Baseball in the 20th Century: The Deadball Era

Honus Wagner, the star player for the Pittsburgh Pirates during the Deadball Era, said hitting a baseball in those days was like hitting "a chunk of mud." The game back then was played a different way than it is today. Bunts were more common than home runs, and pitching dominated hitting. It was the age of the legal spitball, shine ball, emery ball, and grease ball. It was also a time of change, when much of what we see as the modern game came to be. Many of the practices and traditions we see in the game today--from team nicknames on uniforms to the seventh-inning stretch--have their origin in the Deadball Era.