 19
to 21…
No, that’s not how many Knickerbockers had a hand in the
first rules of baseball.
Volume 7, #14, May 26, 2009
Book Review: “Baseball’s First Inning”
When discussing outstanding multi-volume histories of baseball,
and the authors of same, the subject matter has traditionally been
limited to those two venerated titans of the 1960s, the late Dr.
Harold Seymour of New York and the still very much on the scene
Dr. David Quentin Voigt of Reading, Pa. While these two gentlemen
have been justly feted for their seminal and ground-breaking works
on the history of the game, the time has come for those of us who
value, research, study and read the history of the game to make
room for a third multi-volume historian (and history) in the pantheon.
His name is William J. Ryczek, and the third volume in his trilogy
of early baseball history, just published by McFarland & Company,
Inc., is “Baseball’s First Inning.”
To briefly re-cap what has gone on before… Ryczek has been
working backwards from 1875 for almost 30 years. Or, at least, he’s
been researching the results, people and history of baseball for
the past three decades or so. This almost half-lifetime of work
first bore fruit in 1992, when “Blackguards and Red Stockings”
was published. This volume, the first and still the best study of
the wild and wooly era of the National Association (if you don’t
believe me, ask John Thorn, he says it’s still the best work
on the NA), is invaluable to anyone who wants to understand how
that first professional baseball association functioned, lived and
died from 1871 to 1875. Covering all five NA seasons in detail,
reading Blackguards is a must for anyone who wants to understand
the sport’s chaotic earliest professional years. Six years
later, Ryczek brought out “When Johnny Came Sliding Home.”
This work covered the years from the end of the Civil War to the
beginning of the NA (in other words, from 1865 to 1870), a remarkable
time when the spread of the game was boosted by the War and by what
Voigt called “creeping commercialism,” practically re-inventing
what had previously largely been a pastime for mid-19th Century
Yuppies in the northeast United States.
Now, it’s time to go back to, not the future, since Ryczek
is working backwards, but the beginning. Ryczek has concluded his
trilogy with “Baseball’s First Inning: A History of
the National Pastime Through the Civil War.” (McFarland, July
2009, 269 pages, $29.95, ISBN 978-0-7864-4194-5. Available through
www.mcfarlandpub.com or by calling 800-253-2187.) Starting essentially
with baseball’s recognizable origins as baseball (more on
that later) and proceeding through the final full year of the War
of Northern Aggression (that’s what they still call it here
in the South… but don’t get me started on that), it
is a work that cements the author’s place in the Baseball
Multi-Volume Hall of Fame. Finding a fine middle ground between
Seymour’s academic erudition (informative, but not the easiest
read) and Voigt’s more informal style, Ryczek’s monumental
research, extensive footnoting (better than either of the two distinguished
academicians, in fact, Seymour didn’t use footnotes at all),
easily readable style (something he has in common with Voigt), and
intriguing appendices (seven in all… in fact you can get a
feel for the game Ryczek writes about almost as well from the appendices
as you can from the text) present the reader with a baseball thrill
the near-equal of seeing your son line a double past the third baseman.
Ryczek’s Preface notes and pays tribute to his distinguished
predecessors in the field of writing about baseball’s origins…
Robert Henderson, David Block, Marshall Wright, George Kirsch, Patricia
Millen, Tom Shieber, Peter Morris, the Protoball Three (Thorn, Tom
Heitz, Larry McCray)… and asks the logical question, has this
subject (i.e., baseball up to 1864) already been covered? Fortunately
for those who care about the on-going quest for truth, Ryczek came
up with the correct answer. That is, each of the previously-mentioned
authors covered a single aspect of baseball in great detail, but
no one had put together the big picture. Besides, history, and our
understanding of it, is ever-changing as long as new data, new concepts,
new interpretations, continue to come forth. And, in the early history
of baseball, that’s as much a given as the Yankees or Mets
overpaying for free agents. Harold Seymour, for instance, for all
his expertise, tended to go along with the Henry Chadwick theory
that baseball developed from rounders. Thus, there is always room
for a new look at history, at least as far as a subject like baseball
– one that has been subject to scholarly scrutiny for only
40 years or so – is concerned, and each succeeding author
(at least the good ones) builds on and learns from the work of their
predecessors.
What Ryczek learned, and passes along to us, is covered in 269
pages that start with the origin of the game that is clearly recognized
as baseball. In that respect he overlaps Block’s work, in
that Ryczek picks up where Block, who focused mainly on baseball’s
ancient antecedents in “Baseball Before We Knew It,”
left off. First Inning also covers the same chronological ground
as Wright’s “The National Association of Base Ball Players,
1857-1870,” but with a different perspective, since Wright’s
work is more a Paleozoic Baseball Encyclopedia (i.e., a statistical
compilation) than anything else.
Although he does start at the beginning, with the Knickerbocker
club, Ryczek does not provide a linear story, as he did in Blackguards.
He does give extensive coverage to the key seasons played during
the Civil War, but this is more of an overview, covering the major
happenings, the game’s major areas on concentration, the major
controversies, some of the top clubs, some of the top players, and
even some of the other sports (ball, fighting and chase sports,
although he misses pedestrianism) of the period. In short, when
Ryczek aimed to provide the big picture, not just of baseball, but
of an era, he succeeded.
Naturally enough, given the importance and location of the early
baseball clubs, much of Ryczek’s story focuses on the New
York and Brooklyn arena, that is, the prominent clubs and players
thereof. And, striding across the pages like the Colossus of Rhodes,
is the one man without whom any story of early baseball would be,
not incomplete, but irrelevant. No, doofus, it’s not Abner
Doubleday, although that myth is still so entrenched in the general
public’s mind (go ahead, ask casual baseball fans who invented
baseball… see what kind of answers you’ll get) that
Ryczek feels the necessity of retelling the story of the Spalding
Commission (for that’s what it really was, Abraham Mills was
awarded de facto naming rights because he chaired Al Spalding’s
puppet parade) in his first chapter. No, as everyone should know,
the key person in baseball’s development from a kids’
game to the National Pastime was… no, it wasn’t Alexander
Cartwright, either. Even if you want to debate (along with Ryczek)
who among the Knickerbocker club members was most responsible for
“baseball,” it should be clear after reading First Inning,
that the real Father of Baseball was… the Father of Baseball,
Henry Chadwick… who is still the only sportswriter who is
actually a member of the Baseball Hall of Fame.
To a certain extent, and rightfully so, this is the Henry Chadwick
story. However, there’s much more to First Inning. Ryczek,
through his exhaustive research, also reports on the other hotbeds
of baseball and baseball-like games in his 20-year focal period;
Philadelphia, Massachusetts and (this may surprise some readers),
New Orleans. He delves at length into the great rules controversies
of the era, notably whether a ball caught on one bounce should be
considered an out, and the overarching issue of just what that guy
in the middle of the diamond was supposed to be doing… pitching
(i.e., tossing) the ball to the batter, or trying to get him out
by jerking his arm, and throwing the ball as hard as possible. The
importance of the second debate, which Chadwick ultimately lost
out on, by the way, cannot be overstated. Perhaps the best way to
illustrate this point is to note that a 74 MPH underhand jerk from
the now-Little League distance of 45 feet away (because that’s
where the pitcher was in those days) will get to the batter in about
the same time frame as a 100 MPH fastball thrown from 60 feet, six
inches.
There can be no doubt about it, William Ryczek has given us an
excellent snapshot of the middle years of 19th Century America,
and the development of what became, and remains to this day, its
national sport. He has educated us to not only this pastime, but
others as well, including even sportswriting, for heaven’s
sake. (His chapter on “The Sporting and Not So Sporting Press”
is a hoot, and not just for broken down old 20/21st Century sportswriters.)
For anyone interested in baseball’s early history, or America
in the years leading up to the Civil War, “Baseball’s
First Inning” is a “must have.”
-- John Shiffert
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