Baseball Cartoons: Pen, Paper,
and a Great Joke!

As Joe Garagiola pointed out with the title of one of the best-selling baseball books of the 1960s, “Baseball is a funny game.” We couldn’t agree more, and that’s why we love baseball cartoons, the fastest and most direct way of getting a chuckle or even a big laugh out of the game. Skillful drawing is important, and a recognizable style is preferable, but the only requisite, besides a knowledge of baseball, for successful baseball cartooning is the ability to find and convey the humor in the situation being depicted.

Political cartoonists have long kept baseball handy to their drawing tables, utilizing the trappings of the game so familiar to all Americans to get their points across. Baseball was also a favorite setting, situation, and metaphor for Charles Schulz, whose Peanuts characters discovered and revealed not political meaning but the truths of everyday existence. The staple of baseball cartoons, however, has been the game itself; a slice of life to be sure but one with infinite possibilities for humor within its boundaries.

Willard Mullin, the recognized newspaper King of Cartoons, developed an inimitable style in the New York dailies of the 1940s and ‘50s that elevated the profession for all who followed him; and today almost every major newspaper in the country has a sports cartoonist who enhances the paper’s coverage of baseball. (Here in Cincinnati baseball fans have been treated to the work of two masters of the genre: Pulitzer Prize-winning Jim Borgman and Jerry Dowling). Fans of Sport Magazine remember that when that great monthly was in its heyday a funny baseball cartoon or two could be found in almost every issue. More recently, baseball has routinely been the subject of nationally syndicated cartoon strips such as In the Bleachers (by Steve Moore) and Tank McNamara (by Bill Hinds and Jeff Millar). And, no less a beacon of high literary taste and culture than The New Yorker has exhibited such a fondness for the baseball cartoon that in 2003 Bloomberg Press was inspired to publish a collection of the best baseball cartoons to grace the pages of the magazine. Here at Spitball we are pleased and proud to continue the comic tradition represented by the cartoonists and publications mentioned above, and we are happy to reproduce here some of the best baseball cartoons that have appeared in our magazine.

Check back soon! Lots more coming...illustrations, discussions...
Awesome stuff!