The Ball

by John Fox

  “Kids are always asking me why I’m dressed as an undertaker,” he said, brushing dirt off his coat.

  A longtime Civil War history buff, Jeff was looking for ways to immerse himself in his favorite period. But, he says, “I’m too much of a pacifist to run around with a gun, even a fake one. So vintage baseball seemed like a better fit.”

  I joked that I’d recently come from 1866 and was happy to report that, postwar, the game was still very much in vogue.

  “More in vogue is the truth, and more of a national game,” said Jeff. “In 1861, baseball was still mostly played in New England and New York. After the Civil War, soldiers took the game back to their hometowns with them and it spread like wildfire.”

  On the eve of the War Between the States, baseball was often promoted in the press as useful preparation for battle, with its physical demands, sharpening of skills, and promotion of the values of teamwork and fraternity. A newspaper editorial that year remarked that “Baseball clubs . . . are now enlisted in a different sort of exercise, the rifle or gun taking the place of the bat, while the play ball gives place to the leaden messenger of death.”

  Jeff introduced me to Brian “Cappy” Sheehy, a cheerful, barrel-chested 28-year-old high school history teacher and club captain. Brian started the club in 2002, naming it after a club that had played in his hometown back in 1859.

  As the eighth inning was kicking off, he asked me if I wanted to play.

  “I’m afraid I left my knickers at home,” I replied.

  “Don’t worry,” he assured me. “We’ll take you as is.”

  A vintage baseball game underway in Washington, D.C.

  Taking to the field with my teammates, I felt like Kevin Costner in the closing scene of Field of Dreams (without the 1980s mullet). I assessed the familiar geometry of the diamond (falsely named since the 1830s: diamonds have two acute and two obtuse angles). I manned second base as the lead-off batter took the plate, wondering whether the second base force-out had been instituted yet (it hadn’t). And whether batters were allowed to overrun first base yet (they weren’t). The batter drove the first pitch well into center field, rounded first, and headed for second. The center fielder chased down the ball and fired it hard to me. As the ball burned a hole through my fingers and kept going I thought to myself how remarkably helpful a glove would have been at that very moment.

  “Muffin!” yelled a player on the other team.

  With little help from me, we eventually managed to retire the side. Soon it was my turn at bat. I selected a caveman club from the pile and headed to home plate, which was literally a heavy round iron plate stuck into the ground.

  The catcher pointed to the outfield. “If you hit the goat, it’s an automatic home run.” I looked and there was indeed a rather large white goat browsing in left field. I felt suddenly lucky, thinking of the curse of the angry goat brought on the Chicago Cubs in the 1945 World Series when the club’s owner ejected a local tavern owner’s goat from the ball park. Truth is, goat or no goat, a home run would have been a rare occurrence in 1861 owing to the combination of large unbounded fields and soft homemade balls. Baseball was still a “small ball” game. In the absence of gloves, it was best to attempt a line drive or a hard grounder, forcing one player to barehand the ball and throw it to another player who had to barehand it to make the out.

  I let the first pitch pass, knowing there were no called balls or strikes to worry about. It bounced past the catcher and into Big Dave’s mud pit.

  “It’s okay, he’s sleeping,” called out a crank as the catcher bounded over the electric fence to pluck the ball from a pile of rotten vegetables.

  The second pitch came right down the middle. I swung my club and tipped it back and foul—or so I thought.

  “One hand!” called the umpire.

  I opened my mouth to protest but checked myself.

  I stomped back to the bench, wishing I had a helmet to throw. Brian explained that I was out because the catcher had caught the ball after it bounced once in fair territory. The notion of foul versus fair territory was a welcome contribution of the Knickerbockers to the game of baseball. Before the Knickerbockers imposed order on chaos, players would commonly reverse-hit the ball behind the catcher or chip it far wide of the baselines to give themselves extra time to reach first base. Nevertheless, the rules around “tipped” balls took time to evolve and, much to my chagrin, in 1861 a ball was called fair as long as it bounced once in fair territory.

  Strange as the rule was, I could live with it. But rule 12 was another story. The fly ball rule I got. A ball caught on the fly is an out. It’s the first rule any Little Leaguer learns and, as David Block points out, is probably the oldest rule in the game, forming the basis for stool-ball, trap-ball, and most other early bat-and-ball games. But being called out on a ball caught on the bounce?

  “What kind of lame rule is that?” I muttered to myself.

  In the 1860s, it turns out, there were plenty of other like-minded players muttering to themselves. The “bound rule,” as it was known, was a Knickerbocker innovation, and it quickly became the lightning rod in a struggle over what Goldstein calls the “two ethics of the game.”

  Considering the great historic rivalries of baseball—Yankees versus Red Sox and Giants versus Dodgers to name just two of the longest lasting—and the passions they stir in players and fans alike, it’s nearly impossible to conceive of a time when excessive competition was regarded as a problem for the sport. But for its first two decades, baseball was a game of gentlemen played not for money or even victory but for fun and fraternity. Sportswriters of the time were as likely to applaud how players cheered each other at the end of the game and left the field “arm and arm” as they were to provide a blow by blow of the game itself. Players who swore or otherwise got carried away in the heat of the competition were fined on the spot—anywhere from 10 to 50 cents—the money put to good use to pay for after-game festivities. And cranks were the worst offenders of all, as they are today. As one club’s officers lamented, “What . . . can any club do? Can we restrain a burst of applause or indignation from an assemblage of more than 15,000 excited spectators, whose feelings are enlisted as the game proceeds, by the efforts of this or that player or players?”

  As spirited competition became more broadly accepted as good for the sport, the bound rule came under attack as an “unmanly” remnant of baseball’s childish roots. In 1858, the newly formed National Association of Base Ball Players (NABBP), attempting to distance their manly sport from its boyish associations, voted to exclude any members under the age of 21. Younger players protested. One correspondent to a sports weekly who signed his name “Infant Ball Player,” argued, “The boys have a say in regard to this game, which they have always played, and which most of you have only just now taken out of their hands.”

  The Knickerbockers had already taken concrete steps to remove the game from the domain of youth. In rule 13 they made it clear that “in no instance is a ball to be thrown” at a runner. Reasonable as that sounds in this age of 80 mph missiles fired to first base, players before this rule were put out by being “soaked” or “plugged” with the ball. Abandoning what was widely regarded as a childish practice made for a more advanced level of play by fielders and base runners. It also allowed for balls to get harder, which in turn made the thrilling crack of a Hank Aaron or “Big Papi” home run possible.

  Likewise, many argued through the 1850s and 1860s, catching a ball on one bounce was, as Henry Chadwick stated at the time, “a feat a boy of ten years of age would scarcely be proud of.” He called on fielders to do their best to catch the ball on the fly, arguing that “nothing disappoints the spectator, or dissatisfies the batsman so much, as to see a fine hit to the long field caught on the bound in this simple, childish manner.”

  The dwindling defenders of the old bound rule, who Chadwick chided as a “muffin fraternity,” suggested that eliminating the bound rule would make baseball too much like cricket or caus
e more injury to hands. Most traditionalists, however, were just trying in vain to hang on to the spirit of the game as a social outlet for fun, exercise, and friendship—a game all comers were welcome to play.

  But the press and spectators favored excitement and skill over fraternity and tradition. The fly rule, codified at last in 1864, made for faster, more riveting play that pushed fielding skills to a new level. It gave outfielders a reason to make graceful, diving catches that brought fans to their feet, and it gave batters a reason to push the ball high and deep to test the pluck and athleticism of fielders. It also brought out the crowds.

  By the summer of 1858 baseball fever had officially swept New York. The Brooklyn clubs, the best in the nation, issued a challenge to the New York clubs (Brooklyn then being a separate city). In what would become the very first All-Star game and New York’s first (pre-subway) subway series, each city was to pick their best “nine” from among various clubs to compete. The neutral ground chosen was the Fashion Race Course in Queens. To accommodate the crowds, which swelled to 10,000, the New York Tribune announced that steamer ships would leave the Fulton Market in Manhattan and horse-drawn carriages would take fans from the Queens slip to the ball field. Having assembled the best players in the game, the series promoters had the novel idea of charging spectators a steep admission price of 50 cents to attend the contest. The series was a wild success. Brooklyn edged New York in the third game and, after expenses, $71.09 in profits was donated to the two cities’ fire departments.

  No one had imagined that there was money to be made from baseball. But as club competition became more intense and the first stars began to emerge in the game, the age of professional sport was just around the corner. By 1860, Jim Creighton, who threw the first fastball, completed the first triple play, and threw a wicked underhand change-up he called the “dew drop,” was being paid under the table by the Brooklyn Excelsiors. Under the table, because the NABBP at the time prohibited player salaries. To get around the prohibition while retaining the appearance of upholding the amateur spirit of the game, teams commonly laundered salaries through local city businesses.

  One of the first to decry the hypocrisy of such arrangements was Albert G. Spalding, a rising pitching star with a club called the Forest Citys in Rockford, Illinois. When he was approached by the Chicago Excelsiors to join the team, the offer came with no salary but with a $40 a week grocery clerk job. He leapt at the chance to play big city ball but, as he wrote later in his autobiographical account, America’s National Game, “I was not able to understand how it could be right to pay an actor, or a singer, or an instrumentalist for entertaining the public, and wrong to pay a ball player for doing exactly the same thing in his way.” Spalding’s stint with the Excelsiors was brief. The team folded in his first season in uniform, and he returned to his old team in Rockford to plan his next move.

  As documented by his biographer, Peter Levine, back home the 17-year-old Spalding filled his scrapbook with news clippings on subjects ranging from baseball to banking and other business stories. Highlighted in black ink were stories about the Cincinnati Red Stockings and their celebrated manager, English-born cricket pro Harry Wright, who openly recruited and paid salaries to the best players around. Also marked off was an announcement that Wright and his brother George had opened a store in New York “for the sale of bats, balls, bases and all the paraphernalia needed for outdoor games.”

  Spalding’s “cannon ball” underhand caught Wright’s attention after it laid waste to the Red Stockings in a 12–5 upset in the fall of 1870. The next year, after moving the Red Stockings to Boston—where they would eventually become the Red Sox—and organizing baseball’s first professional league, the National Association of Professional Base Ball Players, Wright signed “Big Al” as a pitcher with an annual salary of $1,500.

  But Spalding had bigger plans in baseball than being a star pitcher. Under Wright’s tutelage, he learned the business of managing a club. When Wright decided in 1874 to fulfill a personal dream and stage a barnstorming tour of his homeland with his Boston Red Stockings, he sent Spalding ahead as his agent to make arrangements for the visit. Although the curiosity factor of Yanks in brightly colored socks brought out spectators, the tour, intended to spread the new American gospel of baseball to English cricket lovers, lost money and did little to convince the English to forsake their wickets for bases. “Few of the youth of Great Britain,” one English commentator noted, “will desert cricket with its dignity, manliness, and system for a rushing, helter-skelter game.” But Spalding learned firsthand the power of marketing and public relations for generating buzz, skills he’d make good use of in the years ahead.

  By 1876, Spalding had taken his free agency and business acumen to the Chicago White Stockings, leaving Boston in the dust and in mourning. It was a straight-up business deal, and a sweet one at that, having negotiated with team president William Hulbert a $2,000 annual contract, 25 percent of gate receipts, and a role as player-manager. Over the next 16 years, as player, manager, and later as president, he helped turn the White Stockings into the most dominant team in baseball. Over 10 seasons between 1880 and 1890 they boasted a winning percentage of .676, and in 1880 set the still unbroken record of .798, winning 67 out of 84 games.

  But as anyone knows who’s ever owned a baseball or a glove, or who has grown up in the city playing stickball with that wondrous pink sphere known as a Spaldeen, Al Spalding wasn’t content with having his name inscribed only on his jersey. Baseball was finally becoming the business he’d envisioned it could be, and he was determined to lead the charge. In 1878, the New York Clipper sports weekly noted that “bats are being made by the 500,000, balls by the thousand gross.” The same year Spalding moved back to Chicago, he and his brother Walter opened their own “baseball and sporting-good emporium” at 118 Randolph Street. Walter, a bank teller, ran the business at first while Spalding played the star pitcher, bringing in publicity and sales.

  In the years that followed, Spalding more or less invented sports marketing, blurring the lines between play and business long before the days of Michael Jordan or Tiger Woods. In his first year in business he launched Spalding’s Official Baseball Guide, a publication that included his full-page autographed picture on the cover. For more than a half-century, the guide was the favorite reading choice of young boys eager to get the latest how-tos from the pros.

  By 1884 the publication had a circulation of 50,000 and was serving as a marketing platform for selling the firm’s sporting goods to a growing nation of baseball fanatics. Spalding quickly cornered the market after his “Spalding League Ball” scored exclusive designation as the official ball of the National League. Then there were his “wagon tongue baseball bats” made of “the finest straight grained, well seasoned, second growth Ash sticks” and used by “nine-tenths” of the players in the World Series. As pitcher and then as first baseman, he was not only an early proponent of gloves (once seen as “unmanly”) but deliberately wore a black one for greater prominence. Having boosted the popularity of baseball gloves on the mound and at first base, he then happily supplied them by the thousand to an eager public.

  Like that other great huckster of his age, P. T. Barnum, Spalding was a master of marketing hyperbole. The firm warned against unscrupulous counterfeiters of “official” Spalding goods. “First be sure it’s a Spalding—then go buy” was their slogan. Their baseballs were sold in red sealed boxes with instructions to check that the seal wasn’t broken before opening. An article in Spalding’s Guide even alerted players to a rash of counterfeit catchers’ masks that were “liable to disfigure a player for life.”

  By October 1888, having firmly established the Spalding brand and developed a multimillion-dollar business from scratch, he set his sights on the next big thing: bringing “America’s game” to the world. For Spalding and others in the age of Manifest Destiny, baseball represented everything unique and noble in the American character. As he later ticked off in his autobiography—al
phabetically, no less—baseball was “the exponent of American Courage, Confidence, Combativeness, American Dash, Discipline, Determination, American Energy, Eagerness, Enthusiasm, American Pluck, Persistency, American Spirit, Sagacity, Success, American Vim, Vigor, Virility.” (What, no Zeal?)

  Spalding decided to take all that American goodness—and, by the way, Spalding sporting goods—on a world tour. For six months an entourage of 20 major-league players barnstormed the globe, from the deserts of Egypt and Ceylon to the green fields of Australia and New Zealand and the cricket pitches of England. As with his earlier 1874 ramble, the trip had great PR value, with 42 games played before some 200,000 people. But the cricket-loving masses of the Anglo-colonial world were, again, largely unmoved. One British reporter stated that Spalding’s beloved game was “as much out of place in England as a nursery frolic in the House of Commons.”

  Spalding and his band of travelers returned to the United States, nevertheless, as heroes. Three hundred guests, including Teddy Roosevelt and Mark Twain, packed into Delmonico’s in New York to toast Spalding’s “feat of pluck.” Countering the pinched views of the English press, Twain famously mused about the idea of attempting to bring baseball, “the very symbol, the outward and visible expression of the drive and push and rush and struggle of the raging, tearing, booming nineteenth century . . . to places of profound repose and soft indolence.”

  Spalding’s tour had confirmed for him that baseball symbolized everything that was great about America. In the years that followed, the notion that baseball might have English roots became unconscionable to Spalding—even though as a younger man he had, along with most of his contemporaries, accepted England’s influence on the game. At the same time, baseball luminary Henry Chadwick, editor of Spalding’s Guide, began authoring pieces there about baseball’s English roots. This got Spalding’s attention and set him off on his final quest: to brand baseball “Made in America” once and for all.