{"id":323826,"date":"2026-08-18T07:12:27","date_gmt":"2026-08-18T07:12:27","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/323826\/"},"modified":"2026-08-18T07:12:27","modified_gmt":"2026-08-18T07:12:27","slug":"doc-bushong-brooklyns-baseball-playing-dentist","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/323826\/","title":{"rendered":"Doc Bushong: Brooklyn\u2019s baseball-playing dentist"},"content":{"rendered":"

For some odd reason, throughout the history of teams associated with the borough of Brooklyn, the month of August saw precious few ball players born or die.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Albert John \u201cDoc\u201d Bushong was one of those who did, dying in the month of August in Brooklyn.\u00a0<\/p>\n

He had a strong tie to Brooklyn, having played for three teams: the Atlantics, the Trolley Dodgers, and the Bridegrooms. Those of you who follow my columns know that those three teams could be one team with the same members but different names or some combination thereof. Bushong leaped to the head of this short list because he, like my father, was a dentist who practiced in Brooklyn. There is more to the story than that, but we\u2019ll save the surprise for later.<\/p>\n

Bushong made his Brooklyn Major League Baseball debut in 1875 as a catcher for the Brooklyn Atlantics of the National Association. During his entire major league career, he also played for the Philadelphia Athletics, Worcester Ruby Legs, Cleveland Blues and Saint Louis Browns. Bushong batted and threw right-handed. Here I pause to share with you a peculiarity of researching old time baseball. Everyone states the facts but the facts aren\u2019t always the same.\u00a0<\/p>\n

For instance, in this piece one writer talks of Buchong\u2019s short career, another points to his 17 years behind the plate. Near as I can figure, one is talking about full-year employment vs. part-time. As my grandma used to say whilst scratching her head, \u201cGo figure!\u201d<\/p>\n

Leaning as I so often do on the Society for American Baseball Research, I found this<\/a>: Though Bushong\u2019s full-time career in baseball was rather short \u2013 less than a decade \u2013 he built a reputation as one of the finest catchers of the 19th century. Standing 5-feet-11 and weighing 165 pounds, according to the encyclopedias (the Brooklyn Eagle in 1889 described him as 5-feet-8\u00bd and weighing 140 pounds), Bush was among the pioneers behind the plate in calling pitches, crouching, one-handed catching, coaching, and glove\/mitt construction. He was highly regarded among the press corps and among his colleagues and fans for his scientific approach to the game. As an intelligent, temperate, and educated man, he was often sought out and cited in the newspapers to help explain the nuances and evolutionary process of the game from the perspective of the backstop.\u201d<\/p>\n

Last night, watching premier catcher Cal Reileigh of the Seattle Mariners wave at a low and inside slider for a third strike, I mused that logic would dictate that catchers should be the best hitters in baseball. But for a few \u2014 Roy Campanella, Yogi Berra, Johnny Bench \u2014 they mostly aren\u2019t. Bushong was no exception. His career batting average was .218, but his skills behind the plate more than made up for his lack of hitting.<\/p>\n

Baseball Almanac presents this quote<\/a> from a local sportswriter: \u201cHis (Doc Bushong) style of receiving pitched balls was so gracefully efficient he suffered relatively little permanent hand or finger damage during his 16 years in baseball (note the differing total 16 vs. 17), despite playing in the barehanded backstop era,\u201d wrote Frank Phelps in\u00a0\u201c19th Century Stars.\u201d That was 1989. Further investigation showed that his career included eight seasons where his error total was zero, a goose egg.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Always looking for unusual citations, I found one about Doc Bushong from the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The museum owns a collection of early baseball cards. For those of us who grew up as part of the Topps generation of cards, few of us knew that baseball cards were about as old as the game itself. In the early days, they were advertisements. The museum has one Bushong from the Old Judge Cigarettes collection dated 1888. If you\u2019re sharing your love of the game with children and grandchildren, the museum\u2019s collection might be something to show off to them. They hardly look like baseball players but for the uniform.<\/p>\n

Two things struck this writer as unexpected. First, for someone credited as one of the finest catchers in the game, his card shows him standing, not crouching, and known for his inventiveness about gear, he is shown gloveless. The second is, of course, the link to smoking, a link that lasted well into the 20th century. It\u2019s worth a detour.<\/p>\n

Here\u2019s what the Los Angeles Times wrote about the issue<\/a>: \u201cThe hot dogs and beer aren\u2019t going away. But with the 1993 baseball season officially underway, cigarette ads are being snuffed out of the parks \u2014 a trend that may cost the tobacco giants their last best bastion of advertising.\u201d<\/p>\n

Sometimes the right place is better than every place. The Times went on to say, \u201cEver since tobacco advertising was banned from television in 1971, critics contend that tobacco makers have tried to weasel around the law by strategically placing huge billboards in the TV camera\u2019s eye. The two biggest-selling cigarette brands \u2014 Philip Morris\u2019 Marlboro and R. J. Reynolds\u2019 Winston \u2014 are in practically every ballpark that will let them.\u201d<\/p>\n

The Times continued, \u201cBut the tobacco giants may have to find alternative ad venues. Fans who filed into the Houston Astrodome on Monday for the Astros\u2019 season opener saw an odd site in center field: the familiar Marlboro sign had been covered with black plastic. It will remain that way until the Astros find a new advertiser. Tobacco ads have been banned from the park.\u201d The Times went on to point out that the Red Sox, the Dodgers, and Padres had joined the ban with Dodger Stadium nixing smoking throughout the stadium.<\/p>\n

Yet, there\u2019s that bulge so often seen in a player\u2019s cheek \u2014 chewing tobacco. Known as smokeless tobacco, it hung around until an early 2020 players\u2019 contract outlawed its use for new players but grandfathered in previous users. Even today, if you look closely at dugout shots, you\u2019ll occasionally see players with a \u201cchaw\u201d pushing out their cheeks. Some will tell you it\u2019s bubble gum. That holds water until the player spits. Nothing but chewing tobacco looks like that dark, nasty stream that shoots from a player\u2019s mouth. Ugh.<\/p>\n

Now a note about the personal aspect of this. When one\u2019s father practiced dentistry for 68 years and was the first New York University dental school graduate to open a regional, not neighborhood practice, one in an office building not a residence, in my father\u2019s case, the Fox Building at 1 Nevins St., finding a baseball-playing dentist was a hoot. Because of Bushong\u2019s skill, mentioned above, his hands went undamaged and therefore didn\u2019t impede his dental work. You\u2019d be hard-pressed today to find a catcher whose fingers would permit the fine motor skills of dentistry. But something told me not to be too impressed about the dental skills of the 1880s.<\/p>\n

Many years ago, I was tooling around in an Eastern Pennsylvania barn-turned antique shop. There I found a set of dental tools from the mid to late 1800s. Suffice it to say, they looked like they had been crafted by Black and Decker. Any of you who are fans of old Westerns have seen the standard dental procedure \u2014 half a bottle of whiskey, a dentist\u2019s foot levered against the chair, arms straining to yank out the offending tooth. Not too much finesse required. Bushong graduated from Penn\u2019s dental school, but there\u2019s no record of him ever playing baseball for Penn, probably because he was already a rostered professional.<\/p>\n

After his retirement from professional baseball in 1890, Bushong turned to the full-time practice of dentistry, first in Hoboken, New Jersey, and then in Brooklyn, where he died in 1908. He\u2019s buried in Holy Cross Cemetery on Tilden Avenue. He shares that sacred space with another Dodger great, Gil Hodges.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Before I close, I promised you a surprise. While remembered for many things in his career, the most notable single part of the Bushong legacy is the invention of the modern-day catcher\u2019s mitt. While a player from long ago, that creation makes him present at every modern baseball game. Now that\u2019s a legacy.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"For some odd reason, throughout the history of teams associated with the borough of Brooklyn, the month of…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":323827,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[36],"tags":[993,98,100,99,121966,35515,9,24,5325,63,99174],"class_list":["post-323826","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-brooklyn","tag-baseball","tag-brooklyn","tag-brooklyn-headlines","tag-brooklyn-news","tag-doc-bushong","tag-major-league-baseball-mlb","tag-new-york","tag-new-york-city","tag-no-paywall","tag-nyc","tag-vli-vertical-lede-image"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/323826","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=323826"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/323826\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/323827"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=323826"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=323826"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=323826"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}