The Midnight Terrors: Baseball's Original Thugs

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The St. Bonaventure College baseball team in the 1890s. How can you play the game without a splendid uniform?

Probably the nastiest team in the history of baseball—or in any sport, ever—were the Midnight Terrors. The Midnight Terrors started out in the 1890s not as athletes but as a teenage street gang, operating out of Manhattan’s First Ward—what’s now known as Battery Park and the Financial District. Their ages ranged from 11 to 19, and they gave themselves that name because they did their best work at night. When forming baseball teams got popular, they got the idea to form their own team. They weren’t allowed to form a team unless they had their own uniforms, which was a problem. Uniforms cost money, and no one was willing to sponsor them. Their solution was to start the Midnight Terrors’ Uniform Fund, which was supported entirely by a rash of armed robberies. They picked pockets, snatched purses, robbed people at gunpoint and knifepoint, and even robbed businesses as far north as Prince Street.

With the success of the Uniform Fund, they could start playing. The Midnight Terrors were never any good at the game, but athleticism was never really the plan. The Terrors, like other players, wore metal spikes on their cleats to help them gain traction when running the bases. Their spikes were sharpened to inflict damage when they would “accidentally” slide into players on the other teams, or step on their feet. The mayhem wasn’t strictly on the field, either. When the team was at bat, instead of sitting in the dugout, players would walk through or under the bleachers, robbing spectators. Their stats were terrible, but their haul was pretty good.

When games weren’t going on, the Terrors were still active in their original vocation of street crime. They were good enough at it to pay off the cops in the First Ward. They were foiled by their own ambitions, though. Once they decided to spread their regular criminal operations outside the First Ward, the cops in other wards, who weren’t enjoying the bribes, cracked down on them hard. The Terrors were soon rounded up and hauled off to court. The leader of the gang boasted at his sentencing that he’d be back on the street in no time. He was wrong. They all got long sentences, and the game of baseball was nicely cleaned up. Until the invention of steroids, at least.

How the Lemon was Invented

Lemons How do you make a lemon? Silly question, isn’t it? You just take the seeds out of one and plant them, and wait for the tree to come up, right? That’s true, but it hasn’t always been that easy. Lemons today are a widely cultivated citrus fruit, with a flavor used in cuisines of countries where no lemon tree would ever grow. You might think that it was just a matter of ancient peoples finding the trees, enjoying their fruit and growing more of them, but that’s not true. The lemon is a human invention that’s maybe only a few thousand years old. The first lemons came from East Asia, possibly southern China or Burma. (These days, some prefer to refer to Burma as Myanmar . I’ll try to stay out of that controversy here and stick to fruit.) The exact date of the lemon’s first cultivation is not known, but scientists figure it’s been around for more than 4,000 years. The lemon is a cross breed of several fruits. One f...

Origins of the Word Hoser, eh?

Rick Moranis and Dave Thomas as cultural icons Bob and Doug McKenzie These days we often hear Canadians referred to as “Hosers”. It’s a strange word, and it sounds a little insulting, but it’s sometimes used more with affection than malice. Any such word is difficult to use correctly, especially if you don’t belong to the group the word describes. I can’t say I feel comfortable throwing the word around, myself, but I can offer a little information about it that might shed some light on what it means. First off: is it an insult? Yes… and no. The word hoser can be used as an insult or as a term of endearment; the variation hosehead , is certainly an insult. It’s a mild insult, meaning something like jerk or idiot or loser . Its origin is unclear, and there are several debatable etymologies of the word. One claims that it comes from the days before the zamboni was invented, when the losing team of an outdoor ice hockey game...

The Whoopie Cap

What can you do with your father’s old hats? If you were born after, say, 1955, the answer is probably “Not much.” Men were still wearing fedoras in the 1970s and 1980s, but by 1990, fashion had turned to the point where unless you were Indiana Jones, the hat didn’t look right. Some blame Jack Kennedy for starting it all, strutting around perfectly coiffed and bare-headed in the early 1960s. In 1953, Harry Truman, a haberdasher by trade, stepped out of office, and just eight years later we had a president who didn’t care for hats? The times, they were a-changin’. If you set the WABAC machine to the 1920s or 1930s (when Indiana Jones was supposed to have lived), you would see the fedora was still very much in style. Men just didn’t leave the house without a hat of some kind, and for what remained of the middle class, the fedora was the topper of choice. But like any other piece of clothing, hats wear out, too. When that happened, you’d ju...

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