March 13, 1915: Dodgers manager Wilbert Robinson agrees to catch a baseball dropped from a plane. Robinson caught it, but then fell down, covered in goo. "Help!" he yelled. "I'm bleeding to death!" Players came running, then burst into laughter when they saw the pilot had dropped a grapefruit!

During the spring of 1915, a pioneering pilot named Ruth Law -- the first woman to "loop the loop" in an airplane -- as a publicity stunt was dropping golf balls from her tiny airplane onto a golf course in Daytona Beach.

The Brooklyn Dodgers -- or as they were also known at the time, the Superbas or the Robins -- were having spring training in the area, and the players thought a similar gimmick would be good for baseball.

Seven years earlier, on August 21, 1908, catcher Gabby Street of the Washington Senators caught a ball dropped from the top of the Washington Monument -- a distance of 555 feet. It was calculated that a 6-ounce baseball dropped from that height would take nearly 6 seconds to reach Street waiting at the bottom, and it would reach a speed of 95 miles per hour and would have 300 pounds of force. It took several attempts to get the ball anywhere in Street's vicinity. Finally, after about 10 tries, a ball fell close enough to Street that he could make a try for it. Street said he didn't even see the ball until it was about halfway down, and then had to make a running dash to get under it. He caught it, but the force of the ball hitting the glove almost took him down!

A ball dropped from a plane would be an even bigger feat. Law agreed to it, but none of the players did. The ball dropped from the Washington Monument reportedly had so much force that Street's mitt nearly touched the pavement; who knows how high the airplane would be and how much force the ball would have behind it?

Robinson was now three months shy of his 51st birthday, but had been a catcher in the majors from 1886 to 1902 and accepted the challenge. As the tiny plane circled several hundred feet over the ballpark, a small round object was tossed from the cockpit. Robinson stood under it, raised his hands, and then the sphere bounced either off his head, his chest, his shoulder, or his arm, depending on which account you believe, before he caught it.

Then he fell to the ground, covered in warm fluid, and crying out for help!

"Help! I'm dying!" he yelled to his players. "I'm bleeding to death!"

The players came running to help their manager, then burst into laughter when they realized he was covered not in blood... but in juicy pulp from a grapefruit.

In some versions of the story, it was a deliberate prank instigated by Dodgers outfielder Casey Stengel, who went up in the plane with her. In another, the baseball was rolling around on the floor of the plane, and Stengel reached for it and mistakenly came up instead with a grapefruit which Law had aboard as her lunch. (Stengel himself later revised that version of the story, saying it was instead team trainer Fred Kelly who was in the plane.)

Law's version, as she recounted in 1957, was that as she was alone aboard the tiny plane. As she was getting into it, she realized she'd left in her hotel room the baseball she had planned to drop.

"While I was considering the dilemma, a young man working in my outfit brought me a small grapefruit that he had intended to have with his lunch and suggested that I drop that. It looked about the size of a baseball and I thought what difference would it make if I dropped the pretty yellow fruit? Dummy that I was, I hadn't thought of the difference in weight of its juicy interior."

Either way, it was a grapefruit and not a baseball that she dropped over the side. It burst open when it hit Robinson, showering him in goo that he thought had erupted from his body. And he, worried about the stories about the hundreds of pounds of force the falling ball would have -- after all, none of his players were brave enough to try it -- assumed the ball had hit him like a bullet!

Here's how the story was reported in the Daytona Daily News on March 17:

NO MORE GRAPEFRUIT FOR MANAGER ROBINSON

Wilbert Robinson, manager of the Brooklyn Superbas, has developed a great dislike for grapefruit, since he was rendered helpless by being hit with one tossed from Ruth Law's aeroplane. A baseball was to have been thrown out of the machine, as it passed over the ball park, but the party selected to do the trick forgot the ball and substituted a grapefruit. When Robinson saw the sphere coming down, he thought it was a lemon, and proceeded to "nail" it. The veteran catcher misjudged the fruit, and instead of catching it in his "mits," it walloped him on the arm, leaving a "yellow streak" on Robinson that will take sometime to wear off. If there is any thing that the old manager despises worse than a yellow streak, it's a grapefruit.

Although the story says Robinson believed the falling object was a lemon, in later accounts Robinson says he indeed thought it was a ball and was surprised when it burst open.

Supposedly the prank is how the spring training "Grapefruit League" got its nickname, but that might be apocryphal, as newspapers sometimes dubbed it the "grapefruit and orange" league not in reference to the stunt but to Florida's famous citrus crops. But Stengel later said that from then on, Robinson's nickname among the players was "Grapefruit."