"Can you hit a man-sized target with a baseball at a distance of two hundred feet?"

The blog Ptak Science Books found an "unlikely advertisement" from 1916 "for baseball players with good throwing skills to enlist in the U.S. Army" and pitch hand grenades at, it would soon turn out, Germans.

Excerpts after the jump.

Can you hit a man-sized target with a baseball at a distance of two hundred feet?

Can you "curve 'em about their waist" all day long without feeling unduly fatigued?

If so, you had better enlist in the Army. Uncle Sam will shortly be in need of men who can handle a baseball skillfully and accurately, for a near relative to the American national sport is destined to play a big part in any warfare in which the United States Army may enter within the next few years.

This baseball-like implement of death is a small hand grenade precisely the size and weight of the ball that Tris Speaker and Ty Cobb wallop, only they would not care to take a crack at this sphere, for it is filled with a secret compartment of explosives, the formula of which is jealously guarded by the War Department as is the working of the hidden spring in the grenade.

The advantage of this typically American weapon is that it may be handled just as roughly as you wish… if one wishes to use the grenade as a bomb, a metal contrivance which fits into the palm of the hand and which presses a hidden spring at the moment the "ball" leaves the "pitcher" must be utilized. This contrivance of itself is not new. It has been sold for years to boys who desire to pitch curves or pseudo-spitballs…

…[T]he grenade, which has been practically harmless up to that time, becomes a whirling sphere of death, exploding with tremendous force upon the slightest contact.

Finally this, written 58 years before the invention of Tommy John surgery and 61 years before the birth of Scott Proctor:

…[E]ach "spit-ball artist" ought to be able to hurl a thousand of these death-dealing weapons a day.