CURRENT ISSUE | SUBSCRIBE | ADVERTISE | WRITE TO US | CORNELL AUTHORS | PAST ISSUES

Bent Out of Shape | WHERE IS OLIN'S CURVED BAT?

tHE OLIN NAME IS A FAMILIAR ONE AT CORNELL-- and plenty of other college campuses around the country. Franklin W. Olin 1886 graduated with a civil engineering degree, earned a fortune in the munitions industry, and, in 1938, established the F.W. Olin Foundation, a private philanthropic organization. Franklin W. Olin Hall, the chemical engineering building he gave his alma mater in 1940, was the first of what would be a small city's worth of Olins funded by the foundation-- seventy-eight buildings spread across fifty-eight mostly independent colleges and universities. This year, the Olin Foundation formally ceased operations, having given away more than $800 million over seven decades.Much of that was lavished on one final magnum opus, the $460 million Franklin W. Olin College of Engineering outside Boston.

But before he became a philanthropic powerhouse, F.W. Olin was known for his skills on the baseball field.He was a star of the college squad--legend has it he belted a 540-foot home run in a game on campus--and spent his summers playing professional baseball. In 1884, while a student, he played for Washington teams in the American and Union associations (both major leagues then) as well as Toledo, and in 1885 he played for Detroit of the National League. One of a handful of players to spend time in all three nineteenth-century major leagues, he shared the field with Moses "Fleet"Walker, the last African-American major leaguer until Jackie Robinson in 1947, and posted a .316 lifetime batting average. Olin's inventive side was also in evidence during his undergraduate career: he designed the University's first batting cage--one of the first indoor batting cages--and came up with a unique curved baseball bat.

Carved from a wagon tongue, the bat was similar to others then in use--with one important difference.When presented with a curveball, the batter turned the bat a quarter-turn to reveal a distinct concavity. The bat is mentioned several times in baseball literature and described by Morris Bishop '14, PhD '26, in his History of Cornell: "convex on one side for distance, concave on the other to meet drop curves." Apparently Olin was having a hard time hitting the curve, and he theorized that a bent bat would compensate for the motion of the ball. It's not documented if and when Olin used it, but it would have been perfectly legal in major league play. Rules barring the bat did not come into force until 1893, and even after that a curved bat snuck into a major league game: on May 21, 1978, Johnny Bench of the Cincinnati Reds used one--and hit a home run.

The current location of Olin's bat is a mystery. No one in the University athletics office or archives is familiar with it, nor is longtime Big Red baseball coach Ted Thoren. If it still exists, the bat would be quite valuable. David Hunt of Hunt Auctions, a leading dealer of vintage baseball memorabilia, estimates its value at $4,000 to $5,000. An official at the National Baseball Hall of Fame offers much higher figures: $35,000 to $50,000.

It's possible that, like so many other historically significant items from nineteenth-century baseball, Olin's bat simply disappeared. Harvard experienced a similar loss with the first catcher's mask, invented by alumnus Frederick Thayer in 1877. At Thayer's twenty-fifth reunion teammates presented him with the mask, silver-plated for the occasion by a local jeweler. The mask was at the Harvard Varsity Club for decades, but vanished in the mid- 1980s. Curator Warren Little fears that the mask--which has been conservatively valued at $10,000 to $15,000--may be "decorating some bar in Boston."

-- Stephen Eschenbach

Freelance writer STEPHEN ESCHENBACH is collaborating with the Ivy League on the Ivy Baseball History Project (www.ivyleaguesports.com/documents/bsbmlb.asp).

Return to top of page