Leo’s World: “A Short History of Batting Helmets (Mostly Seen Through Rose-colored Glasses)”

Good Tuesday morning, Uni Watchers! I hope everyone had a pleasant Monday.

I’m back again this morning with the ubiquitous Leo Strawn, Jr., who returns today with a really fantastic article (eight years in the making!) on the early history of batting helmets. Leo’s knowledge of early and mid-to-late century baseball uniforms and equipment is vast — and while many of you may be familiar with early batting helmets, this deeply researched piece will definitely add to that knowledge. Although this one is somewhat Reds-centric, it definitely covers all the bases (if you’ll pardon the pun).

I think you’re really going to enjoy this one!

Here’s Leo…

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A Short History of Batting Helmets (Mostly Seen Through Rose-colored Glasses)
by Leo Strawn, Jr.

I’m Leo…welcome to my world!

You can’t hit in a baseball game without a helmet…but it wasn’t always that way.

I have been sitting on this info for 8 years and had pretty much forgotten about it until recently while cleaning up my sports folders. So, I thought I would add what I have to the research in the form of this article. A lot of the research I had done is, not surprisingly, Ohio-centric and this is not intended to be a comprehensive history of protective headgear in baseball.

I recall my grandpa, a huge Indians fan, telling me the story of Ray Chapman’s death in 1920 from a beanball and the Tribe’s World Series title that followed less than 2 months later, which featured the first grand slam and the only unassisted triple play in WS history. He told me that tale around the same time that my dad took me to my first Reds game. That game was just days after Riverfront Stadium finally opened, following months of delays, and was just weeks shy of being exactly 50 years after Chapman’s death. My dad bought me one of those Reds kids’ batting helmets at the game, a new piece of merchandise at that time, like the one in the photo below. (There was a warning inside that they weren’t to be used for protection in games. Strictly for funsies, kiddos. But we all wore them anyway in our sandlot games.)

This will start with a bit of random protective gear history via photos, which will weave its way into Cincinnati’s contributions, along with a quick look at their batting helmet history up to spring training of 1983. That’s where I paused my research eight years ago.

* * *The earliest photos I have seen regarding protective gear for a hitter are these helmets that the Philadelphia Athletics batters tried out in 1937. It looks like they simply went out and bought some construction hard hats. I can’t find any indication that these were worn in any games, but this might be the first actual attempt to create a batting “helmet.”

Just two seasons later, Lamar “Skeeter” Newsome of the Athletics wore this protective gear under his cap in 1939 after being the victim of a beanball that fractured his skull, appearing in only 17 games in 1938, as a result. The article in the photo describes the headgear, “Made of felt, crisscrossed on the top with reenforcing strips of tape…”

The player in the next pic is Jack Hayes, wearing custom leather headgear outside of his cap in 1940 for the White Sox. This was likely proactive on Hayes’ part. I haven’t read any information that he was wearing it because he had been beaned. He certainly feared he could be, however, due to a misdiagnosed eye issue. He would close his right eye while batting, evidently and understandably worrying that he would not be able to see a beanball well enough to get out of the way due to lack of depth perception while using only his left eye.

Not sure where I got this photo, but this is the earliest pic of an actual “batting helmet” that I have seen, purportedly worn by Ralph Kiner in 1947. He played for the Pirates from 1946-53. I haven’t seen another photo of a helmet like this or any photo of him wearing anything like it, but the colors would have been correct for the ’47 Pirates.

I have, however, seen photos of him in a flocked Pirates batting helmet, so this 1953 flocked helmet is certainly one of the earliest. (Branch Rickey, who was the Pirates’ general manager at the time, required his players to wear the helmets in the field as well at the plate; the flocking was to make them look more like regular caps.)

In 1954, the Redlegs required all hitters to wear this protective “beanie” under their caps.

It wasn’t just Cincinnati, though. Pittsburgh required their batters to wear helmets in 1953 (noted in the news article below), the year those photos were taken of Kiner in that flocked helmet, his last season in Pittsburgh. Also, while I was working on this info years ago, I managed to get a quote from The Milwaukee Journal archives, dated August 3, 1954 (which I can’t locate online, now, sorry), that stated, “Other clubs which make the headgear more or less mandatory are the Cincinnati Reds, Philadelphia Phillies, New York Giants and Chicago Cubs in the National League and the Cleveland Indians and Chicago White Sox in the American League.” Since I didn’t save the Milwaukee Journal article from their archives when it was still available, I’m not sure if that ‘other team’ was referring to the Pirates or if it was the Braves.

The season after they started requiring batters to wear protective headgear, Cincy GM Gabe Paul made a suggestion to NL owners to make helmets mandatory. Instead, the NL made protective gear mandatory for 1955, but not necessarily batting “helmets.” (This baseball-reference.com article states that it wasn’t until 1971 that helmets were required. Baseball Reference also says that “some veterans continued to wear cloth caps with liners under a grandfather clause.”)

This is where my research turned more specifically toward Cincinnati helmet history.

I’ve never been 100% certain about this flocked helmet that is supposed to be from 1955, but they did wear navy caps with a red wishbone C outlined in white during the 1955 season. Interestingly, this batting helmet is “air conditioned”.

Cleveland sported a similar look in the late 1950s-early 1960s. For a single season in 1962, the Tribe reinserted Chief Wahoo into the wishbone C but I haven’t seen a helmet like that. Tough to tell for certain, but it looks like the wishbone C on the helmets Johnny and Tito are wearing in the pics below may have been a raised, 3D logo.

The 1956 “air conditioned” Big Red Machine preview version is the first verifiable Cincinnati batting helmet I have found. Note the white, painted pill.

On a side note: Those weren’t the only “air conditioned” lids Cincinnati experimented with. They tried out these caps in the spring of 1958.

The 1957-60 Cincinnati batting helmet versions also looked similar to those seasons’ caps. No pinstripes, though.

In 1959, Cincy tried out batting helmets with ear flaps in spring training.

During the 1960 season, the year Billy Martin broke Jim Brewer’s cheekbone, it looks like the Reds may have had all-white batting helmets.

In 1961, they dropped the wishbone C.

Circa mid-1960s, it appears the helmets were still hand-painted, including a faux squatchee.

Willie Mays even batted in a hand-painted Reds helmet during the 1965 ASG.

And they had a road version, too.

Just throwing this in here: The Indians started wearing their wishbone C with red helmets, in the style of my favorite Cleveland cap, in 1965.

Before returning to red wishbone C caps again in the 1967 regular season, Cincinnati gave fans a preview by wearing red batting helmets in spring training.

Aside from a few tweaks to the wishbone C, their helmets retained that classic Big Red Machine look, uninterrupted…

…until the white spring training helmets of 1983.

And that’s where I’ll close. I didn’t research into the 1990s, when the Reds had their first major makeover in over two decades. I guess initially I was looking at two articles, one on the history of protective headgear in baseball and one specifically about Cincinnati, but the two kind of overlapped, so as I was going through what I had, I just combined it all.

Hope you enjoyed!

* * *Until next time…

Cheers!

• • • • •Thanks, Leo! Another tremendous Leo’s World!

Readers? What say you?