Away flies the Boy
To the next destin’d Post
And then Home with Joy.
A feature of many of these games was that runners were not tagged but put out by defensive players who threw the ball at them, an action called “plugging” or “stinging.” These games were sometimes referred to as base-ball, and they certainly do represent the beginnings of American baseball.
For the most part, stick-and-ball games were the domain of children in colonial America, but beginning in the late 1700s older teenagers and young adults took up playing ball from time to time. George Ewing reports in his diary that as a soldier at Valley Forge, Pennsylvania, in 1778, he “exercised in the afternoon in the intervals played at base.” Princeton College students played “baste ball” in 1786, and enthusiasm for the sport only seemed to grow from there. In what may have been the first American college campus craze, from about 1810 to 1830, students at Brown, Bowdoin, and other eastern colleges couldn’t get enough of baseball-type games.
A nineteenth-century illustration of the "New York Game," as established by the Knickerbocker Base Ball Club in 1845. The picture shows the configuration of the field and the position of the players (note the second and third basemen standing on the bases). The pitcher is shown throwing underhand; it wasn't until 1884 that pitching was changed to overhand.
What’s remarkable about this phenomenon in these pre-Victorian times in class-conscious America is that men felt comfortable playing the game. In many localities, the notion that adults would spend considerable time playing a game like baseball would have seemed childish or odd, and while the players would not have been arrested or punished, they did risk being castigated by their peers. Stick-and-ball games were banned at Princeton on the grounds that they were “dangerous as well as beneath the propriety of a gentleman.”
Small towns also banned ball playing. In 1816 the towns of Cooperstown, New York, and Worcester, Massachusetts, both passed ordinances prohibiting the playing of ball in the streets (at Cooperstown the ban applied to specific streets). Ball playing could result in horses being frightened or a window being broken, but it may also be said that sometimes when youths do things that annoy adults, the latter find ways to make them illegal.
Illustrations of baseball-type games continued to feature children even as late as the 1830s, which may indicate that mainstream adults continued to view stick-and-ball games as children’s games. There was rounders, for instance, a children’s game popular in England in which a person would throw a ball to a side of three or four batters, and whoever hit the ball would try to run to a base and then return home before a fielder could retrieve it and throw it at him. If he succeeded, he earned a run; if not, he exchanged places with the fielder who hit him. There were many variations of this involving more bases, but this was the basic format of the game. There was also One o’Cat (with its variations) and its offshoot, town ball. In One o’Cat, Two o’Cat, Three o’Cat, and Four o’Cat, players hit the ball, ran to bases, then tried to return to the original batter’s base to score runs, the particular game played determining the number of bases used. In town ball, players divided into teams and used a small bat to hit the ball to opponents waiting in the playing field. There were other games too, such as barn ball and goal ball, in which balls, bats, and sticks were often makeshift objects, and the rules and playing fields varied according to the players. A feature of many of these games was that runners were “plugged.”
Although children’s books about stick-and-ball games continued to be published in America, men began to organize into clubs to play town ball and other precursors of modern baseball. Players were sometimes hungry for a challenge, as evidenced by this newspaper article that appeared in the July 12, 1825, edition of the Delhi (New York) Gazette:
The undersigned, all residents of the new town of Hamden, with the exception of Asa C. Howland, who has recently removed into Delhi, challenge an equal number of persons of any town in the County of Delaware, to meet them at any time at the house of Edward B. Chace, in said town, to play the game of BASS-BALL, for the sum of one dollar per game. If no town can be found that will produce the required number, they have no objection to play against any selection that can be made from the several towns in the county.
The names of nine men were printed under the article. Most were relatively young British émigrés who had come to the United States after the War of 1812, some quite recently.
Baseball remained a local pastime until September 1845, when a group of town ball players organized the New York Knickerbocker Base Ball Club. The team sprouted from some of the members’ previous association with a volunteer fire department. The volunteer firefighters were middle-class men in their twenties and thirties who worked in Manhattan in such professions as customs brokering, pharmacy, medicine, legal services, and banking. The fire department was a way for these young men to offer community service, but it also provided a social outlet. After meetings the men would pursue some form of amusement, such as playing ball, and then dine.
The fire company disbanded in the early 1840s, but some of the members continued to play ball, and over time others joined them. The men met regularly to play ball at different sites in the New York City area, and around 1844 they even started taking a horse ferry (in which a horse on deck turned the wheel to move the ferry) across the Hudson River to Hoboken, New Jersey, where they would walk along the shore for about a mile to the Elysian Fields to play. A rules committee later formed, and on September 23, 1845, the New York Knickerbocker Base Ball Club adopted twenty rules for the playing of baseball.
In June 1846, the New York Knickerbockers played their first match. They suffered a humiliating defeat—according to one account the pitcher on the opposing team was an experienced cricket bowler—and did not play another team until five years later. But other teams formed in the interim, and by the mid-1850s there were more than twenty-five clubs, many founded by former New York Knickerbockers, which played in Manhattan, Brooklyn, Staten Island, and the Bronx, using the New York Knickerbocker rules. Some of these clubs were proficient ball teams and drew crowds of a thousand or more people. The New York Knickerbockers reemerged as a competitor around 1851, and while their record was not outstanding, they left an enduring legacy: their 1845 set of twenty rules became the basis for modern-day baseball.
Among the rules that became known as the “New York Game” were:
the bases shall be from “home” to second base, forty-two paces; from first to third base, forty-two paces equidistant;
a ball knocked out of the field, or outside the range of the first or third base, is foul;
three balls being struck at and missed and the last one caught, is a hand out; if not caught is considered fair, and the striker is bound to run;
a player running the bases shall be out, if the ball is in the hands of an adversary on the base, or the runner is touched with it before he makes the base;
three hands out, all out.
The Knickerbocker rules contained certain innovations, such as creating foul territory, and were important in another respect: they made baseball more advanced by eliminating plugging.
In May 1858 ten clubs playing town ball in and around the Boston area met at Dedham, Massachusetts, to draw up a set of rules. There was disagreement in a number of areas, and the players discussed meeting at a later date to address them, but apparently never did. Still, they adopted twenty-one “town base ball” rules that became known as the “Massachusetts Game,” among them:
four bases or bounds shall constitute a round;
the distance from each base shall be sixty feet;
the bases shall be wooden stakes, projecting four feet from the ground;
the catcher shall not enter within the space occupied by the striker, and must remain on his feet in all cases while catching the ball;
the ball must be thrown—not pitched or tossed—to the bat on the side preferred by the striker, and within reach of his bat;
/> players must take their knocks in the order in which they are numbered, and after the first inning is played, the turn will commence with the player succeeding the one who lost on the previous inning;
the ball being struck at three times and missed, and caught each time by a player on the opposite side, the striker shall be considered out;
should the striker stand at the bat without striking at good balls thrown repeatedly at him, for the apparent purpose of delaying the game or of giving advantage to players, the referees after warning him, shall call one strike, and if he persists in such action, two and three strikes;
if a player, while running the bases, be hit with the ball thrown by one of the opposite side, before he has touched the home bound, while off a base, he shall be considered out;
a player, after running the four bases, on making the home bound, shall be considered one tally;
in playing all match games, when one is out, the side shall be considered out;
in playing all match games, one hundred tallies shall constitute the game, the making of which by either club, that club shall be judged the winner.
The Massachusetts version of baseball was very popular in the Boston area, but as the New York Game spread and increased in popularity in the Civil War period, town ball essentially fell by the wayside, and the Massachusetts Game disappeared. To the people of mid-nineteenth-century America, the New York Game was superior because it was a more orderly game, and the ball was not thrown at the runner.
In America’s pre-Civil War era, baseball continued in popularity, and its rules became more refined. In New York City, a group of clubs met and decided that games would be played for nine innings, instead of the seven innings proposed by the members of the New York Knickerbocker club. In 1859 the first intercollegiate baseball game took place: Amherst College faced Williams College on neutral territory at Pittsfield, Massachusetts. The game was played under the rules adopted the previous year at Dedham.
Baseball almost from the beginning of its evolution as a professional sport seemed to be cast as an American game, as something that expressed American ideals and values and was uniquely American. The notion that baseball had evolved from British rounders was by the 1870s and 1880s rejected by some American authorities, who seemed determined to believe that somehow an American had brought the game into being.
In the late 1850s, Henry Chadwick, an English expatriate who wrote for the Brooklyn Eagle, helped form the National Association of Ball Players. Chadwick, who was a cricket player and covered cricket matches, made many contributions to baseball, including creating the box score and publicizing the sport as it was taking shape. Here’s Chadwick conveying the popularity of the game in an article published in the New York Clipper on October 26, 1861, about a ball game played five days earlier in Hoboken, New Jersey:
The game of base ball is, as our readers are for the most part aware, an American game exclusively, as now played, although a game somewhat similar has been played in England for many years, called “rounders,” but which is played more after the style of the Massachusetts game. New York, however, justly claims to being the originators of what is termed the American Game, which has been so improved in all its essential points by them, and its scientific points so added to, that it does not stand second either in its innate excellencies, or interesting phrases, to any national game of any country in the world, and is every way adapted to the tastes of all who love athletic exercises in this country.
Chadwick’s enthusiasm for baseball being an “American Game” would diminish over time, and he would later figure prominently in the debate over whether baseball was in fact English or American in origin. Chadwick and two others of his time, Alexander Cartwright, who spearheaded the founding of the New York Knickerbockers, and Harry Wright, a world-class cricket player who was one of the leading members of baseball’s first professional team, the Cincinnati Red Stockings, would become known as “the three fathers of baseball.”*
As America was undergoing a vast change in the last quarter of the nineteenth century, baseball—in the New York style—became established as the country’s national pastime. In 1874 American baseball players went on an exhibition tour to Great Britain, and in 1889 embarked on a worldwide tour. The latter was organized by Albert G. Spalding, the sporting goods executive who had been a star pitcher for the Chicago White Stockings and helped establish the National League.
Spreading the national pastime was the American thing to do, and Spalding, during the 1888 global tour, drove the concept home. In masterful public relations stunts, baseball players competed in front of the Egyptian pyramids and posed on top of the Sphinx. Boys on the streets in Morocco were photographed holding baseball bats just like red-blooded American kids. Indeed, Spalding dispensed bats to young street urchins with missionary zeal (of course, as a sporting goods manufacturer, Spalding had something to gain personally by popularizing baseball). As Spalding would later write in his high-spirited baseball book:
All America has come to regard Base Ball as its very own, to be known throughout the civilized world as the great American National Game. … Ever since its establishment in the hearts of the people as the foremost of field sports, Base Ball has “followed the flag.” It followed the flag to the front in the sixties, and received then an impetus which has carried it to half a century of wondrous growth and prosperity. It has followed the flag to Alaska, where, under the midnight sun, it is played on Arctic ice. It has followed the flag to the Hawaiian Islands, and at once supplanted every other form of athletics in popularity. It has followed the flag to the Philippines, to Porto Rico and to Cuba, and wherever a ship floating the Stars and Stripes finds anchorage today, somewhere on a nearby shore the American National Game is in progress.
The last quarter of the nineteenth century was an exciting period in America, with many revolutionary American inventions altering the very fabric of society. Beginning with Alexander Graham Bell’s invention of the telephone in 1876, Americans over the next twenty-five or thirty years introduced to the world the phonograph, the incandescent lamp, the motion picture, the gasoline automobile, and the airplane. America even had its own indigenous music in ragtime, the jaunty, syncopated tunes that swept the country. Political tensions were simmering in Europe, but that was too far away to be of much interest.
On February 15, 1898, an event happened that would bring American nationalism to a fever pitch. In the harbor of Havana in Spanish-controlled Cuba, the U.S. battleship Maine blew up. More than 250 American sailors were killed,* and their countrymen refused to consider the explosion an accident. They turned their wrath on Spain, incited in part by Spain’s oppressive treatment of Cubans and driven by the strident yellow journalism of some influential American newspapers that had been clamoring for war.
Despite Spain’s willingness to reform its policies in Cuba, the United States sent its troops into action. In Cuba and the Philippines, the Americans swiftly wiped out the Spanish naval fleets. The Spanish-American War wasn’t much of a war, but it created a newly fervent patriotism. The last time Americans had been at war, it was among themselves; now they had a common enemy and couldn’t get enough of the war. They showed their support by parading through city streets with the Stars and Stripes held high, and their passion rescued a new entertainment medium called moving pictures (by this time the novelty had worn off) as they flocked to theaters to view footage of American soldiers shellacking the Spanish villains. It didn’t matter that many of the battles were staged on sets and in water tanks in New York City and New Jersey.
Americans took pride in their victory over an Old World power. Spain had attacked an American ship in Cuban waters—and even if it hadn’t, it was still the enemy. An attack on an American institution caused outrage. An attack on an American institution on American soil would surely draw the unbridled wrath of the country. Such an “attack” came some years later from Henry Chadwick.
Chadwick, the British expatriate sportswriter, penned a piec
e about the origin of baseball that ran in the 1903 Baseball Guide published by Albert Spalding. In his essay, Chadwick traced the history of modern baseball to the British game of rounders. The piece set off a firestorm of discontent among baseball’s elite, and the next year Spalding in his annual guide countered Chadwick’s assertion and proposed a commission to investigate and report on the origin of baseball.
Known as the Mills Commission after its head, A. G. Mills, who in the 1880s had served as president of the National League, the committee consisted additionally of two U.S. senators, Arthur Gorman of Maryland and Morgan Bulkeley of Connecticut, both former baseball executives; two businessmen, Bostonian George Wright and Philadelphian Alfred Reach, both former ballplayers (George Wright was the brother of famous baseball player Harry Wright); James Sullivan, the president of the Amateur Athletic Union; and Nicholas Young, a longtime secretary of the National League. All baseball insiders, the members of the Mills Commission were not well suited to conduct a scholarly investigation, and in fact did not go about their inquiry with great precision. The commission ran advertisements in sports publications inviting anyone who knew anything about the early days of baseball to write in. The most significant correspondence received was deemed to be from a mining engineer from Colorado named Abner Graves.*
Graves wrote that Abner Doubleday had invented baseball at Cooperstown, New York, in 1839. The Mills Commission asked him to provide additional details, and Graves responded. According to Graves, Doubleday had sketched out a diamond-shaped playing field and introduced certain rules that had altered the game of town ball to create the new game that became known as baseball. Graves gave the impression that he and a bunch of boys had engaged in disorderly games of ball (played with bats, balls, and bases) at Cooperstown, and that one day Abner Doubleday had shown up with rules for their field—a ninety-foot playing field shaped like a diamond with the bases set out at different positions. Graves’s testimony did not offer much in the way of concrete proof; it was the recollection of one man some sixty-five years after the game’s alleged inception.
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