Baseball As America

From the Tour: On the Road With Baseball As America

The other Ted Kennedy: Discovery and the Diamond

by Kristen Mueller,
Baseball As America Lead Curator

(Article originally published in Memories and Dreams — Fall 2004)

Ted Kennedy’s major league pitching career lasted just two years (1885-86), but he became well known as an inventor and equipment manufacturer.

The spirit of invention that fed our nation’s industrial and economic growth has also been a continuing part of the baseball story. Innovation has flourished both on and off the field, thanks to players who have doubled as inventors over the years. Many a pro has turned to experimentation in order to achieve greater success in the game. Improvements have been spurred on by changes in the way the game is played, as well as for safety concerns. A little-known pitcher with a penchant for tinkering, Ted Kennedy was one of these visionaries.

In 1884, Kennedy began his career with the Keokuk, Iowa team of the Western League. That season, he struck out 17 batters in succession, and then 24 in another game. The following season, Kennedy received a big-league offer from the Chicago White Stockings. After a less-than-stellar year with Chicago, Kennedy bounced to Philadelphia and St. Louis in 1886 and then hung on in the minor leagues until 1889. Kennedy’s early pitching feats became his claim to fame, and he later made regular note of them in ads for his fledgling sporting goods venture.

Though Kennedy’s ball-playing career did not flourish, the legacy he leaves behind is one of a pioneering inventor. Toward the end of his playing career, Kennedy began experimenting with mitt designs, and soon opened a factory in Chicago. After moderate success, he sold his patents to the A.G. Spalding Company.

Curveball tutorial, one in a series of correspondence lessons prepared by former pitcher Ted Kennedy in 1906 and a “glove-mitt” designed to securely catch the ball wherever it hits the glove, c. 1900.

After moving to St. Louis, Kennedy continued to work on improved designs for gloves. At that time, he also devised a correspondence school with lessons on various pitching grips and styles. Kennedy’s “School of Natural and Scientific Base Ball Instruction” included illustrated lessons on “32 ways to throw a curving ball.” In an advertisement for the correspondence school, Kennedy touted the application of scientific methods in the teaching of baseball:

“I have invented a new system of teaching the theory of base ball playing of a much higher class than the game of the present day based on natural and scientific methods. Science and my completed lessons show it without a doubt a much faster article of professional league ball in sight. It shows that the ballplayer is not at his highest skill and the future league ball player taught idealism ball will make any present day star look like an amateur.”

A collection of materials, including handmade drawings of pitching curves, instructional pamphlets, patent materials, photographs, glove and mitt prototypes (as well as templates for their construction), was donated to the Hall of Fame in the mid-1970s. Several of these items are on display in Baseball As America, including a diagrammed baseball designed to teach pitching grips, a patented “glove-mitt,” and a lesson from his correspondence school illustrate Kennedy’s on-going desire to improve the game.

Kennedy’s inventive spirit came to a tragic end in 1907. While experimenting with a burglar alarm, he sustained a severe electric shock, and died a day later at age 42. While most of Kennedy’s inventions met with little commercial success, we are reminded that both triumphs and failures are part of the evolutionary and creative processes of science. Without the Ted Kennedys of the baseball world, we wouldn’t have padded gloves, batting helmets, or even catcher’s masks.