Bullpen

During the Civil War in the United States, the notorious Andersonville prison camp was referred to, by the inmates, as a bullpen.

Though conditions were initially a vast improvement over Richmond detention centers, problems grew in proportion to the number of inmates. By late summer 1864, the prison population made Andersonville one of the largest cities in the Confederacy. At its peak in August, the "bullpen", built to lodge up to 10,000 enlisted men, held 33,000 grimy, gaunt prisoners, each one crammed into a living area the size of a coffin. Their only protection from the elements were "shebangs", hand built shelters low to the ground created by driving forked branches into the sandy soil four to eight feet apart and a piece of limb laid in the two forks creating the center pole. Planks or limbs were laid from the center pole to the ground creating what is also known as a "lean-to". The planks or limbs were covered with tent shelter halves, gum sheets, overcoats, or blankets as the owner could afford. If no woven material was available, then the shelter was covered in broad leaves giving the owner some shade but little protection from the rain.[3]

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This wartime usage in the United States has occurred as recently as World War II. Tokio Yamane described conditions in Japanese relocation camps, referring to a "bull pen" within a stockade at Tule Lake, California.

Prisoners in the stockade lived in wooden buildings which, although flimsy, still offered some protection from the severe winters of Tule Lake. However, prisoners in the "bull pen" were housed outdoors in tents without heat and with no protection against the bitter cold. The bunks were placed directly on the cold ground, and the prisoners had only one or two blankets and no extra clothing to ward off the winter chill. And, for the first time in our lives, those of us confined to the "bull pen" experienced a life and death struggle for survival, the unbearable pain from our unattended and infected wounds, and the penetrating December cold of Tule Lake, a God Forsaken concentration camp lying near the Oregon border, and I shall never forget that horrible experience.[7]

Bullpen used to imprison striking Industrial Workers of the World farmworkers, 1933

Temporary holding facilities for rebellious workers trying to organize into unions were referred to as bullpens.[8] These military prisons were sometimes literally pens normally used for cattle which were pressed into service by stringing barbed wire, establishing a guarded perimeter, and keeping large numbers of men confined in the enclosed space. These "bullpens" have been considered early versions of concentration camps,[9] and were used by the national guard during the Colorado Labor Wars of 1903–04, and in northern Idaho during union miners' uprisings in 1892 and 1899 in the Silver Valley east of Coeur d'Alene. Author Emma Langdon described these as the first use of the bullpen in the West.[10]

In his autobiography, Bill Haywood described Idaho miners held for,

...months of imprisonment in the bull-pen, a structure unfit to house cattle, enclosed in a high barbed-wire fence.[11]

Penned up in bullpens as a response to violence, many hundreds of union men had been imprisoned without trial. Peter Carlson wrote in his book Roughneck,

Haywood traveled to the town of Mullan, where he met a man who had escaped from the bullpen. The makeshift prison was an old grain warehouse that reeked of excrement and crawled with vermin. Overcrowding was so severe that some two hundred prisoners had been removed from the warehouse and quartered in railroad boxcars.[12]

Charlie Siringo described the bull pen as

"...a large stockade with a frame building in the center, for them to sleep and eat in."[13]

• In the 1800s, jails and holding cells were nicknamed "bullpens", in respect of many police officers' bullish features – strength and a short temper.
• The bullpen symbolically represents the fenced-in area of a "bull's pen", where bulls wait before being sent off to the slaughter. The relief pitchers are the bulls and the bullpen represents their pen.
• Another theory is that the term is a reference to dairy farms, where bulls were penned separately from the cows, but in sight of their eventual "mates" so as to get them ready for "further action."[14]
• The name may be a reference to rodeo bulls being held in a pen before being released into the main arena.
• Latecomers to ball games in the late 19th century were cordoned off into standing-room areas in foul territory. Because the fans were herded like cattle, this area became known as the "bullpen", a designation which was later transferred over to the relief pitchers who warmed up there.
• At the turn of the century, outfield fences were often adorned with advertisements for the Bull Durham brand of tobacco. Since relievers warmed up in a nearby pen, the term "bullpen" came about.[15]
• Manager Casey Stengel suggested the term might have been derived from managers getting tired of their relief pitchers "shooting the bull" in the dugout and were therefore sent elsewhere, where they would not be a bother to the rest of the team – the bullpen. How serious he was when he made this claim is not clear.
• Jon Miller, a baseball play-by-play announcer with ESPN television, said the term is derived from the late 19th century. The New York Giants first played at the Polo Grounds, which opened around 1880. The relief pitchers warmed up beyond the left-field fence, and in the same area was a stockyard or pen that had bulls in it.
• In 1913, an Ohio veteran of the Civil War contrasted a current baseball game with "a good game uv old time bull pen, the way us boys uster play it." This suggests that bullpen was the name of a game.[16]