There’s been a strong effort by the UI baseball program to get back to its roots, to learn its history. It’s something I heartily embrace and I know a lot of fans feel the same. Many have asked me if there was some sort of repository of information on Illini Baseball (“do you know when so-and-so played… I’d love to look that up”).
So maybe the baseball program saw the demand and began to research and make available some of the information they have. Earlier this year, they compiled rosters for every season of Illini Baseball and put them on the web. Now, they’ve gone a step further…
Now, they have introduced a segment on fightingillini.com called Illini Retrospective which gives a in-depth look at the history of University of Illinois baseball. Their first installment of this series looks at the years 1879-1940. This particular segment brings us back to the old days when players like Carl Lundgren, Jake Stahl (the only Illini to hit over .400 two years in a row), and head coach George Huff were legends of their time.
All I can say to those doing this is “keep it up”. Some of us love reading about the history of the program.
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By the way, a little trivia about Jake Stahl who went on a successful career in the pros: the term “jaking it” had its origin with Stahl:
"Jake" meaning "to fake an injury" or "to hang back in play, to loaf" in sports was, according to Paul Dickson’s New Dickson Baseball Dictionary, derived from the name of Garland "Jake" Stahl, a player for and manager of the Boston Red Sox in the early 1900s. Opinions vary on the exact rationale for this "jake" as slang. Some say that Stahl inspired the "malingering" sense of the term when he refused to play because of an injured foot, others that the "hang back" sense is a pun on Stahl (pronounced "stall"). Whatever the original reason, "jake" has been in constant use in baseball since about 1927.
Stahl was obviously an accomplished player in the majors but for whatever reason when he refused to play because of the foot injury, the term stuck and I hear people use even today on occasion.
Apparently though, Stahl wasn’t “jaking it”. His foot injury was bad enough to get released by the team. Here’s a scanned article from July 16, 1913 detailing the unfortunate affair.