On April 22, 1915, Napoleon Lajoie commits five errors in the Philadelphia A’s 7-6 loss to the Boston Red Sox. The newly acquired second baseman becomes the seventh player to commit that many errors in a game.
On April 22, 1915, the New York Yankees wear their famed pinstripes for the first time. Although they are not the first club to use the vertical stripes, the Yankees become so associated with them that writers will commonly refer to the team as the “Pinstripers.”
After being called the Naps since 1903, Cleveland’s American League ballclub, plays its first game known as the Indians, a moniker selected from a contest to re-name the team run by a local newspaper. The franchise’s former name, which honored their once-popular player-manager Nap Lajoie, needed to be changed when the 40 year-old second baseman is sold back to A’s, after feuding the team’s current skipper, Joe Birmingham.
1915 – Rube Marquard of the New York Giants no-hits the Brooklyn Robins, winning, 2 – 0.
1915 – In the opening game at Shibe Park, Philadelphia Athletics pitcher Herb Pennock shuts out the Boston Red Sox, 5 – 0. Pennock gives up only one hit, a scratch single by Harry Hooper with two outs in the 9th inning.
1915 – In the final match of a three-game series against the Memphis Chicks (Southern Association), the Boston Red Sox win 10 – 5 to sweep. Babe Ruth pitches the final five innings in relief. The Sox are traveling north from their spring training camp in Hot Springs, Arkansas.
1915 – The Boston Braves break ground on Commonwealth Avenue and begin construction of Braves Field. Owner James E. Gaffney wants a large enough park so that inside-the-park homers can be hit in three directions. The field will open on August 18th.
1917 – After hearing that Gabby Street had caught a ball dropped off the Washington Monument in 1908, Brooklyn manager Wilbert Robinson brags that he could catch a ball dropped from an airplane at spring training, even though he is in his mid-50s and well above his playing weight. Robinson circles unsteadily under the descending spheroid. Instead, a grapefruit was secretly substituted and it explodes on impact with his glove. Once he feels the ooze, Robinson thinks it is blood, and screams that he is dying, until he tastes the juice. He later concedes that he probably would have been killed if a real baseball had been dropped from the plane. Aviatrix Ruth Law dropped the grapefruit as outfielder Casey Stengel assumed culpability for the switch.
1915 – Home Run Baker, 28, announces his retirement following a contract dispute with Connie Mack. He will sit out the 1915 season. Mack will also have salary problems with Chief Bender, Eddie Plank and Jack Coombs, and rather than compete with the Federal League, he releases the stars.
New York Giants president Harry Hempstead rejects the International League’s request for permission to put a team in the Bronx. The shift of the IL’s Jersey City to the nearby borough, already the home to the Yankees, was conceived as a way to prop up the failing minor league franchise and perhaps as an opportunity to thwart the invasion of the Federal League into the Big Apple.
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