Kilby writes: I have no idea where Bill found this image, but he saved it in a miscellaneous draft back in 2019, and I figured that it would be appropriate to post it on the 100th anniversary of the event:
Bill was a dedicated baseball fan; he later said that he would have been interested in seeing an amateur game during his visit to Berlin in 2017, but in retrospect it would have been very difficult to find one (then or now).
P.S. In recent baseball news, The Daily Cartoonist posted a nice (if slightly repetitive) collection of cartoons commemorating the death of Willie Mays.
Comics I Don't Understand 
The value of sports in enabling small talk.
That’s an iconic photo that I’ve seen a few times before. Note what looks like a basket full of coke bottles on the bench. Ruth was out for about five minutes, returned to the game where he got three hits off Walter Johnson, and even played the second game of the doubleheader. Today he would have been put on concussion protocol and would have sat out at least seven games. I love old-time photos and you can find bigger copies of this photo online that allows you to see much more detail.
As far as baseball in Germany, Wikipedia says that it is a minor sport but that 30,000 people play it so that he should have been able to find a game somewhere. Minnesota outfileder Max Kepler was born in Germany and played amateur baseball there. They also play pesäpallo in Germany which is a kind of souped up, Finnish version of baseball.
Concussion protocol in the NFL is an imperfect but helpful first step. It certainly beats just saying “he just got his bell rung.”
There’s one of the classic photos of quarterback Y. A. Tittle right after throwing an interception returned for a TD in a game as he was brutally hit and suffered a concussion among other injuries. There was another shot from a different photographer that was also well-known, but I prefer this one. It’s the haunted stare.
@ U.$. (2) – The question was moot right from the beginning, because Bill never mentioned his interest to me until after he had returned to the U.S., but even if there are 30K baseball players hidden somewhere in Germany, that is an insignificant whisper (just 1 out of every 2800 people) compared to “Fußball” (a.k.a. soccer), for which there are 6.5 million club members (8% of the population) in Germany, organized in 27000 clubs (many of which support multiple teams at more than one level).
P.S. There is in fact a “German National Baseball League” (with 11 teams), but the only teams located even remotely close to here are in Hamburg and Döhren (each of which is a good three-hour drive (one way) from Berlin).
If Fußball is soccer, what is the name for the tabletop game with flippers styled as players on rotating spindles which the human actual players can flip around to propel a puck?
Foosball
The term “Foosball” is the (American) English name for it, Germans generally call the game “Tischkicker”; I’ve never heard anyone here call it by the supposedly “official” name of “Tischfußball”.
“Tisch” is table, so “Table football” or “Table soccer” makes sense. A play table in general, as for children, is “Spieltisch” but I find it interesting that “Spieltisch” is also (very logically) the term for a pipe organ console. For me, playing the pipe organ is much more fun than Foosball.
Parallel to “Kicker” for a foosball table, the German word for a pinball machine is “Flipper”, and no, dolphins have nothing to do with it.
They call him Flipper, Flipper / faster than lightning / and since he was a young man, he’s played the silver ball.
No one you see / is smarter than he / from Soho down to Brighton he must have played them all.