About this edition

Provenance, rights, and what is missing

The source

How to Watch Baseball at the Field or on Television is a 46-page booklet published by Phillips Petroleum Company in 1953 and given away at Phillips 66 stations. Sixteen chapters, each bylined by a then-active major leaguer, each closing with a short list of cues telling a fan where to point their eyes. It carries the notice “Copyright 1953 Phillips Petroleum Company”.

Every word here is transcribed from a physical copy. The prose is reproduced as printed; only damage introduced by optical character recognition has been repaired. Several chapters end mid-sentence because that is how the page runs into its closing block. Where the booklet is dated or mistaken, we annotate alongside it rather than change it.

Copyright

Under the law in force at the time, a work published in the United States in 1953 received a 28-year term and required an active renewal filing to obtain a second one. For a 1953 work that filing would have fallen around 1980 or 1981. Without renewal, the work entered the public domain.

A search of Stanford University’s Copyright Renewal Database found no renewal for Phillips Petroleum Company or for this title. That database covers renewals received between 1950 and 1992 for works published between 1923 and 1963, which contains the relevant window exactly, so a null result there is substantive rather than merely inconclusive.

It is not, however, complete. Stanford indexes book-class renewals only, so a renewal filed under another class would not appear in it. A search of the Copyright Office’s own records, which cover all classes from 1978 forward, has not yet been completed. We believe this booklet is in the public domain and say so as a considered conclusion rather than a guarantee. If you hold rights in this work and disagree, please get in touch.

Trademarks and likenesses

This site is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Phillips 66 or Phillips Petroleum Company, and uses none of their marks in its own identity. It is likewise unaffiliated with Major League Baseball or any of its clubs; club names appear only as factual description of who played where in 1953.

Player photographs appear only within their own chapters, as part of the reproduced page. No player’s name or likeness is used to brand or promote this site.

The diagrams

Each of the sixteen hand-drawn diagrams has been rebuilt as an animated figure. The geometry is real: positions are held in feet on an actual baseball field, and every movement is checked against the speeds a person can actually run and throw. Where the booklet makes a claim — that a squeeze play makes the run certain, that a runner takes an extra base on a single to right because the throw is longer — the animation is timed so the claim is measurably true, and a test enforces it.

They are interpretations, not reproductions. Each figure links to the page it came from and carries that page’s caption.

How it was digitised, and what is missing

The first scan omitted three leaves entirely — page 11, which ends Ralph Kiner’s chapter on power hitting, and pages 40 and 41, which end Bill Stewart’s chapter on umpiring. They were rescanned before publication, so the book is complete here.

A torn corner on page 40 destroys the opening of three consecutive lines, and those openings are the only text on this site that was not read directly from the page. What survives is “is effort to keep from being”, “ocked down by the runner sliding”, and “n to break up the play”; we read them as “In his effort”, “knocked down”, and “in to break up the play”. Each is forced by the surviving letters together with the sentence that ends page 39, and we record them here rather than let a reader assume the page was whole.

Season data

The information used here was obtained free of charge from and is copyrighted by Retrosheet. Interested parties may contact Retrosheet at www.retrosheet.org.