A Baseball Roster: The-All Geology and Paleontology Team

This post has little to do with natural history.

Bluebirds have returned and are scoping out bird boxes.  Buds are brushing color onto trees.  Some days are actually warm.  Memories of a brutally cold winter have faded.  Clearly, it's time for baseball.  For this post, I was largely inspired by my recent discovery of an intimate and quirky publication imbued with all things baseball, the Elysian Fields Quarterly (EFQ).

The EFQ began life in 1981 as The Minneapolis Review of Baseball:  A Journal of Writing on Baseball (MRB), segued into the EFQ, and died in 2008.  For its owners and editors, it was (mostly?) a labor of love (apparently making money didn’t factor into it).  They worked to produce a journal that would be, according to Ken LaZebnik, who conceived of MRB:

a quasi-literary quarterly that would provide a forum for baseball fans everywhere, from any walk of life, to express their interest in and abiding affection for the National Pastime.

Macalester College holds a nearly complete run of both publications and a vast array of other associated material.  The LaZebnik quotation above is taken from the historical note in the Macalester College Archives guide to the Elysian Fields Quarterly/ Minneapolis Review of Baseball collection.  This quotation was originally posted on the EFQ website, a site which is no more. 

I am more familiar with the EFQ, though I think much of what I have to say about it also applies to MRB.  The EFQ embraced baseball, but, more importantly, it was devoted to publishing writing about baseball in all, or nearly all, possible forms:  history, fiction, essays, poetry, puzzles, interviews, book reviews, quizzes, statistical analyses, and so on.  Among the EFQ regular offerings was a column titled Rosters.  It's this last "literary" form that is the focus of this post.  (I would note that baseball-related photography and art were also part of the journal's reach.)

The Rosters column was a clever and playful deep dive into the names of major league baseball players.  The objective for this feature was finding enough players with names (mostly last names) that reflect some chosen theme and whose playing positions cover all of the positions needed to field a team.  For instance, the Fall 1994 EFQ issue included a roster compiled by Steven Lichtman of players whose names were appropriate for The All-Home and Hearth Team and whose positions filled out a roster.  His roster had, among other players, Alan Bannister at shortstop and Tommy John among the pitchers.  In addition to the roster by Lichtman, my copies of EFQ include rosters fashioned by Mikhail Horowitz.  The editors wrote the first Roster - The All-Fish Team - which appeared in the last issue of MRB.  It was accompanied by a call for rosters to be contributed by readers.

Inspired by their efforts, I have tried my hand at creating a roster for The-All Geology and Paleontology Team.  (None of the roster columns in my very small sample of EFQ issues or in any of the issues listed on eBay that I've looked at covers this same theme.)  The roster I filled out is very heavy on the geology side, barely touching paleontology.  To populate my roster, I first went through my print copy of The ESPN Baseball Encyclopedia, Fourth Edition, 2007, then, to fill a gap or two in the roster, I went to the online Baseball Reference, a great source of baseball statistics and history.  I used the Baseball Reference to create the player profiles given below.  Of note, I limited myself to players who took the field before 1940.  I also did not expand my roster to add additional "bench" players or add a manager.

I found this to be a sobering, even melancholic, enterprise.  For many of these players, their major league careers were starkly brief moments, their presence barely recorded in the game’s annals.  I suspect that, for at least some, the experience carried an outsized weight.  Thoughts and, perhaps, regret about what might have been?  Though I did not deliberately seek out obscure players, no one on my roster is a household name.

In my annotated roster below, I first list the position, the player filling it, and his birth and death years.  Below that, I record the player’s full name, describe the length of their career and which teams they played for, and conclude with mention of an item or two that struck me as, at least, somewhat memorable about their career.  The EFQ rosters were not annotated.  (A glossary explaining most of the baseball terms and statistics cited in my annotations can found on the Major LeagueBaseball website.)

Here, then, is my all-geology and paleontology team roster:

First Base: Les Rock (1912-1991)

Lester Henry Rock played in two games for the Chicago White Sox in 1936.  He came to bat just once in his career, entering his first game as a pinch hitter.  He grounded into a double play and a runner scored on the play.  Under the rules in place at the time, Rock was credited with a run batted in (RBI).  Only a few years later, a rule change would have deprived him of that RBI.

Second Base: Charlie Pick (1888-1954)

Charles Thomas Pick played in the major leagues from 1914 through 1920, for the Washington Nationals, Philadelphia Athletics, Chicago Cubs, and Boston Braves.  In his debut in the majors, he had three hits in his first three at-bats.  He holds the major league record for most times at bat in a game without a hit, 11.

 

Shortstop: George Bone (1874-1918)

George Drummond Bone played for the Milwaukee Brewers in 1901.  He appeared in 12 games with a batting average of .302.  Baseball Reference gets into the roster game when it notes that "he is a cinch to make the 'All Body Part' team, along with players such as Dave Brain, Roy Face, and Harry Cheek."

 

Third Base: John Karst (1893-1976)

John Gottlieb Karst appeared in a single game for the Brooklyn Dodgers in 1915.  He was a fielding substitution for the starting third baseman and helped turn a double play.  He never came to bat.

 

A karst is a limestone landscape where water has created sinkholes, caverns, underground streams, among other features. ( John O.E. Clark and Stella Stiegeler, The Facts on File Dictionary of Earth Science, 2000.)

 

Catcher:  Silver Flint (1855-1892)

Frank Sylvester Flint played in 1875 with the St. Louis Red Stockings, then spent a couple of years in the minor leagues, before returning to the major leagues in 1878 with the Indianapolis Blues.  From 1879 through 1889, he played for the Chicago White Stockings.  He briefly managed the White Stockings in 1879 while also playing.  During his career, he was the catcher for three no-hitters.  (A "no-hitter" - a term not defined in the MLB glossary - is a game in which one side fails to make a hit during the entire contest.)

 

Outfielder: Bill Clay (1874-1917)

Frederick C. Clay appeared in three games in 1902 for the Philadelphia Phillies, batting eight times with two hits and a run batted in.  In his debut, he had two hits in four at-bats.

 

Outfielder:  Jerry D’Arcy (1885-1924)

Jeremiah Joseph D’Arcy played for the Pittsburgh Pirates in 1911.  He had six at-bats over the course of two games, but failed to make a hit.  According to Baseball Reference, D’Arcy was “a player whose true identity long eluded researchers.”  A "Jerry Dorsey" reportedly played for the Pittsburgh Pirates for two games in 1911, but much of information on the man was contradictory or missing.  It wasn’t until 2013 that it was proven that Dorsey was, in fact, a person named Jerry D’Arcy.

 

In geology, a darcy is a unit of measure of the permeability of rock.  (John O.E. Clark and Stella Stiegeler, The Facts on File Dictionary of Earth Science, 2000.)

 

Outfielder:  George Stone (1876-1945)

George Robert Stone played in 1903 for the Boston Americans, and then from 1905 to 1910 with the St. Louis Browns.  Stone was a good hitter with a career batting average of .301.  In 1905, he led the American League in hits (187) and topped the major leagues in batting average in 1906 (.358).

 

Pitcher:  Shovel Hodge (1893-1967)

Clarence Clemet Hodge appeared in 75 games for the Chicago White Sox from 1920 through 1922.  Of the 20 games he started, he pitched complete games in 8.  Baseball Reference reports that he was called “Shovel” because, at one time, he was quite heavy and brought to mind a steam shovel.

 

Pitcher:  Bob Spade (1877-1924)

Robert Spade debuted in 1907 with the Cincinnati Reds at the age of 30 and played for them until 1910, when he was traded mid-season to the St. Louis Browns.  His career ended after 1910.  His most impressive season was 1908 when he had a record of 17 wins and 12 defeats.  That season, he started 28 games and pitched complete games in 22 of them.

 

Pitcher:  Reese Diggs (1915-1978)

Reese Wilson Diggs pitched for the Washington Nationals in 1934, appearing in four games.  That year, he was the youngest player in the American League.  He started three games and pitched complete games in two.

 

Pitcher:  Ray Miner (1897-1963)

Raymond Theodore Miner pitched one inning in one game for the Philadelphia Athletics in 1921.  It was not a good outing because he gave up two hits, walked three batters, and yielded four runs.  He has a statistically weird claim to fame, starting his career, ending it, and dying on the same month and day:  September 15.  Strangely enough, he’s not the only major league player to have achieved this distinction.  Lou Raymond made those three transitions on May 2.

Since I was attempting to emulate them, I thought it might be interesting to learn a bit about the two authors who composed rosters in the issues I own of the EFQ (one column by Lichtman and several by Horowitz).  When Steven Lichtman’s roster column appeared in the Fall 1994 issue, he was a newly minted lawyer.  He later earned a PhD in political science and is now an associate professor at Shippensburg State University.  Though he doesn’t list the EFQ roster column in his curriculum vitae (understandable in the scheme of things), I don’t think he abandoned baseball completely.  At one point in his wandering in the academic wilderness of two-year appointments, he taught at Dickinson College.  An article about his impending departure from the college appeared in the May 20, 2005, issue of the Dickinson student newspaper.  It quoted a student who said of Lichtman:  “He was equally willing to discuss John Stuart Mill's 'On Liberty' as that night's baseball game."  

Mikhail Horowitz was described in the EFQ as “the author of Big League Poets (City Lights, 1978) and a contributor to many outré baseball anthologies.”  That doesn’t quite capture his multifaceted career as a poet, musician, writer, journalist, comedian, and satirist; baseball runs through his poetry and creative output.  A recent interview offers some insight.  (Howard Altarescu, Writers of the Catskills:  In Conversation With Mikhail Horowitz, TheOverlook, December 25, 2025.)

I think I’m in good company.

A Different Kind of Deep Time: The 1909 Norton (Kansas) Town Team

This post is about my discovery of a tiny slice of life in this country, dating back to the early 20th century.  This isn't a story about paleontology or even natural history.  Rather, it's about the attraction of exploring and making some sense of a world that seems familiar but which is also distinct in many ways from mine today.  Though not a matter of deep time, it feels a bit like it.  The attraction of this research is quite analogous to what I experience when engaging with paleontology or natural history.  (This is my thin justification for uploading this post.)

My wife's aunt was, by profession, a neuroanatomist, and, by avocation, a genealogist.  Upon her death, she left a wealth of material about her extended family.  I don't know what happened to most of it, but some came to my wife and me.  Any collection of "things" likely undergoes marked diminution in size as it is passes from the original collector (who probably considered all of it treasure) to others, less involved and less dedicated.  That is, if the collection isn't simply trashed at its first transition from the collector.  (See my post titled Why Did Dad Collect All This Crap?, April 28, 2016.)

I was being ruthless in doing triage on the contents of a box of photographs of family and friends, until I uncovered a professional photograph of a baseball team.  Though I tried to resist, the allure of the image and the label pasted below it was too much for me.  It was all so markedly and wonderfully different from the rest of the pictures I'd been sorting; it called out for exploration.

How could I not be taken by this photograph of these young players, their manager, and a bat boy.  All are unsmiling as they stare into the camera, well, all save Oran Morehead (#15), a pitcher, seated at the far end of the first row, who is captured looking at something or someone off to his right.  The picture was taken on September 8, 1909, by photographer C.E. Reed.  (The Norton County News, September 9, 1909.)  There are at least a couple of errors in the picture's label.  The second entry in the column on the left should be #2 not #5.  The manager is the actual #5, but his name was spelled Hobart not Hobert.

A note about research sources:  I was aided immeasurably by the Kansas Historical Society which, on its website, provides digital access to a broad collection Kansas newspapers.

A question I addressed and answered early was this:  Why did my wife's aunt have this picture among her genealogically related materials?  The answer rests on the shoulders of the young man seated in the first row, second from the viewer's left:  L. Graves, #10 in the photograph, 2nd baseman.  One branch of my wife's extended family has a connection with the Graves family of which the 2nd baseman was a part.  His full name was Lyman Archibald Graves (1890-1927) and he was 18 years old at the time he posed for the group shot.  Lyman Graves and my wife are 2nd cousins 2 times removed.  (I utilized the very useful cousin chart provided by Jessica Grimaud on the FamilySearch Blog, July 23, 2019.)

My wife's aunt would be disappointed in me.  I used her very complete treatise on her extended family to determine the genealogical relationship of Lyman Graves to my wife; after that, though, I paid little attention to the Graves family.  It was what this image depicts that prompted me to spend several engrossing weeks of research.  Yes, the photograph shows a baseball team that played for the town of Norton, Kansas, but, in reality, it offers a glimpse of a widespread social and cultural phenomenon of the early 20th century, one completely new to me:  town team baseball or, as it was also known, townball.

Myriad small towns across the country fielded amateur teams that played each other during the summer months.  (Town team baseball is still very much alive in some areas of the country.)  To set the stage for this particular team, I would note that Norton was, and is, a small town located in the northwestern portion of the state, up near the border with Nebraska.  Its population in 1910 was 1,787.  Based on my research, I believe Norton played in 1909 against teams from 13 other towns - 10 in Kansas and 3 in Nebraska.  In general, Norton with about two thousand inhabitants had a larger population than nearly all of the other locations involved.  Muddying this picture is the fact that two of Norton's games were at home against the "K.C. Red Sox," a team that may have come from Kansas City, Kansas, and that played games around the state.  With a population of over 80,000 in 1910, Kansas was a decided outlier among these localities.  Excluding Kansas City, Norton had a larger population than all of the other jurisdictions involved but one, Concordia, Kansas, population 4,415.  The smallest of the towns was Selden, Kansas, population 297.  The average size of the towns involved (excluding Kansas City) was 1,236; the median size was 975:  these were all small towns.  (Data on the Kansas towns' population size was taken from a table available on the University of Kansas' website, titled Population of Cities in Kansas 1900-2020 - Decennial Censuses.)

In his insightful documentary Town Teams:  Bigger than Baseball (2016), focused on town teams in Kansas in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, Mark Honer cites a study of Kansas newspapers from 1911 to 1920 that found more than 300 town teams playing baseball in the state.  He posits that these teams and the games they played had an impact well beyond the ball field.  He makes the case that the towns fielding these teams did so for much more than friendly sporting competition:  the games had economic, cultural, and social importance.  Those who assembled these teams did so, in part, to bring their particular community together.  These games were among the organized social events of small towns and their surrounding areas.  At a time without the ubiquitous visual media available to us today (television and the rest), organized social cultural events that prompted people to gather together physically, such as fairs, Chautauqua assemblies, lectures, plays, and, of course, sporting events, were the life blood of many small towns.  Honer contends, quite rightly in my mind, that towns established and supported teams in order to boost civic pride and to tell the broader world that here was a municipality worthy of economic investment and a good place to live.  (Some papers referred to this specific team as the "Norton Boosters.")  In general, small towns across the country were engaged in a struggle to survive and town team baseball was one of the steps many took to stand out from, and out pace, other area towns.

The games were major events for the towns.  Norton's games were often played on the weekends, but a majority (22 of its games) fell on weekdays.  (As described below, my data on the team's games are missing two games, at least.)  If Fridays are excluded from the weekday count, 17 of the games were played between Monday and Thursday.  Obviously, all were played during daylight hours.  Reportedly, in many towns that fielded a team, businesses would close on game days.  Norton was probably no exception.  I found attendance reported for only three games; it ranged from 150 to 400 patrons.  That last was for a game played on a Sunday (July 11, 1909) at Norton against the Selden team.  Though fans might come not only from town, but also from outlying areas, those 400 people represented a striking 22 percent of the Norton town population.

Historian David Vaught has summarized the central role of baseball for small, rural towns.

From the 1880s through the 1950s, the small-town team became an institution in rural American every bit as much as the little red schoolhouse and the old-fashioned Fourth of July celebration.  Diamonds dotted the countryside right alongside grain elevators, water towers, courthouses squares, and churches.  Every small town in rural American that considered itself a progressive, modern place had its own baseball team.  (Abner Doubleday, Marc Bloch, and the Cultural Significance of Baseball in  Rural America, Agricultural History, Vol. 85, No 1, Winter 2022, p.10-11.)

Town teams were composed of players often, but not always, drawn from the local male population.   Sometimes skilled players were recruited from outside the local area in an effort to field a winning team. Overall, these ball players were considered to be, and were referred to as, amateurs.  If the definition of that label is undergoing dramatic change today, it was certainly stretched almost to the breaking point in the first decades of the 20th century with regard to town team baseball.  These town team players were often financially compensated for their services.   Paul R. Albert, in his book Plainville Baseball:  History of Plainville, Kansas Town Team Baseball (2021), states that the Plainville team eschewed paying its players which many local town teams did.  Yet, he also observes that "men with baseball talent may have been recruited to open [business] positions in town," and that the town was not above hiring pitchers for important games.  (p. 4)

Suggestive of the financial rewards coming to the players, I found that the occupations reported for three of the Norton players in the 1910 decennial census were baseball related:  Ralph Shimeall and Lyman Graves were employed as "ball player," while Oran Morehead's occupation was "umpire baseball."  (I have found very few of the Norton players in that decennial census, probably due, in part, to my inexpert searching.)  The Beaver City Tribune reporting on a loss of its town team to Norton said it was "outclassed by the salaried players of our Kansas neighbor."  (The Norton Courier, May 20, 1909.)

The following description, written in March of 1909, of the assembling of Norton's 1909 team captures some of the most salient aspects at the time of town teams, in general, and of this Kansas town team, in particular.

Manager Hobart, of the Norton Baseball team[,] has signed two men for the coming year for sure and has strings out for three more that are 'cracker jacks.'  In fact it has been suggested to the Telegram editor by some of the sports of the game that we had better not publish the line up of the team or we would not be able to get any games with the other towns in this section.  So far, the manager has four men in [sic] pitching staff, Elliot, Morehead, Shimeall and a new man who just came to town a few days ago that is endorsed by Ed Port [his surname was actually Poort], professional player who makes his headquarters in Norton.  All these boys are good utility men and can play anywhere on the diamond.  Ed Port is a catcher and will probably sign the agreement in a few days.  Johnnie Dempewolf will wear a Norton uniform around the third station if he is offered a reasonable compensation and as the fans here like him that will probably happen.  (The Norton Weekly Telegram, March 3, 1909.)

The author of this article also observed, "Almena is reported to be in the game with a salary team this year as the business men of that town say they will pay $710 per month to a bunch that will skunk the county seat aggregation every game they play."  These teams were presumably not in any organized leagues.  Further, it appears that parts of Norton's schedule of games were established as the season progressed; who played and when could be rather ad hoc.

The Norton town team, as noted on the photograph, had a record of 33 wins and 9 losses through, I believe, September 4, 1909.  My basic data on those 42 games using the newspapers published in Norton in 1909 is incomplete.  I am missing two of the games, presumably Norton victories since I can account for the nine losses.  The actual final 1909 record compiled by the club remains unclear.   The Norton Weekly Telegraph on September 15, reported that the team had a record of 43-9 going into a double header on September 11 against Kensington; Norton reportedly lost both games.  I seriously doubt that total of 43 victories which is well beyond what I have been able to record.

Box scores are available for each of the 40 games I've tallied.  They provide information on opponents, where the games were played, scoring by inning, total hits, runs, and errors, and batteries (pitchers and catchers).  Umpires were often identified (as noted below, probably with good reason).  Sometimes the strikeouts and walks are provided for each participating pitcher.  Once in awhile the duration of the game is noted; even rarer, is the inclusion of figures on attendance.

Frequently, a sentence or two describing a highlight of the game would be included with the box score.  Those brief blurbs about the games offer a wealth of insight into the nature of the contests, the emotions involved, not only on the part of the players, but the crowd in attendance, and the partisanship of the Norton newspapers when covering its team.  A recurrent complaint was about the bias or ineptitude of the umpires.

Among the most dramatic or amusing are the following:

The score is omitted because we are unable to distinguish between the umpire and his pets.  (The Champion, June 10, 1909.)

Monday's game was much more tame owing to a row among the Smith Center players that caused several of their stars to leave hostilities.  (The Champion, July 8, 1909.)

This game should have been 2 to 0, but a rank decision on the part of the umpire, gave Kensington a score.  (The Norton County News, July 29, 1909.)

With the regular line-up in the field, Norton had an easy time winning this game, even if we did have to beat nine men - and the umpire.  (The Norton County News, August 12, 1909.)

The Norton team certainly received the worst treatment Saturday at Selden that they have ever been up against.  There was a bunch of hoodlums that crowded the players off the bench and used the vilest language possible.  (The Norton County News, August 12, 1909.)

A most remarkable thing happened in one of the latter innings, when an Oberlin base runner trying to make home plate ran afoul of the Norton catcher and both went down.  The runner straightened out as though dead - unconscious - and while in this condition several of the Oberlin players ran up, grabbed him and dragged him onto the base, resuscitating him afterwards and claiming a tally.  Before this runner had been dragged onto the home plate another runner taking advantage of conditions made home plate and a tally was claimed for it.  If the first runner was perpetrating a ruse, it didn't work.  Neither did the bluster of the other runner whose imagination carried him to a state of wildness.  The game was finished in red hot work [sic].  (The Norton Courier, September 9, 1909.)

More than a century ago, town team baseball helped to define and energize life in small town America.  Turns out, the young men on the Norton team did more than play ball.

Hey, Louie, What Are You? ~ The Evolution of Baseball and An Unidentified Fossil

Any murky history that challenges precise deciphering frustrates us, defying our instinct to identify, define, and categorize.  We want to pinpoint origin.  If we cannot, we make it up.

The big green furry mascot named Louie with the bulbous nose, backward ball cap, and pink top knot joined in the “sumo wrestling” contest between two young women in costumes that rendered them barely able to keep their balance.  From behind me came the most memorable line of the evening, delivered in jest, “Hey, Louie, what are you?”

A cool late spring evening in a small stadium with a startlingly green field spread out like an open fan, a game between the home team Bowie Baysox and visiting Reading Phillies, Double A baseball, the minor leagues.  There and then, with the field before me, I willingly placed heart over mind and embraced the illusion of baseball as a game rooted in timeless, bucolic, American fun and innocence.  Illusion.

The roots of the game of baseball are an enormous tangle where nothing is as it seems.  Of baseball, I ask the question, more seriously than my friend in the ballpark, “Hey, Louie, what are you?”

Forget Abner Doubleday, forget Cooperstown – all of that is a manufactured myth, pure fabrication, part of a late 19th century and early 20th century effort to claim the game for the United States and deny any ties to any earlier games from England.  Baseball historian John Thorn recently asserted in Baseball in the Garden of Eden:  The Secret History of the Early Game (2011),

[I]n no field of American endeavor is invention more rampant than in baseball, whose whole history is a lie from beginning to end, from its creation myth to its rosy models of commerce, community, and fair play.  The game’s epic feats and revered figures, its pieties about racial harmony and bleacher democracy, its artful blurring of sport and business – all of it is bunk, tossed up with a wink and a nudge.  Yet we love both the game and the flimflam because they are both so . . . American.  Baseball has been blessed in equal measure by Lincoln and by Barnum.  (p. ix)

(Thorn has done grand research; I just wish the book offered more moments of concise statement and summary amid the stream of quotations from old and often obscure resources.)

Despite that entrenched lie about the game’s origins, to any dispassionate observer, the myriad versions of games involving sticks, balls, and bases (or just balls and bases) that Americans, often children, played from the early colonial period through the first third of the 19th century bear family resemblance in key ways to the game that we now know as baseball.  There is a continuum stretching back through much of the history of the country and on to England.  The 1840s New York codified version of the game has survived; the old games of town ball, round ball, four old cat (and its variants played with fewer combatants), and the English game of rounders, all of which contributed to baseball, mostly went extinct.

An evolutionary continuum, even with its moments of significant change, doesn’t offer “heroes and sacred places.”  Paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould, pondering the attraction of baseball creation myths for Americans despite the more wonderful and thought-provoking historical truth, likened it to the place of evolution in the popular culture.

Scientists often lament that so few people understand Darwin and the principles of biological evolution.  But the problem goes deeper.  Too few people are comfortable with evolutionary modes of explanation in any form.  I do not know why we tend to think so fuzzily in this area, but one reason must reside in our social and psychic attraction to creation myths in preference to evolutionary stories – for creation myths, . . . , identify heroes and sacred places, while evolutionary stories provide no palpable, particular object as a symbol for reverence, worship, or patriotism.  (The Creation Myths of Cooperstown, in Bully for Brontosaurus:  Reflections in Natural History, 1991, p. 57)

In linking evolution and baseball through the creation stories, Gould was not stretching the point.  A remarkable piece of evidence (not cited by Gould) comes from the 1886 newspaper article on the game’s origins by Will Rankin who, according to Andrew J. Schiff, was one of early baseball’s best journalists (The Father of Baseball:  A Biography of Henry Chadwick, 2008, p. 192).  Rankin entering into the simmering debate over baseball’s English versus American origins explicitly rejected evolution in favor of creationism.   In his widely printed piece, Rankin opined that the game emerged whole cloth (presumably from some creator’s mind).  “The game of baseball seems to have sprung up, just as any game has.”  Indeed, he observed,

It can no more be claimed that the game of baseball had its origins in rounders or town-ball than billiards were the issue of pool, or the latter came from bagatelle.  It is like Mr. Darwin’s theory of the origin of man – it lacks the necessary connecting links to carry out the idea.  (As quoted in David Block’s Baseball Before We Knew It:  A Search for the Roots of the Game, 2006, p. 4-5)

Perhaps it’s partly because a creation story is easier to birth and control.

Speaking of origins, several months ago, I found this fossil camouflaged among the pebbles gathered by a stream that cut through an upper Cretaceous formation.

Fragment of a fossil tooth, of that I have little doubt.  Given what is usually found here, a marine creature most likely.  But, from what animal?  I considered that question on my own for some time, then turned to the printed page and the web, and began to show it to folks, including a practicing paleontologist or two.

I’m still uncertain as to the animal of origin, though the most frequent response has been that it is likely from a Mosasaur, a large marine lizard, one of the grand predators of the late Cretaceous waters.  A denizen among the large beasts of the period – up to 33 feet or 10 meters from nose to tip of tail.

The history of any single fossil is a complex mesh of events and forces.  For some fossils, identifying the original animal from the end product, much less untangling the taphonomic and post-taphonomic knots, may be beyond our capacity.  (I’ve posted on taphonomy previously.)  At some point, a fossil has suffered enough abuse from exposure to the elements that it loses most traces of its genus- or species-specific identity.  Distinguishable from a rock, but perhaps just barely.

I wont make up this fossil's origin story.  Sometimes when I notice it on my desk in its small display case, I ask, with genuine interest, “Hey, Louie, what are you?”