Clipping:A claim of an illicitly substituted ball

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19C Clippings
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Date Thursday, August 1, 1889
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Captain Farrar did a great deal of unnecessary kicking. His worst ebullition was in the fifth inning, when, with two men on bases, Thompson placed the ball against the slats of the right field fence. Thinking that the ball would easily be a home run, the runners, Haliman and Meyers, began to make the round of the bases at their leisure. Kelly stood watching the ball, evidently of the same idea as the runners, but the ball struck the slats, which in that portion are constructed so that a ball cannot go through them, and they allow a ball to bound well away from them. The ball dropped back in the field and Kelly made a run for it. He fumbled the ball, else he would have been able to capture Haliman at the plate. The runners had been going so very slowly that Myers managed not to get beyond third and Thompson made second. Here Farrar made a great bluff about the ball having gone clear over the seats and then having been thrown back again, but he was unable to persuade Umpire Powers of this fact, though he stood arguing and expostulating for quite a number of minutes. All sorts of rumors went the rounds of the grounds about this ball. Some people, however, said that the ball was thrown back; and others claimed that the ball cleared the fence, and that Kelly had another ball concealed about his person and threw it in. The writing visited the bleaching boards at the end of the game, and found several persons who saw the ball hit the top of the slats and bound back onto the field. A moment’s reflection will convince any one that it was simply impossible for Kelly to have a ball concealed about his person from the way that he ran for the ball after it dropped to the ground.

Such a hypothesis is simply ludicrous. Then it is scarcely within the bounds of possibility that any person could have thrown the ball back into the field as quickly as it came back from the slats. With any other man but Kelly in right field it is hardly probable that so many people could have been found who were so positive that they saw the ball go over the fence., quoting the Boston Herald

Source Philadelphia Item
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Submitted by Richard Hershberger
Origin Initial Hershberger Clippings

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