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Community Corner

Bridgehampton's Baseball Heritage Precedes Yastrzemski

The Bridgehampton Nine entertained locals and summer visitors.

Growing up on Cape Cod, my brothers and I were weaned on Red Sox baseball. But who knew our favorite player hailed from Bridgehampton, his photo hanging on the wall in the Long Island Collection at the ?

The extended Yastrzemski clan, successful potato farmers, put Bridgehampton baseball on the map in the middle of the 20th century with the White Eagles team, and produced a baseball great, triple crown winner, and hall-of-famer in Carl Jr., but Bridgehampton’s baseball heritage didn’t start there.

Ernest Clowes (1881-1957), a summer turned full-time resident, photographer, and author of the Bridgehampton News column “Wayfarings” from 1941 to 1953, dutifully chronicled life in our quaint hamlet. One such column written in July 1943 illustrates the early days of Bridgehampton baseball in the 1890s. Clowes, a teenager at the time, describes how the baseball games became quite the social event under the guise of a sporting one. The games were usually played on Friday afternoons on a not-so-manicured baseball diamond on a field leased from the Henry Howell farm just east of the present-day .

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Many Main Street businesses closed up shop, and even the Rev. Arthur Newman, the minister, was a regular attendant. Benches were set up along the first-base line, the cheering section for women, girls, businessmen, and summer residents. Down the third baseline sat the teams, scorekeepers and boys known as “hot sports.” The games were almost always umpired by Raymond Hildreth, who would call out, “Play ball!”

Clowes writes that spectators, at times 400 to 500 strong, came on foot, bicycle and by horse-drawn wagons, which acted as bleachers. Gambling was known to take place behind the backstop.

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The Bridgehampton Nine, as the home team was called, consisted of a roster of local men, Schwenk, Humblet, Ware and Howell, and players recruited from neighboring villages.

In September of 1896, the local papers reported that Bridgehampton had won the baseball championship of the East End at home, defeating the Peconic Nine by a score of 1-0. Leo Fishel, a Babylon man, was on the mound for Bridgehampton. In nine innings, Fishel faced only 29 batsmen, struck out 21, walked one, and gave up only one hit, to the delight of the local crowd. In 1899, Fishel, according to the Suffolk County News on May 12, 1899, signed with the Giants, the New York National League team. But he went on to pursue a career in law instead.

For about 10 years baseball ruled, until golf became the sport of choice here with the opening of the in the early 1900s. Even nationally, baseball hit a slump, and it wasn’t until after World War I that the game picked up again. But baseball has never lost its charm, whether you claim to be from New England stock or don a Yankee cap.

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