The Burial Mound

Was way behind on some reading, but did finally catch up to a February 25th WSJ story on the Yankees spring training in New Jersey during the war. Government imposed rail restrictions required the baseball teams to hold their training sites at locations north of the Ohio and Potomac Rivers, and east of the Mississippi. It's a well researched story, with some great outtakes from the sportswriters of the day.

The weather in the north/northeast during winter is certainly not that of Florida, or the southwest. The writer, Joshua Robinson, reports that the newspaper reports of the era usually reserved the last paragraph for a comment about the lousy weather. One sportswriter, Rud Rennie of the New York Herald Tribune is quoted twice, once about the weather, when he concludes with the report that, "otherwise, everything is simply dandy. It's snowing."

But his best comment seems reserved for field conditions. In 1943 the Yankees trained in Asbury Park on a field so bad that Rud described the pitcher's mound as so poorly made that it looked "as if an elephant was buried there."

I don't think the legendary sportswriter Red Smith had made it to New York by then, but Rud is a typo away from Red.

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