‘DON’T THROW BOTTLES AT THE PLAYERS’
The New Lightweight Ones, Especially Paper, Might be OK (kidding)
BY ALAN GOLDFARB
May 27, 2025
“No True Lover of Base Ball (sic) will Risk Any Injury To The Players or Interfere
With The Game by Throwing Bottles Into The Field”
From The Gentleman’s Game, 1907
I’m rocking to-and-fro at my desk on a swell 65-degree Spring morning, as random thoughts of wine shuffle through my brain as though there’s a Rolodex in there. With fingers intertwined, I glance up to see, in a small-framed poster on the wall, the somewhat obtuse message (which I must have looked at a thousand times), and which to my mind, must have been wheatpasted all over the nation’s ballparks in 1907. The sign is titled “The Gentleman’s Game, 1907”.
What if the reference to bottles (bolded by me above) were wine bottles? The hooligans -- who are definitely not gentle men, and dressed as I imagine them, in knickers and tweed newsboy caps -- are hurling wine bottles onto the field; even smacking the outfielders in the noggin. They’ve been sitting in those bleachers, since bleachers were built to accommodate their asses, and throwing wine bottles since the turn of 19th-to-20th fin de siècle. Then, the baseball coppers took action to stop it, albeit in the form of those placards.
A little research into the vintage of ’07 -- both in wine and base ball -- revealed a list of wines (courtesy of Wine-Searcher) from that year. Most on the list where Bordeaux, Armagnacs & Sauternes, and Madeiras, now worth upwards of $34K(!) for a Jean Cave Armagnac. But among them is a 1907 Heidsieck Monopole Extra Dry, now selling for a mere $48. In today’s bucks, that comes to about $1.50.
I decided there and then: That must have been the spent dead soldier bottles those guys (only guys, I’m sure) at Fenway, at Wrigley and at Ebbets (and most especially at Ebbets) and at Fenway; even though those museums of ballpark immortality didn’t come into existence ‘til 1912, ’13, and ’14, in that order. I betcha a sawbuck that (wine) bottle throwing didn’t cease at the country’s ballfields for a long while after that. In spite of those, “No Throwing Bottles” warning signs.
Detroit and the Chicago Cubs won the pennants in ’07; and the likes of Cy Young, Ty Cobb, Honus Wagner and Christy Mathewson were the Judges and Ohtani of the day.
So, where was wine in 1907? Doing a little more digging, I came up with these fascinating tidbits:
The 1907 vintage for Bordeaux was “large and reasonably good in its day. Wines from the Right Bank arguably performed slightly better than the Left, particularly Pomerol. However, the vast majority of wines will be past their best. Little information exists on the Port vintage, which suggests it was mostly undeclared. It is still possible to find both Armagnac and whisky from 1907, which are likely to still be drinking well.”
Nineteen-ought-seven also saw the Romanian Peasants’ Revolt, Europe's last major uprising against feudalism. And the Workers, Socialists, and the Winegrowers' Revolt in the Languedoc grabbed attention, as well..
A French protest song from the day sounds eerily familiar and relevant:
We are the ones who have wine to sell and can't find a buyer;
We are those who have our labor to sell and can scarcely find a job;
We are those who have goods that no one can afford to buy;
We are the ones who are dying of hunger.
Play ball – and drink wine – at your own risk and resist.