 19
to 21…
Let’s start with the 19th Century and move forward.
Volume 7, #12, May 1, 2009
The Mount Rushmores of Baseball – Four Historic Figures
Prior to 1840
Here is the first chapter of my current project – a history
of baseball, as illustrated by “The Mount Rushmores of Baseball,”
wherein the origins of the game, and some of the notable historic
figures in uncovering those origins, are discussed. Your comments
are invited, however, this copy is not to be reproduced in any other
media, including websites, since it is a work in progress.
The Mount Rushmores of baseball starts with the reality of the
origins of baseball, and not the myths. So, there is no great need
to go into great detail on one of the whoppers of all time –
that Abner Doubleday drew up the game in a little field in Cooperstown,
N.Y. in 1839. Suffice it to say that this particular fable came
about starting in 1907 (fourteen years after Doubleday was laid
to rest in Arlington National Cemetery), when a commission put together
by Albert Spalding, a commission with the ostensible charge of discovering
the origins of baseball, and the somewhat hidden agenda of finding
an American origin for the game, reported said fable. Thanks to
the dubious testimony of an octogenarian mining engineer named Abner
Graves, who put forth what would prove to be an outrageous tale
in a letter (the above-mentioned story of West Point cadet Doubleday),
Spalding had all the “proof” he needed.
Moving on to reality, all the cognoscenti know that the origins
of baseball actually date far back before 1839 or whatever other
arbitrary date you care to name. They also know that, at least at
this point in time, it’s pretty hard, like impossible hard,
to actually identify specific notable figures in baseball prior
to 1840. It’s almost safe to say that the only thing we do
know for sure is that Abner Doubleday wasn’t one of them.
So how does one choose four figures for this first Mount Rushmore?
For that matter, why even bother? The answer is, it’s all
in the name of historical accuracy... a noble cause, at least for
historians, and that is largely who make up this chapter. It is
thus with historical accuracy in mind that three of the four members
of the first Mount Rushmore of Baseball are renown for exactly that
– they are individuals who have brought a better level of
historical accuracy to our understanding of the origins of the game.
That is, historians. Researchers and writers on the origins of baseball.
Because, prior to 1840, there was no baseball as we know it. But
there were what have been called proto-baseball games and it is
to the researchers and writers on the development of the ancestors
of baseball that we turn for our first three nominees. If we are
trying to view the history of baseball in light of the outstanding
figures of each era, then what better way to start than with those
who have illuminated the Dark Ages (aka, B.B., or Before Baseball)?
While many have delved into researching this era of proto-baseball,
and the origins of baseball (there is, in fact, a Society for American
Baseball Research – SABR -- committee solely devoted to this
subject), it is the opinion of this author that, at this time, three
eminent historians stand out… David Block, John Thorn (both
prominent members of the SABR Origins Committee) and Thomas Altherr.
Yes, like all of the forthcoming Mount Rushmores, there is room
for discussion here, and at least one of these gentlemen feels that
picking just three historians to “immortalize” is a
mistake that will, at the very least, offend many fine baseball
historians who have delved into the origins of the game. While there
is no desire here to offend anyone, especially those tireless researchers
into the origins of the game… the rules we’re operating
under state that we’re picking just four men from each era..
And since there is a notable figure who actually lived in the late
18th Century and who qualifies for this Mount Rushmore, we’re
then limited to three present-day historians for this era.
Choosing three historians to honor is not an easy task. Historical
research being what it is in any field – be it baseball or
any other endeavor – old findings are always being supplanted
by newer ones. It is very rare that anyone can be said to have gotten
a final, definitive answer to any historical question. However,
what can be identified is pioneering work – research and historical
insights that can be said to have broken new ground, or set a standard
of truth or knowledge that future generations will inevitably acknowledge
as important. It is this history nerd’s opinion that, while
these three gentlemen may not literally have lived in the pre-1840s
era (at least, they won’t admit to it), no one is more deserving
of “immortalization” herein than Messrs. Block, Thorn
and Altherr, for their seminal and pioneering work in helping uncover
the origins of baseball. Maybe, if you so desire, they can all be
said to stand for purposes of this book as fine representatives
of their type – the baseball origins historian.
Having noted that prior to 1840 there was no baseball as we knew
it was a set-up. David Block, in 2005, literally wrote “the
book” on baseball’s origins, and he called it Baseball
before We Knew It. A work wherein he ties the present game back
through England, not to rounders or cricket, but to another game,
English baseball (or base-ball), and thence to even earlier European
bat and ball games. Should you wish confirmation of this assertion,
it is worth noting that Thorn, who certainly can stand as the pre-eminent
baseball historian in the early part of the 21st Century, wrote
a blurb for the dust jacket of the book (“an important book…
creating a knowledge base upon which all future research will rely.”1)
and Altherr contributed the book’s third appendix, a piece
he originally wrote in 2000 for Nine: A Journal of Baseball History
and Social Policy Perspectives.
As to the state of the understanding of baseball’s actual
long-term origins prior to Block, Dr. Joseph Baldassarre, a professor
at Boise State University, writing in the 2001 issue of SABR’s
The National Pastime, notes that children’s games played with
balls date back to ancient Egypt, Greece and Rome. In fact, pictographs
still exist of children of the Nile playing ball games of some sort.
Bat and ball games most certainly go back to Medieval Western Europe,
most notably on the British Isles, where many of these games had
religious or ritualistic overtones. (Some things never change…)
In a similar vein, Robert Henderson, while writing Ball, Bat and
Bishop in 1947, makes the same claim, noting various bat and ball
games in medieval Europe and Great Britain. Baldassarre especially
remarks on the games of creag, club ball and stool ball. King Edward
I of England even went so far as to shell out 100 shillings so that
the Prince of Wales could play the former game in what probably
wasn’t the first organized Little League. The latter game
may well have been a precursor to cricket, since the object of the
game was for the batter to protect an overturned milking stool.
Even if it isn’t, stool ball does go back a long way –
it’s mentioned in the English Domesday Book in 1085. And,
speaking of cricket, Baldassarre notes a reference to a sport with
that name as early as 1344.2
However, these are just literary references. They prove nothing
except that games with certain names, and some of them may not have
even been bat and ball games, existed. For instance, in 1867 baseball’s
first great journalist, Henry Chadwick, who was born in England,
claimed that the game of base, which he says eventually became prisoner’s
base (a subject that Altherr has also written on), dated back to
King Edward III of England’s era (the early 14th century –
he was Edward I’s grandson). Further, he claimed that it was,
at some point in the 17th century, “united” (Chadwick’s
word) with the game of ball to form rounders, which was also called
round ball or base ball. Although purely speculative, Chadwick’s
comment is noteworthy, since he played rounders as a boy in England,
and it was Chadwick’s claim, last made at the time of the
Mills Commission that anointed Abner Doubleday, that baseball was
in fact descended from rounders.3 Professional baseball and sporting
goods pioneer Al Reach, a close contemporary of Chadwick’s,
(and a member of the Spalding’s Mills Commission) told a story
similar to the great sportswriter’s just before Chadwick’s
death. In a May 19, 1907 Philadelphia North American article, Reach
proclaimed that baseball was a game only Americans were qualified
to play (typical of the jingoism of the time, although Reach was
born England) and it evolved from the less-sophisticated rounders
and town ball. Still, these are just speculation, conjecture. They
are not fact.
There were many other bat-and-ball games, notably the “old
cat” games, English in origin and imported to what would become
the United States in colonial times… and lasting to at least
the early 1960s when the author played a couple of versions in Lafayette
Hill, Pennsylvania -- games that were usually dominated by Bob Umbarger.
Starting with one old cat, and increasing through two, three and
four, these kids’ games all basically featured a pitcher,
catcher and fielder arrayed against a batter, the number of “cats”
increasing as the number of players increased. Although primitive
games, they were clearly relatives to baseball, since they were
ball-and-bat games that featured the essential element that makes
baseball different from all other ball sports – the defense,
not the offense, controls the ball. It’s worth noting that
Al Spalding biographer Peter Levine, in A.G. Spalding and the Rise
of Baseball, points out that old A.G. himself, just before he put
together the Mills Commission, published his theory that baseball
was descended from the colonial old cat games, which Spalding, a
dedicated America-first type, obviously did not know were originally
English games as well.4 Actually, as historian David Voigt pointed
out in American Baseball, the theory that the old cat games were
the primeval ancestors to baseball was a popular one in the early
20th Century, espoused by, among others, Chadwick, Sporting Life’s
Francis Richter and long-time Boston Herald sports editor Jacob
Morse.5
Until fairly recently, the claim for discovering the earliest written
reference in America actually using the term “base ball”
rested with New Yorker George A. Thompson, Jr. Writing in the same
2001 edition of The National Pastime as Baldassarre, Thompson reports
on finding an article in a New York newspaper, The National Advocate,
that refers to a base ball game, played in New York, apparently
on April 19, 1823. The article also notes that an “organized
association” of young men was playing these games every Saturday
at a location that is now on the west side of Broadway, between
Washington Place and Eighth Street. Exactly what the National Advocate
meant by an “organized association” is unknown, ultimately
leaving this lead sort of vague… it could have been almost
any kind of group or club, and they could have been playing almost
anything. And they don’t seem to have been very organized,
not in any permanent sense, since there are no other known references
to this group. Thompson himself noted at the end of his article,
“Whatever sort of ball these wicked boys were playing, it
hardly seems that it could have been any form of baseball.”6
Further proof of the sport’s status as a “time-honored
game” comes from another New York State newspaper, this time
from the July 13, 1825 Delhi Gazette, which reports a challenge
from nine (note the number) residents of Hamden, New York, to any
like number of individuals from any town in Delaware County, New
York, to play a game of “bass-ball” (another common
spelling), for the sum of $1 per game.7
Then in 2004, a sensation. John Thorn discovered a reference to
baseball in Pittsfield, Massachusetts that dated back to 1791. As
of this writing in early 2009, it remains the earliest unquestioned
reference to a game of that name in America.
Thorn’s find will be discussed at greater length shortly.
Suffice it to say at this point that the above virtually sums up
the true knowledge of the origins of baseball until 2005, when David
Block re-wrote the subject in Baseball before We Knew It. Up until
fairly recently, very little in the way of serious, systematic research
on the origins of baseball had been done since the pioneering work
of Robert Henderson in the 1930s and 1940s. Indeed, his Bat, Ball
and Bishop has not only stood as the word on baseball’s origins,
it has been practically the only word for almost 60 years. Henderson,
a dogged historical researcher who worked for the New York Public
Library and the New York Racquet and Tennis Club, had already shot
down the Doubleday story by the time the Baseball Hall of Fame opened
in Cooperstown in 1939. Broadly agreeing with Chadwick that baseball
was descended from rounders,8 Henderson was considered THE source
on the subject, B.B. (Before Block)
Block is more interested in the more distant “roots”
of the game (as indicated by his book’s subtitle, “A
search for the roots of the game”) than he is in exploring
the actual transitions that what is now recognized baseball went
through in America in the middle years of the 19th Century. The
main focus of Block’s work and the home base for most of his
conclusions is in England, something that would have pleased Henry
Chadwick, though not Al Spalding. However, Block discards out of
hand Chadwick’s (and Henderson’s) theory that baseball
evolved from rounders, since his (Block’s) research has yet
to produce any references to the game of rounders prior to 1828.
In fact, contrary to Chadwick, Henderson, et al, Block says that
rounders is basically just a synonym for English baseball, indicating
merely an early 19th Century change in terminology, if you will.
It is clear from Block’s research that baseball (including
the actual game by that name) and baseball-like games go back much
further than the 1820s. (As of late 2008, the earliest known reference
to the exact term baseball was from a 1755 personal journal in Surrey,
England.)8a
Who then is David Block, and what did he find out about the origins
of baseball? He’s a lifelong fan of the game and its history,
and a long time collector of early baseball books and memorabilia
who worked in the field of information technology prior to his retirement
in 2002. A member of SABR, he’s also a long time Oakland Athletics
fan who now lives in San Francisco.9
As for what Block found out about the origins of baseball, let’s
first identify the fourth sculpture on this first Mount Rushmore.
Turns out it’s a friend of Block’s by the name of Johann
Christoph Friedrich Gutsmuths. Maybe friend is a little strong,
but there’s no doubt that Block feels warmly towards Gutsmuths
(whose last name has more spellings than he has names – this
is the version Block uses in his book). That’s because Block’s
key discovery into the origins of baseball is his 2001 find in an
18th Century work – Spiele zur Uebung und Erholung des Korpers
und Geistes fur die Jugend, ihre Erzieher uhnd alle Freunde Unschuldiger
Jugendfreund. Written by Gutsmuths in 1796 in the small German village
of Schnepfenthal, it’s the first comprehensive guide to popular
sports ever written, by anyone, anywhere. Containing almost 500
pages with every child’s game and activity conceivable (e.g.,
charades, hopscotch, kite flying), including no less than 15 ball
games, it’s sort of an early version of James Michener’s
Sports in America, written in German, by a German, for Germans.
In case you’re wondering, that title translates to Games for
the Exercise and Recreation of Body and Spirit for the Youth and
His Educator and all Friends of Innocent Joys of Youth.10
Among the 15 ball games included in Gutsmuths’ book is English
baseball (or base-ball). That’s the name used in his, “vivid
and long-lost record of baseball at an early evolutionary moment.”
That’s how Block described the game Gutsmuths called in toto,
“Ball met Freystaten (oder das englische Base-ball),”
or “ball with free station, or English base-ball.”10a
So who was Gutsmuths? He was an early German physical education
pioneer, who introduced the concept of regulated body training,
especially for young people. Indeed, if you google Gutsmuths pretty
much every reference you’ll find relates to his work in gymnastics
or physical education… he’s better known as the Father
of Gymnastics. Born in Germany in August 1759 and dying in Germany
in May 1839 (just about the time young Abner was drawing that baseball
diamond in the dirt in Cooperstown… ah, the ironies of history),
Gutsmuths developed the basic concept of physical education and
introduced same into school curriculum. He also developed the basic
principles of gymnastics.
He is, in fact, quite celebrated for his work in gymnastics, to
the point where, even as this passage is being written, there are
celebrations being held in honor of the 250th anniversary of his
birth. (One of which includes the gymnast to whom this book is dedicated,
my daughter, Maggie.) There is even a German-language website, www.gutsmuths.eu
for JCFG. These celebrations are taking place because, three years
prior to writing Games for Exercise to Relax the Body and Mind,
in 1793, he wrote a better-known book, the first systematic text
on gymnastics.11 He also, according to the www.latech.edu website,
was the first individual to suggest reviving the ancient Olympic
Games.
As Block describes his “ah-ha” moment in reading Gutsmuths,
“There, beginning on page 78, were seven pages of German text
unveiling the earliest known rules for a game called baseball!”
Specifically, he described the game of English base-ball…
thus providing Block’s “Rosetta Stone,” and thus
the seminal work in our understanding of the development of the
game.12
Although the game described by Gutsmuths was not baseball as we
know it, the most important part of this discovery is the fact that
there were rules, and listing thereof. After all, you can call almost
anything “baseball” and it won’t necessarily be
the game that we now recognize, the game that saw the Phillies win
the 2008 World Series. However, if you have rules, well, then there
is hard data to compare with the present National Game. And these
are the first known written rules for, as Block notes, “a
game called baseball.”
What were those rules? There were some that don’t fit what
is considered baseball in the 19th, 20th and 21st centuries –
like a varying number of bases (depending on the number of players),
home base being an area and not a specific spot and only one out
per “inning.” There were also some rules that apparently
fell by the wayside over the years; including burning, which involved
throwing the ball at a base a runner had over-run, and what Block
calls the “retaliation” rule that actually briefly put
the ball in the hands of the offense. Under this rule the team at
bat could remain batting after the last out if they could get possession
of the ball and either tag or soak a member of the defensive team
with said ball before all of the defenders could get off the field.
Gutsmuths comments that this rule typically led to a “fun,
short-lived fight.” One can just imagine the fun Mike Piazza
might have had with this rule in the games wherein Roger Clemens
was pitching for the opposition. Or how much this rule could cut
down on head-hunting by pitchers. Or even how much fun some of Barry
Bonds’ opponents (or former teammates) might have had as well.
Still, das englische Base-ball does set some familiar standards.
First, the pitcher throws to a batter who has three chances to put
the ball in play. Second, after hitting the ball, the batter runs
the bases counterclockwise for as far as he can without being put
out (the bases being closer together and the field smaller than
the present game), which act is accomplished by the fielders catching
the ball, touching the runner with the ball, throwing to a base,
or practicing the ancient art of “soaking,” that is,
hitting the runner between bases with a thrown ball… a rule
that still existed in America for another 50 years or so. Finally,
the object of the game is to complete a circuit of the bases.12a
Let’s take a quick look at actual text of one of the rules
as reported by Gutsmuths (courtesy of Wikipedia), dealing with hitting
and base running, and recognizing this is translated from 18th Century
German…
“If the ball hit the bat, so he runs at 1, 2, 3 and so on,
until the time the ball is thrown, then he must not continue [that
sure sounds like baseball], but must be placed on the free space
is left, where he is, until a new strike happens on the ball or
else some kind from the time comes. [This sounds a bit like the
Little League rule – no stealing until the pitch crosses home.]
Läßt er sich nun bei diesem Laufen von irgendeinem Dienenden
werfen, so ist der Schlag für seine Partei weg.Where he is
now running on this subject from any servants, the blow to his party
away. - Es ist schon oben gesagt, daß der Schläger im
Mal das Recht zu drei Schlägen habe, trifft er alle drei Mal
den Ball nicht, so muß er doch laufen, und da der Aufwerfer
den Ball gleich bei der Hand hat, so wirft er gewöhnlich nach
ihm.It's been said above that the racket in the right time to have
three shots [three strikes?], he meets all three times the ball
is not so but he must run, and since introducing the ball just off
the hand, so he usually raises after him.Trifft er den Laufenden,
ehe er den ersten Freiplatz berührt, so ist der Schlag verloren.
If he tuned before it the first free space affected, the strike
is lost.- Ganz derselbe Fall tritt ein, wenn er den Ball nur so
wenig berührt, daß er nicht fortfliegt. Quite the same
happens when the ball just as little touches [a foul ball?] that
he does not fortfliegt.”12b
Although Block doesn’t mention this, the game Gutsmuths describes
also has some commonalities to the present-day game of Finnish baseball,
or pesäpallo. As explained by Brian Podoll, the John Thorn
of pesäpallo, “This baseball-derivative sport, created
by Lauri Pihkala from a combination of his observation(s) during
a 1907 Red Sox game at Boston [and] traditional local bat-and-ball
games, has been played at a nationally-organized level in Finland
since 1922. What Lauri Pihkala did with his composite creation of
pesäpallo is take away the undue emphasis on the pitcher, but
compensated for that with the way the "bases" were arranged.
Each base path, in its zig-zag fashion, grows longer to a final
dog leg and increases the difficulty to score. The nature of the
lob-style pitching mostly puts the ball into play, keeping most
of the fielders constantly involved in the action with a premium
on base-running.”12c
Particularly significant among the similarities between pesäpallo
and Gutsmuths’ description of English baseball is that, in
both games, the pitcher stands very close to the batter, and lobs
the ball to him. Also, both games place a great deal of significance,
and require a great deal of skill, on and from the base runners.
The former concept should not be that surprising to baseball historians,
who know that’s how pitchers got started in American baseball
(that is, serving the ball to the batter), before Jim Creighton
introduced the wrist snap to his throws just before the Civil War.
While the pitcher tossing the ball straight up in the air quite
adjacent to the equivalent of home plate may at first seem strange
(and it sure looks funny… trying searching out pesäpallo
on You Tube sometime), the emphasis in both pesäpallo and English
baseball on base running should also not be entirely foreign to
early baseball experts. For instance, anyone who has read Darryl
Brock’s novel about the 1869 Red Stockings, If I Never Get
Back, realizes how important shifty baserunning was in the primitive
American game. And, Gutsmuths undoubtedly thought it important as
well. Block says that, “base running, with all its myriad
possibilities, seems to have been the feature of English base-ball
that Gutsmuths found most intriguing.”13
Are the similarities between 18th Century English baseball and
20th/21st Century pesäpallo a coincidence? Although Block doesn’t
mention any Finnish bat and ball games in his book, it seems at
least a possibility that the “traditional local bat-and-ball”
games that Pihkala based pesäpallo upon were in some ways related
to English baseball.
It’s worth noting that Gutsmuths (and Block) also describe
“das deutsche Ballspiel,” or “the German ball
game” in Games for Exercise to Relax the Body and Mind. Although
this game has disappeared in the ensuing centuries, Block notes
that it is descended from the Longball games of Northern Europe
and it, too, had similarities with baseball, notably in that the
two opposing teams took turns on offense and defense, and the basic
parameters of pitching, hitting and catching the ball were a part
of the game. Gutsmuths, ever the innovator, suggested in Games for
Exercise that a game that would unite both the English and German
forms might be superior to both. He proposed that the rules of the
English game be used, along with the German game’s longer
bat (the bat in English baseball was only two feet long), so the
ball could be hit farther… thus making Gutsmuths the first
proponent of the “Home Run Hitters Drive Cadillacs”
school of thought. He also suggested that, in addition to the fixed
home base, that a fixed total of four bases (recall that the number
of bases varied with the number of players in English baseball)
be arranged in a square. In short, says Block, Gutsmuths was pretty
close to proposing the rules of town ball.13a Just 30+ years after
Games for Exercise to Relax the Body and Mind, while the German
educator was still alive, a similar game such as he proposed would
be played in, among other places, Philadelphia, by the Olympic Club.
Another coincidence?
One unanswered question is… how did Gutsmuths know about
English base-ball, living in a small town in Germany in the days
before Google and You Tube? This conundrum has been the subject
of some additional research by Block. Though he admits it is highly
speculative, Block notes that the best evidence he has to tie Gutsmuths
to English base-ball is through the 18th Century British writer,
philosopher and feminist (and mother of Mary Shelly, the author
of “Frankenstein”), Mary Wollstonecraft. Here’s
where Block’s work stands at the moment…
“For years I have been trying to discover how he found out
about English baseball, largely without success. My leading hypothesis,
one that is supported by only the thinnest of circumstantial evidence,
is that Mary Wollstonecraft was his source. A couple of years before
Gutsmuths published his 1796 book, Wollstonecraft translated a book
by Gutsmuths' boss, Salzmann, from German to English. That book
includes a description of some boys playing a baseball-like game,
which may well have been the "German ball game" that Gutsmuths
(in Games for Exercise to Relax the Body and Mind) said was related
to baseball. While I have not found any proof that Wollstonecraft
had direct contact with Gutsmuths, she did carry on a correspondence
with Salzmann.”14
Salzmann, by the way, was Christian Gotthilf Salzmann (1744 –
1811), the founder of the Schnepfenthal Institute, a school dedicated
to new modes of education and where Gutsmuths was employed from
1785 to 1837.
Block has supported his theory on the origins of baseball with
research into a myriad of other bat and ball games, most from England,
though others from central Europe (as well as the French game theque)
as well. The English games include Longball (maybe the earliest
ancestor of the National Pastime), Tut Ball, Stool Ball, Trap Ball,
and the various “cat” games. Block also notes that one
other thing that the Gutsmuths book does, albeit indirectly, is
to explain the three or four passing references to ball games that
appear in English literature in the 18th Century… well-known,
though previously puzzling, mentions in The Little Pretty Pocket
Book in 1744 and the novels Battleridge and Northanger Abbey. The
reason these references were a puzzle is that, like its predecessor
games, English baseball was a kids’ game that would soon die
out as part of its transformation into another game, in this case,
American baseball. And, prior to Gutsmuths, almost no one bothered
to write about such children’s games, outside of an occasional
fictional reference. As Block phrased it, “Like many aspects
of social and cultural history, especially those involving the diversions
of children, (English) baseball was not deemed of any great significance
and was not worth writing about.”15 Thus we see the basic
reason for the dearth of hard data on the game prior to the pioneering
Gutsmuths.
There are a few other instances of the term baseball appearing
in English literary sources that bear repeating. Like during the
Boston Red Stocking/Philadelphia Athletic tour of England in the
summer of 1874. Much to Albert Spalding’s disgust, the British
press at the time, picking up on the surface similarities of the
two games, insisted that baseball was derived from rounders, and
that the Price of Wales had played baseball (English baseball, most
likely) in 1748.16 Block will certainly agree with that, since he
references the Letters of Mary Lepel, Lady Hervey in Baseball before
We Knew It. An 18th Century British royal courtier, Lepel’s
collected letters were published as a book in 1821, and contained
a reference to the Prince of Wales family, “they divert themselves
is base-ball, a play all who are, or have been, schoolboys, are
well acquainted with,”16a
The overall conclusion reached by Block is that baseball evolved
from European Longball and other medieval bat and ball games, through
Tut Ball (and maybe Stool Ball) into English baseball, the game
described by Gutsmuths. English baseball ultimately became baseball…
this last permutation taking place in America, starting just before
the dawn of the 19th Century. “No other pastime more directly
contributed to the development of American baseball than its diminutive
eighteenth-century English namesake.”17
Moving back across the pond to the U.S., we find Thorn and Altherr’s
work awaiting us. First, Thorn, presently our pre-eminent baseball
historian, researcher and early American baseball expert. Possessing
a baseball historian/author resume as deep as Death Valley in the
old Yankee Stadium, and as high as the right field wall in Baker
Bowl, Thorn has had a hand in a plethora of baseball history-related
ventures over the past 30 years or so. A listing not limited to:
directing the Vintage Base Ball Federation; editing Base Ball: A
Journal of the Early Game; serving as senior creative consultant
(and on-screen commentator) for BASEBALL, Ken Burns’ critically-acclaimed
nine-part television series (Thorn was also an on-camera commentator),
as well as the book version of the series; being the founder and
first editor of SABR’s The National Pastime; and also serving
as SABR’s publications director for years. Wait, there’s
more. He served as an historical consultant to the National Baseball
Hall of Fame Library; National Baseball Hall of Fame Committee on
Baseball Veterans, the American Baseball Heritage Foundation, Major
League Baseball, Office of the Commissioner, Major League Baseball
Properties, ESPN; American Heritage, Sports Illustrated, National
Geographic, Upper Deck Company and Topps; and has appeared as an
on-screen and on-air commentator for ESPN, ESPN Classic, Major League
Baseball Productions, HBO, PBS and The History Channel.
The Thorn baseball bibliography reads a little like the baseball
section in the card catalog at the Library of Congress. Including
his most forthcoming effort, “Baseball in the Garden of Eden,”
(that’s really taking the origins back a long way) which is
scheduled to be published in the spring of 2010, Thorn has authored
or co-authored or edited approximately 30 baseball books. Maybe
the most notable (though it’s kind of hard to choose) of these
is the “Total Baseball” series (along with various co-authors/editors,
mainly Pete Palmer) that out-MacMillaned the MacMillan Baseball
Encyclopedia. (Actually, he’s the publisher and CEO of Total
Sports Publishing.)18
But, what have you done for us lately, at least as far as pre-1840
baseball is concerned?
Well, among other things, Thorn has been doing research on the
original papers of the Mills Commission, long thought to have been
incinerated in a fire in 1913. Turns out, they weren’t, and
Thorn has delved through these fascinating source documents to prove
that A.G. Mills and his assistant, James Sullivan, were actually
far from sold on Spalding’s Doubleday fable. Of more importance,
he also found that Mills and Sullivan turned up, in 1905, an account
from John Oliver, the 90-year old editor of the Yonkers Statesman,
about baseball playing in Baltimore around 1825 – a significant
find, since typically the game’s American roots were thought
to have been concentrated in the Philadelphia, New York and Boston
areas. Thorn reported, to a recent NINE Conference (and a subsequent
article in the fall 2007 issue of NINE), that Oliver described a
game called baseball, played by kids in the Baltimore area. This
game, Thorn notes, did not feature a pitcher (the batter tossed
the ball in the air and hit it) but did bear close resemblance to
games played by English children a century before (and American
children at least 140 years later.) Thorn also discovered in this
long-lost document a statement by Oliver that he had never heard
of rounders, and that he’d never seen men play ball until
the late 1830s in New York… both significant nuggets in the
understanding of the development of the game.18a
Then there was May 10, 2004… Thorn turned up a gem on the
American origins of the game in the town of Pittsfield, Massachusetts.
He came upon a reference to an ancient Pittsfield city ordinance
that mentioned “baseball.” (That’s how the AP
wire story spelled it, however, the game that became baseball as
we know it was most commonly spelled “base ball” well
into the latter part of the 19th Century.) The reference Thorn found
was in an 1869 book on Pittsfield’s history, and referred
to a law passed by that city in 1791 regarding baseball. Thorn,
with the help of his friend and Pittsfield resident Jim Bouton,
went to Pittsfield city officials and, wouldn’t you know it,
a Pittsfield librarian dug up the 213 year old document in a local
library. The ordinance is quite explicit… you weren’t
allowed to play baseball within 80 yards of the city’s new
meetinghouse (for fear of breaking the windows… glass was
almost worth its weight in gold in those days).
However, what isn’t obvious is exactly what game they were
talking about in 1791. It wasn’t baseball, as played in the
U.S., say some 150 or 70 or even 40 years later. The on-going evolution
of bat-and-ball games in the 18th and 19th centuries make it obvious
that Thorn is researching the origins (plural) of baseball, and
not the origin (singular) of baseball. Indeed, as the Hall of Fame’s
Jeff Idelson is quoted as saying later in the AP story on Thorn’s
find, “There’s no way of pinpointing where the game
was first played. Baseball wasn’t really born anywhere.”
Absolutely correct, in that baseball is not basketball – it
wasn’t invented one day in Massachusetts at a YMCA. Still,
this was proof of baseball’s varied and broadly played antecedents
in a contemporary American document… and a major step in unearthing
the American lineage of the game that came from English base-ball.
This brief re-cap gives rather short shrift to Thorn’s work.
However, he will appear again in these pages, since discussing the
early history of American baseball, and baseball clubs, is impossible
without referencing John Thorn’s work again and again.
Then there’s Dr. Thomas L. Altherr, distinguished professor
of History at Metropolitan State College of Denver. Holder of a
Ph.D. from Ohio State University. Teacher of a course at Metro State
on American Baseball History (how do I go about transferring?) And
“the source” on early bat and ball games (and the like)
in America. His 1997 book Sports in America won the Choice Magazine
Outstanding Academic Book Award. The recipient of SABR’s 2001
McFarland Award, he is also the co-author of the 2002 book Safe
by a Mile, which he wrote with Charlie Metro. And he has also recently
written an article on the confusion between early baseball-type
games and prisoner’s base, the pursuit tag/running game, thus
providing a caution to researchers who might otherwise get excited
about early references to a game called “base.”
(An aside… ever notice how many distinguished writers of
baseball are or were college professors? In addition to Altherr,
there’s Harold Seymour, David Voigt, Lawrence Ritter, Charles
Alexander, Darryl Brock, Jeff Powers-Beck, Jerrold Casway, Joseph
Baldassarre, etc., etc.)
Altherr’s article, “A Place Leavel Enough to Play Ball,”
which originally appeared in Nine and which Block reproduces in
his book, is a classic and pioneering study of baseball and baseball-like
games from the Colonial era to the early days of the United States.
It was also written a year both before Block discovered Gutsmuths’
book and a year before Baldassarre’s article (which, although
it contains some of the same information as “Leavel”
does not reference Altherr’s work… Baldassarre apparently
was using Henderson as his reference), and five years before Block
published his landmark book. Thus, Dr. Altherr, who humbly deflects
suggestions that his work in the field of the origins of baseball
is anything extra-ordinary, will be seen as having preceded Block’s
seminal work with an article that presages in some ways Baseball
before We Knew It… a far from shocking conclusion, since Block
included “Leavel” in his book. The title of Altherr’s
work refers to an entry from the journal of a Revolutionary War
officer, Henry Dearborn, regarding the fact that he and his mates
were obliged one day to “walk 4 miles… to find a place
leavel enough to play ball.”19
Altherr, after what must have been a monumental research undertaking
-- one of his specialties is pre-1820 North American primary source
documents -- gives extensive and sometimes quite detailed examples
of references to ball games, usually from private journals like
that of Dearborn. First, though, Altherr takes the reader through
the European origins of bat and ball games, covering some of the
ground in ancient Egypt and the Middle Ages in Europe that Baldassarre
and Block would later cover, and referencing such diverse and spontaneous
pre-baseball folk games as stool ball, trap ball, catapult ball,
the various old cat games, rounders, town ball, and baste, barn
and base ball.20
While Altherr clearly did some seminal work in the field of European
bat and ball games, it’s when he delves into American games
that he really makes the reader take notice. For instance, did you
know that the first record of a baseball-like game (in this case,
stool ball) in the New World comes from Plymouth, Massachusetts
on Christmas Day, 1621? (Any earlier, and it might be postulated
that the Pilgrims landed on home plate instead of Plymouth Rock..)
Altherr gives numerous instances of this nature, all detailing early
ball games in the Colonies… references to trap ball in 1713
and 1728, a bat and ball games played in North Carolina in 1737,
and the note that, from the middle of the 18th Century on, there
are increasing references to baseball-like games, usually among
three groups of people; children’s book writers, soldiers
and students.
As was the case with Thorn’s discovery in 2004, Altherr has
also come across instances where municipalities banned ball playing,
sometimes because of the game’s inherent wickedness, sometimes
for fear of breaking windows. (Note: although many of Altherr’s
finds pre-date the 1791 Pittsfield ordinance, it should be noted
that Thorn’s discovery specifically mentions a sport called
“baseball.” The earlier references just mention “ball.”)
These include rulings from Portsmouth, New Hampshire (1795), Newburyport,
Massachusetts (1797), Portland, Maine (1805), Troy, New York (1816),
New York City (1817) and what Altherr calls “the crowning
irony,” Cooperstown, New York! This ruling, in June 1816,
prohibited “playing at Ball” in the center of Cooperstown,
some 23 years before Abner Doubleday supposedly invented the game
of baseball there. Zinger!21
(Although not mentioned in Altherr’s article, it’s
worth noting that the city of Philadelphia also had some sort of
prohibition against ball-playing around 1830, most likely ball-playing
on the Sabbath, that forced the organized first ball-playing club
in America, the Olympic Club, to journey across the Delaware River
to Camden, New Jersey to find a place to play town ball.)22
Even though towns throughout New England, New York and Pennsylvania
were banning ball playing, Altherr makes it clear that such games
were spreading, both geographically and in popularity among the
masses. Surely soldiers, both in the course of their free time between
engagements and in not-so-free time as POWs, were into ball playing.
In addition to Dearborn, Altherr quotes from the 18th Century journals
of Simeon Lyman, Joseph Joslin, Jr., Samuel Shute, Ebenezer Elmer,
Benjamin Gilbert, George Ewing, Enos Stevens, Jabez Fitch, Charles
Herbert, Jonathan Haskins and Samuel Dewees — all soldiers,
and some of them prisoners of war -- about ball-playing. Thus establishing,
among other things, that playing ball to pass the time in a POW
camp didn’t start during the Civil War… although Altherr
does admit that it’s not clear to him if the Revolutionary
War helped spread baseball through the Colonies as the Civil War
did throughout the south some 85 years later.23 (Still, you have
to think it couldn’t have hurt the spread of such games.)
Some other things besides soldiers needing a pastime stay true
over time. Leave it to college students to push the envelope. In
this case, by playing ball games, despite attempts by their universities
to ban such games. Altherr notes that such good Ivy League schools
as Yale, Dartmouth and the University of Pennsylvania frowned upon
this undergraduate pastime, mainly because of potential property
damage issues, (at least streakers, goldfish swallowers and panty-raiders
didn’t do any damage) as did more plebian institutions such
as Williams and Bowdoin. Actually, Altherr cites many instances
of ball-playing at colleges in the late 18th and early 19th centuries,
including Henry Wadsworth Longfellow playing at Bowdoin and Oliver
Wendell Holmes, Sr., playing at Harvard.24
Altherr’s research that is summarized in “Leavel,”
led him to the conclusion that the bat and ball games that Americans
played prior to 1820 were highly informal and spontaneous, basically
a lot like a bunch of 20th Century kids just playing sandlot ball
for the fun of it. “The emphasis was on play, spontaneity,
and communal recreation. Baseball and similar games were still folk
games, with all their rubbery aspects and irregular patterns. That
does not mean, however, that they were any less important to the
populace than are modern sports today.”25 And, indeed, that
also does not mean that these proto-baseball games were not important
in the eventual development of the game of baseball as we now know
it (to paraphrase Block.) They were. They laid the very foundation
for baseball. For having done this pioneering spade work (Altherr
has also called it “scullery research”) on illuminating
the game’s American origins, Thomas Altherr goes on this author’s
Mount Rushmore of Baseball for the pre-1840 era.
Before leaving this era, let us recognize some other important
figures who are indeed worthy of recognition… mainly some
of the other fine historians who have contributed to the current
state of knowledge about the game’s origins. Altherr, in protesting
his own inclusion on Mount Rushmore, gives this list of his fellow
historians who have excelled in the origins of baseball field; Larry
McCray, Richard Hershberger, the aforementioned George Thompson
and Robert Henderson, Priscilla Astifan and Peter Morris.26 (This
in addition, of course, to Thorn and Block.)
Also missing the cut in this era is a group portrait of Philadelphians
from the late 1820s and early 1830s, the members of the first real,
organized association of ball-players in the U.S., the previously-referenced
Olympic Town Ball Club of Philadelphia. Since the University of
Pennsylvania had banned playing ball near open windows in 1784,
it’s clear that the ball-playing was going on in Philadelphia
some 50 years before the first club was formed. While even John
Thorn (there’s that name again) will admit that the Olympics’
game or history is still not understood very well, the weight of
opinion at this time, much of it coming from as close to a contemporary
source as we have at this point, Charles Peverelly’s Book
of American Pastimes (written in 1866 – it’s the first
American equivalent of Gutsmuths’ Games for the Exercise and
Recreation of Body and Spirit), indicates that Olympic was the first
organized ball club. At least that’s what Peverelly, writing
just 32 years later, thought
Although it’s just speculation, there’s a possibility
that the members of the Olympic Club were a bunch of rope-makers
(the textiles industry was Philadelphia’s largest in the early
19th Century) who were playing some sort of ball on the grounds
of the Orphan Asylum (18th and Race, just north of Center City)
in 1829. This is another Thorn find… a story in January 1830
issue of The American Sunday School Magazine that tells of a group
of 18 men who were playing ball on the Sabbath (Sunday being the
only day in the 19th Century that the urban working class didn’t
work) at the Orphan Asylum one summer day in 1829. The story ends
with the 18 ball players being asked to remove themselves…
Thorn adds that it’s his guess that they removed themselves
to Camden, where the Blue Laws weren’t as strict.27
Whether they were those sacrilegious rope-makers or not, the Olympic
Club did cross the Delaware River to Camden to play their first
recorded game on July 4, 1831. Their game was town ball, as Block
notes, the principal term for baseball in the Philadelphia area
in those days, and a game delineated by soaking and five sticks
set in a 30-foot diameter circle.28
The fact that the Olympic Club wasn’t playing baseball is
less important than the fact that they were formally organized in
1833, with a written constitution, as the first ball-playing organization
or association in the country. Thus, the importance of the Olympic
Club cannot be overstated. For all of its long history, dating back
to the pyramids, if you so desire, baseball and its various antecedents
were either a child’s game, or literally a pass-time, the
latter referring to something young men did spontaneously in their
spare time to pass the time. Now, however, this pass-time, this
children’s game, was becoming in a primitive way, organized…
the first real step towards widely-accepted rules and ultimately,
the widespread acceptance that would turn this game into a recognized
sport.
Coming up next in 19 to 21 is baseball through the Civil War –
but not from “The Mount Rushmores of Baseball.” Bill
Ryczek (and McFarland) have just brought out the third part of his
trilogy on the earliest years of the National Pastime, a work, “Baseball’s
First Inning” that may well qualify Ryczek for his own spot
on a baseball Mount Rushmore.
-- John Shiffert
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