The Learning Curve: Reexamining the Data

(Back to baseball sweaters! Where did I leave this? Oh, right...)

Front entrance to the Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum

So, it was back to Cooperstown and the Hall of Fame. Fortunately, this time I felt more prepared. After all, on my previous visit, I hadn't known about the Ty Cobb Sweater; there had just been a vague idea of, "Maybe we have something in the vaults you'd like to try your hand at."

Measuring the logo (again)

Once again, the Ty Cobb Sweater came out, and not only did I take more pictures and notes, but this time I focused on minutiae in a way that didn't occur to me before. For instance, I took almost ridiculously-detailed measurements on the felt logo, something I had overlooked the first time. In response to a number of interesting Twitter discussions with Baseball by BSmile, Phil Hecken, Paul Lukas etc.--I also made a point of finding out the manufacturer.

More than that, though, I got a feel for the sweater. Put bluntly, it was heavy. Not just "warm-heavy"; it weighed a lot--far more than any modern sweater. As Tom Shieber described it, "The thing is like armor." That fact (as I'll discuss in my next post) turned out to be the key to solving my construction problems.

1914 White Sox sweater

However, this visit turned out to include a lot more than just the Ty Cobb Sweater. Now that we had established that I was trying to make a stitch-for-stitch reproduction, Tom surprised me with yet MORE sweaters! It turns out that the Hall of Fame has a number in its collection (at least eight or nine), and he thought that, once I'd finished with my current project, I might want to try my hand at others.

1918 Red Sox sweater

1934 New York Giants sweater

New York Yankees sweater (circa 1918-1929)

We looked at sweaters from four different teams--the Chicago White Sox, the Boston Red Sox, the New York Giants, and the New York Yankees. As each really deserves its own blog post, I won't go into detail about them here, save to say that the White Sox sweater was from 1914 and was owned by Red Faber, the Red Sox sweater was from 1918 and was owned by Harry Hooper, the New York Giants sweater was from 1934 and was owned by Bill Terry, and the New York Yankees sweater dated to 1918-1929 and was owned by Miller Huggins. (Note: I believe Miller Huggins has more than one sweater in the collection. Apparently, he was quite good about taking care of them.)

I will add that, while all had similar construction, none were identical (i.e. I couldn't use the Ty Cobb Sweater as a template for, say, the Red Sox sweater.) Granted, the fact that the same style dominated for at least twenty years was something of a surprise; I certainly couldn't have identified them in chronological order. (I wonder when the styling changed and why? Topic for a later post, I guess.)

Anyway, I returned from that visit with fresh heart. I had new data--which, thank goodness, turned out to be the data I needed--and the promise of future projects. Now, it was back to the drawing board.