were features of games on the old Polo Grounds.”

In the 2/26/1893 article about Ewing: “For seven years his work was of the best possible character, and it was due to his efforts that the club won the world’s championship. Some of his timely hits and daring slides are fresh in the memory of all metropolitan enthusiasts.”

We learn that this one writer did put sliding front and center, but that is a little different than finding two independent accounts that feature it. Moreover, the writer was happy to work from a template, not even changing the adjectives he paired with sliding and hitting. So I seems he might not have been taking the job seriously and was entirely sentimental.

It’s very interesting that this passed for sportswriting of the day. I’m currently reading a book about the pacer Dan Patch, who competed in the early 1900s, a book that was written by Charles Leerhsen, who in 2016 came out with a well-received biography of Ty Cobb. Leerhsen says, “Literary journalism had not yet been invented, and even its quotidian cousin the feature story was still inchoate. Newspapers had long since recognized the demand for scores and highlights…but stories about athletes of both the two- and four-legged kind were usually short and shallow. Worse, they were polite, often steering clear of conflict and bad behavior, in accordance with proper etiquette, painting a grotesquely bland portrait of American life.” I think Leerhsen’s assessment is greatly oversimplified, and I disagree with it, but this sort of discovery does shake one’s confidence. The phoniness is hard to reconcile. because both articles are undeniably full of detail and contain criticism of the principals, both implicit and explicit, in other sections.

The “seven years” part of the template may strike some readers as curious. You might even wonder if both players had, in fact, been with New York for seven years, because it seems a convenient coincidence. But the explanation is that both Ewing and Ward were on the inaugural Giants team of 1883, and both logically left after 1889, for the one ill-fated season of the Players League.