Chronicling baseball’s early days

In 1904, just a year after the World Series debuted, a proofreader for the New York Telegram newspaper lugged his Graflex single-lens camera to the ballpark for the first time. Thus began Charles M. Conlon’s nearly 40-year career as the pioneering documentarian of the national pastime.

Season after season Conlon returned to New York City’s baseball cathedrals. He shot gritty, intimate portraits of the legends (Babe Ruth, Walter Johnson, Joe DiMaggio), the obscure players with evocative names (Buzz McWeeny, Pinky Pittenger, Gabbo Gabler), even the crankiest umpires (Bill Klem, Pants Rowland, Hank O’Day).

In an age when action photos were virtually nonexistent, Conlon’s photograph of Ty Cobb sliding furiously into third base in 1910 remains the classic image of the dead-ball era.

With Conlon’s death in 1945 — and with the evolution of lens, camera and film technology — his work as a lens-man was relegated to newspaper morgues. He was rediscovered only in 1990 after the Sporting News, which had acquired the surviving cache of about 8,000 negatives shot by Conlon, hired photo conservator Constance McCabe to print pictures from the original glass plates.

She told her brother Neal about them, and the Los Angeles-based baseball researcher found himself “blown away,” both by Conlon’s artistry and his anonymity. “Conlon took baseball photography out of the studio and onto the field,” said McCabe, whose fascination with hardball history was inspired by listening to Dodgers announcer Vin Scully. “He was an original. He wasn’t influenced by what he was supposed to do.”

In 1993, the brother and sister produced “Baseball’s Golden Age: The Photographs of Charles M. Conlon” (Harry Abrams). The book was a revelation in black and white, a time machine to the era of wooden ballparks, legal spitballs and manual typewriters, and the visual counterpart to Lawrence Ritter’s “Glory of Their Times,” the groundbreaking oral history of baseball’s early days. Roger Angell of the New Yorker called it “the best book of baseball photographs ever published.”

Nearly two decades later, Neal and Constance McCabe have teamed on a worthy and riveting sequel titled “The Big Show: Charles M. Conlon’s Golden Age Baseball Photographs” (Abrams). The book features more than 200 photos (this time digitally produced from the glass negatives), as well as Neal McCabe’s fascinating captions.

Conlon created a unique baseball narrative, as reflected through the faces he captured on the field: the haunted look of O’Day, the savage mug of catcher Frank “Pancho” Snyder, the intense stare of shortstop Donie Bush.

Said Neal McCabe: “Alfred Stieglitz once said of [fellow photographer] Paul Strand that he was ‘devoid of all flim-flam.’ That was Conlon. He never had any lessons to unlearn.”

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