Batter sustains fatal injury at plate

Year
1920
Month Day
August 16

On August 16, 1920, Cleveland Indians shortstop Ray Chapman is struck in the temple by a ball pitched by Carl Mays of the New York Yankees. He died 12 hours later. This was the first and only death to occur as the result of a pitched ball in major league history.

Ray Chapman was one of the young and impressive Cleveland team’s major stars and their best infielder. On the afternoon of August 16, he led off the fifth inning against Carl Mays, a fastball pitcher whose underhand style made the ball difficult for batters to see. Chapman made a habit of being hit by balls, and Mays had a longstanding reputation as a “bean ball” pitcher. With a hunched-over stance, Chapman appeared to be looking for a curveball, and when Mays instead threw a fastball, Chapman made no movement to get out of the way. The ball hit Chapman in the left temple and made a sound so loud that many in the crowd and on the field believed he had hit the ball. The crowd of 20,000 at New York’s Polo Grounds gasped as Chapman collapsed to the ground. Indians players rushed to Chapman’s side, and helped him to his feet so that he could walk back to the dugout. However, he then lost consciousness and was rushed to St. Lawrence Hospital. Despite a late-night operation to relieve the pressure on his brain, Chapman was pronounced dead at 12:30 a.m. the next day.

Chapman’s death prompted a number of important changes to the way baseball was played. Prior to the incident, it was common for just a handful of baseballs to be used for an entire game. The balls became discolored from dirt and tobacco juice rubbed in by the pitcher, as well as scuffed and misshapen, making them difficult for batters to see. After Chapman’s injury, it was mandated that scuffed or discolored balls be replaced with new white ones. In addition to being easier to see, the white balls are more tightly wound and carry farther, making it possible for hitters to send them much greater distances. As a result, home runs became much more common, and the sport’s first generation of great sluggers–including Babe Ruth, Lou Gehrig, Jimmie Foxx, Al Simmons, Hack Wilson and other future Hall of Famers–put fans in the seats and powered one of the greatest eras in baseball history.

With the influx of power hitting, pitching changed. Pitchers could no longer pace themselves and attack only the best hitters. The threat of the home run led pitchers to work harder throughout the game; they then tired more easily and had to be replaced more frequently. Baseball franchises have continued to place an ever greater premium on power hitting, and, as a result, depth of pitching.

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President Tyler is burned in effigy outside White House

Year
1841
Month Day
August 16

President John Tyler vetoes a second attempt by Congress to re-establish the Bank of the United States. In response, angry supporters of the bank gathered outside the White House and burned an effigy of Tyler. The protestors were comprised primarily of members of Tyler’s own political party, the Whigs, who dominated Congress at the time.

READ MORE: Why John Tyler May Be the Most Reviled US President Ever

The first federal U.S. Bank, created by Alexander Hamilton and set into place by George Washington in 1791, provided a repository for federal funds and issued currency. However, beginning with President Thomas Jefferson, who opposed the idea of a national bank as “unconstitutional,” anti-Federalists in Congress chipped away at the bank’s power and importance. In 1811, President James Madison and Congress let the bank’s charter expire. Although a second Bank of the United States was implemented in 1819 during James Monroe’s presidency, successive attempts by different Congresses to re-charter the second bank were denied by Presidents Andrew Jackson, in 1832, and Martin Van Buren, in 1837. Tyler, as a senator during Jackson’s tenure, had originally condemned Jackson’s attempts to nullify the bank as an “abuse of executive power.” However, as president in 1841, President Tyler, faced with a U.S. economy plagued by wildly fluctuating currency valuation and bank fraud, made an about-face and “betrayed” the Whigs, declaring the U.S. bank a threat to individual states’ rights. When word of the veto spread, the bank’s Congressional supporters flew into a collective rage and stormed out of the Capitol toward the White House.

The rioters hurled stones at the White House, shot guns into the air and hung an effigy of the president that they then set on fire. The protest is considered one of, if not the most violent demonstration held near the White House. As a result of the unrest, the District of Columbia decided to create its own police force.

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The Ramones play their first public gig at CBGB in downtown Manhattan

Year
1974
Month Day
August 16

Five years to the day after half a million rain-soaked hippies grooved and swayed to the psychedelic sounds of the Grateful Dead at Woodstock, four young men from Forest Hills, Queens, took to the stage of an East Village dive bar in jeans, motorcycle jackets and Converse high-tops to launch a two-minute sonic attack on everything those 60s icons stood for. The date was August 16, 1974, the bar was CBGB and the band was the Ramones, giving their debut public performance. The rapidly shouted words with which they opened that show and launched the punk-rock revolution were, as they would always be, “One! Two! Three! Four!”

One eyewitness to the scene was music journalist Legs McNeil, the future co-founder of Punk magazine. “They were all wearing these black leather jackets. And they counted off this song…and it was just this wall of noise,” McNeil later recalled. “These guys were not hippies. This was something completely new.” The guys responsible for this new sound were Douglas Colvin, John Cummings, Thomas Erdelyi and Jeffrey Hyman, better known to the world as Dee Dee, Johnny, Tommy and Joey Ramone. The Ramones’ sound didn’t even have an agreed-upon name until McNeil’s magazine codified the term “punk rock” in 1975. But the group’s members knew right from the beginning that they were out to provide a bracing antidote to the tamed and bloated corporate rock and roll of the mid-1970s. “Eliminate the unnecessary and focus on the substance,” was the way Tommy Ramone expressed the group’s philosophy many years later.

Following their now-historic debut performance on this day in 1974, the Ramones quickly became a force on the burgeoning underground rock scene centered in the downtown Manhattan clubs CBGB and Max’s Kansas City. With the release of their self-titled debut album in 1976, the Ramones may have failed to score a true hit, but they managed to inspire a whole new movement across the Atlantic, as groups like the Sex Pistols and the Clash rushed to embrace their loud, fast and unstudied approach. When they toured England in 1976, Joey Ramone would later say, “All these kids came over to us and told us how we were responsible for turning them on, to go out and form their own bands.” As the Ramone’s manager at the time, Danny Fields, put it when assessing the impact of punk’s founding fathers, an entire generation of future punks looked at the Ramones and said, “Look at them. They can’t play. They’re terrible! They don’t know more than three notes….Let’s start a band!’

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Plane crashes into highway, killing 156

Year
1987
Month Day
August 16

A plane crash at Detroit Metropolitan Airport in Michigan kills 156 people on August 16, 1987. A four-year-old girl was the sole survivor of the accident, which was caused by pilot error.

Northwest Flight 255 was headed to California with a stopover in Phoenix when it pulled away from the gate in Detroit. While the DC-9 Super 82 taxied out to the runway, the pilot and co-pilot failed to conduct their pre-flight checks according to procedure and, as a result, the takeoff-warning system was never turned on. Later, there was speculation that the pilots may have been rushing the checks to avoid incoming bad weather.

A lack of communication between the pilot and co-pilot turned into a deadly mistake when neither extended the wing flaps prior to takeoff. The extended flaps work as a lifting surface on the leading edge of the wings. As the plane rushed down the 6,800-foot runway, it lifted only 40 feet off the ground when it should already have been 600 feet in the air. At the end of the runway, the plane hit lampposts and a rental-car office. The plane then crashed onto a road a half of a mile away. On the Interstate 94 Bridge in Romulus, the plane hit a car and killed both people in the vehicle.

The fiery crash that ensued killed 154 other people, including Nick Vanos, a center for the NBA’s Phoenix Suns. Remarkably, one person survived the accident, four-year-old Cecelia Cichan of Tempe, Arizona.

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