Photo courtesy Jack Bales

These are the saddest of possible words: "Tinker to Evers to Chance." Trio of bear cubs, and fleeter than birds, Tinker and Evers and Chance. Ruthlessly pricking our gonfalon bubble, Making a Giant hit into a double— Words that are heavy with nothing but trouble: "Tinker to Evers to Chance."

This poem, penned by Franklin P. Adams and published in the New York Evening Mail a century ago, is well-known to nearly every baseball fan. (And though I have seen the second-to-last line printed with the word "weighty" instead of "heavy", the original piece of doggerel did indeed use "heavy.)

For many years, it was thought that July 10, 1910 was the publication date. However, I have learned from Jack Bales, a librarian at the University of Mary Washington in Fredericksburg, Virginia (and a big Cubs fan) that his research shows that today, July 12, is the actual centennial of the publication of this poem. After the jump, a reproduction of excerpts of Bales' research that proves this date.

Happy 100th Birthday, "Tinker To Evers To Chance".

From Jack Bales -- parts of an article he wrote about "Baseball's Sad Lexicon" for his local newspaper last May, and many thanks to Jack for sharing it with me, so I could share it with you, as we take a break from the 2010 season for a few days.

It was "Baseball’s Sad Lexicon," however, that was reprinted all across the country and in dozens of anthologies. Often called "Tinker to Evers to Chance," it is the second-best-known baseball poem in America—close behind Ernest Thayer’s immortal "Casey at the Bat," written in 1888.

Adams’s verse was destined to have far-reaching effects on the 3 teammates as well as on the publishing world. It is largely credited with getting them inducted into the National Baseball Hall of Fame together in 1946. Indeed, more than a few baseball statisticians sniff that Tinker, Evers, and Chance never did lead the league in double plays, and that it was the poem’s cadence rather than the players’ craft that paved their way into the fabled Hall in Cooperstown, New York.

Countless sources state that Adams’s famous bit of doggerel was published in the July 10, 1910, issue of the New York Evening Mail, the day Adams saw the Chicago Cubs play the Giants at New York’s Polo Grounds.

The problem? When Tim Wiles, Director of Research at the National Baseball Hall of Fame, and I began researching the poem’s centennial, it did not take long to notice that the Cubs were playing in Chicago that day. Furthermore, July 10, 1910, was a Sunday, and the Evening Mail was not printed on Sundays.

Some researchers maintain that the poem was first published on July 18 that year. If that’s true, how did it appear in the Chicago Daily Tribune a few days earlier under the title "Gotham’s Woe"?

A bit of checking revealed that just two libraries held the newspaper for 1910. Just one—the Center for Research Libraries in Chicago—would loan the microfilmed summer issues, and it lent items at no charge only to members of its library consortium (others, understandably, had to pay a rather hefty fee). Fortunately, my alma mater, Illinois College in Jacksonville, belongs to the group, and I emailed its library director, Martin Gallas. He readily agreed to borrow the microfilm and skim the pages for the month of July.

Gallas did more than just that. He carefully pored over the Evening Mail for the entire months of June, July, and August. He turned up not only "Baseball’s Sad Lexicon" in the issue for July 18, but also the original publication of Adams’s poem, which appeared on July 12 under the title "That Double Play Again." (Not surprisingly, on July 11, Cubs players Joe Tinker, Johnny Evers, and Frank Chance turned a double play against the Giants in a 4-2 win for the Chicago team.)

ELKINS PARK, PA. — Lynnewood Hall, a century-old stunner of a building just outside Philadelphia, silently, almost invisibly, languishes 200 feet beyond a two-lane blacktop road like a crumbling little Versailles.

The graceful fountain that welcomed hundreds of well-heeled visitors, President Franklin Roosevelt among them, was dismantled and sold years ago. Its once meticulously sculpted French gardens are overgrown with weeds and vines. The classical Indiana limestone facade may have lost its luster but its poise still remains — at least from the other side of rusted wrought iron gates that keep the curious at bay.

Like other Gilded Age palaces of the nation's pre-Depression industrial titans, Lynnewood Hall is a relic of a bygone era facing an uncertain future. Will it befall the same fate as neighboring Whitemarsh Hall, the demolished mansion of banking magnate Edward Stotesbury? Or will it be returned to former glory, like industrialist Alfred I. duPont's former Nemours Mansion in Delaware?

"It's a tragedy that people drive past Lynnewood Hall and don't know what it is, or don't even notice it's there," said Stephen J. Barron, who runs a website and Facebook group aiming to drum up interest in the mansion's plight. "It breaks my heart and it bothers me. The house is a work of art."

Long before its current humble predicament, Lynnewood Hall was home to the uber-wealthy Widener family and called "the last of the American Versailles."

The lord of Lynnewood Hall, Peter A.B. Widener, started out as a butcher. After making a small fortune supplying mutton to Union troops during the Civil War, he grew into a full-fledged tycoon from buying streetcar and railroad lines and investing in steel, tobacco and oil.

Among the spoils was his 480-acre estate, its centerpiece the 110-room, 70,000-square-foot Georgian-style palace designed by architect Horace Trumbauer.

Lynnewood Hall was completed in late 1900 and cost $8 million to build — a staggering $212 million in today's dollars.

It had a ballroom that held 1,000 people, an indoor pool and squash court, a bakery and full-time upholstery and carpentry shops. The estate boasted its own power station, horse track and stables, and a 220-acre farm run by a staff of 100.

French landscape architect Jacques Greber designed the formal French gardens, which were graced by his brother Henri-Louis Greber's fountain of bronze and marble statuary.

"It's a great building and it has great potential for commercial use, especially for institutional use," said Mary Werner DeNadai, principal of John Milner Architects in Chadds Ford. "It was certainly built to last."

Contrary to accounts describing it as largely gutted, Lynnewood Hall is in surprisingly stable condition and generally intact, said DeNadai, who got a rare look inside in 2004 at the behest of an client interested in a possible purchase.

Her firm specializes in breathing new life into mothballed mansions, among them Nemours in Wilmington, Del., owned by a duPont-founded nonprofit and reopened in 2009 as a house museum after a three-year, $39 million rehab.

The rough estimate six years ago for rehabbing Lynnewood Hall was $12 million, not including grounds or other structures on the estate, DeNadai said.

For aging mansions without healthy endowments to keep them going, a second chance can come in the form of an upscale hotel, conference center or country club, said Jim Vaughan of the National Trust for Historic Preservation in Washington.

"If the building has good bones it might make sense, but it takes a major capital investment," he said. "Coming up with a successful business plan, then finding investors to make it happen, is a real challenge with these great old mansions."

He said it's also easier to come up with workable ideas for "smaller" mansions — perhaps half the size of the Wideners' former home.

"It's a very wonderful property but a very difficult property in the sense of bringing it back from the edge," said David Rowland, president of the Old York Road Historical Society, who has long followed Lynnewood Hall's precarious plight.

Lynnewood Hall's reversal of fortune began when P.A.B. Widener's son, Joseph, died there in 1943 and the younger generation deemed the property too large to maintain. Much of the acreage was sold to developers and the opulent furnishings were auctioned. In 1952, the Rev. Carl McIntire of Collingswood, N.J., a controversial fundamentalist preacher, bought the property for $190,000 and established a Christian seminary.

As maintenance and heating costs on the past-its-prime palace skyrocketed, the Faith Theological Seminary sold Lynnewood Hall's magnificent fountain, marble walls and fireplaces and other parts of its interior to make ends meet. New York physician Richard Sei-Oung Yoon, a former student of McIntire and one-time chancellor of the cash-strapped seminary, bought its mortgage in 1993 for $1.6 million with plans of establishing his own church there.

He and Cheltenham Township have been embroiled in a yearslong legal battle over Yoon's request for tax-exempt status as a religious organization, which the township has denied. Meanwhile, Yoon has paid tens of thousands of dollars in property taxes, which Rowland said are being held in escrow while the case is held up in the courts.

Neither Yoon nor Cheltenham Township manager David Kraynik responded to repeated requests for comment. A caretaker lives on a 15,000-square-foot "guest house" but could not be reached.

Norman J. Manohar, current president of the seminary, now headquartered in Baltimore, referred all questions to the group's attorney Herman Weinrich. He did not respond to a request for comment.

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Online:

http://www.lynnewoodhall.com