This entertaining history blends anecdote, incident, and analysis as it chronicles the story of our national pastime.
Charles C. Alexander covers the advent of the first professional baseball leagues, the game's surge in the early twentieth century, the Golden Twenties and the Gray Thirties, the breaking of the color line in the late forties, and the game's expansion to its current status as a premier team sport. He describes changing playing styles and outstanding teams and personalities but also demonstrates the many connections between baseball--as game, sport, and business--and the evolution of tastes, values, and institutions in the United States.
This entertaining history blends anecdote, incident, and analysis as it chronicles the story of our national pastime.
Charles C. Alexander covers the advent of the first professional baseball leagues, the game's surge in the early twentieth century, the Golden Twenties and the Gray Thirties, the breaking of the color line in the late forties, and the game's expansion to its current status as a premier team sport. He describes changing playing styles and outstanding teams and personalities but also demonstrates the many connections between baseball--as game, sport, and business--and the evolution of tastes, values, and institutions in the United States.
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Overview
This entertaining history blends anecdote, incident, and analysis as it chronicles the story of our national pastime.
Charles C. Alexander covers the advent of the first professional baseball leagues, the game's surge in the early twentieth century, the Golden Twenties and the Gray Thirties, the breaking of the color line in the late forties, and the game's expansion to its current status as a premier team sport. He describes changing playing styles and outstanding teams and personalities but also demonstrates the many connections between baseball--as game, sport, and business--and the evolution of tastes, values, and institutions in the United States.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781466856226 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Holt, Henry & Company, Inc. |
| Publication date: | 03/14/2025 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 401 |
| File size: | 501 KB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
Our Game
An American Baseball History
By Charles C. Alexander
Fine Creative Media, Inc.
Copyright © 1991 Charles C. AlexanderAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-56731-130-3
CHAPTER 1
1. The New York Game
Within less than three years, the people of the United States would be locked in an epochal civil conflict that would kill more of them than any other war in their history — past or future. But on Tuesday, July 20, 1858, for the couple of thousand Americans who paid a stiff fifty cents each to get into the Fashion Race Course near the village of Flushing on Long Island, and then jammed the little grandstand and elbowed each other around the track railing, the most important thing about to happen was a game of baseball.
One team, representing the city of New York and consisting of players drawn from baseball clubs in Hoboken, New Jersey; Morrisania (just north of the Harlem River in the Bronx); and the Gothams, Empires, and Eagles from Manhattan itself, would meet an all-star outfit made up of players from the Putnam, Excelsior, Atlantic, and Eckford clubs in the independent city of Brooklyn. It was the first match in what was planned as a three-game series, bringing together most of the best players in the country.
Early in the afternoon, spectators began reaching the site by horseback, carriage, and the special trains run for the occasion by the little Flushing Rail Road. Others walked as many as five miles. The players arrived with their full club memberships in horse-drawn omni- buses decorated with flags, bunting, and streamers; the Excelsiors came by the Fulton Avenue Line in a huge conveyance pulled by fourteen gray horses bedecked in feathered bridles.
The interclub Committee of Management, having prohibited the sale of anything stronger than beer, was delighted with "the very decorous conduct of the immense numbers on the ground." The presence of a couple of hundred well-dressed ladies supposedly added to the wholesomeness of the event.
At 2:30 the game started on the grass diamond laid out inside the racetrack. Batting first, the Brooklyns scored three runs. They added two more in the second inning, while the New Yorks counted once. Each team scored twice in the third inning; then New York made four runs in the fourth to tie the game at 7–7. Brooklyn came back with four in the fifth inning, only to see New York rally for seven scores in its turn at bat. Each club tallied two more runs in the sixth inning and one in the seventh. Brooklyn scored four times in the eighth, but the New Yorks piled up five more. Although the outcome was decided when the Brooklyn players failed to score in the top half of the ninth inning, they courteously took the field so their opponents could have an equal number of times at bat. The New Yorks also made their three outs without scoring, so that the final count was New York 22, Brooklyn 18.
After cheering each other on the field, the players adjourned to the little clubhouse atop the racecourse grandstand to exchange champagne toasts and raise their glasses to the Niagara Club, several of whose members had traveled all the way from Buffalo to watch the event. The president of the Excelsiors hoped for a better outcome in the return match the following month.
Reporters from several Manhattan newspapers as well as the Brooklyn Daily Eagle covered the game. Frank Pigeon of the Brooklyns won praise for his play in the "short field" (shortstop), as did Harry Wright in center field for New York. Outfielders Green and O'Brien of Brooklyn had excelled "particularly in catching the ball on the fly," while New York's Davis "made a miss on a ball, which, if he had held it, would have immortalized him as a fielder." The only moment of controversy had come late in the game, when Wadsworth of New York swung at the ball and somehow managed to hit it off his forefinger. The Brooklyn pitcher tossed over to first, but the umpire, seated under an umbrella at a table about twenty feet from the home base, had ruled no play.
All in all, thought the New York Times, it had been a fine match, one that would be "long remembered with pleasure by all lovers of this noble and invigorating game." Indeed it had been the most-talked-about and watched baseball event up to that time — something of a landmark in the evolution of the "New York game" from a pleasant recreational activity, based on the ancient English children's game of "rounders," into a mature competitive sport.
Europeans had played varieties of stick-and-ball games for centuries before the earliest American Colonial settlements. Children here, like their European forebears and contemporaries, frequently amused themselves at games with names such as "one o' cat," "three o' cat," and particularly rounders, also commonly called "town ball." What all of those games had in common was that a boy with a stick or "bat" would try to hit a small ball tossed to him by another boy, and then run to a base or bases (depending on the game) before he was "put out."
Until the early 1800s, such games remained almost exclusively children's amusements. In a country such as the new United States, one that valued hard work and possessed no true leisure class, few adults had either the time or inclination for idle diversions. Thomas Jefferson might acknowledge the usefulness of horsemanship and hunting skills, but "Games played with the ball," he wrote a friend in 1785, "stamp no character on the mind." Two years later the faculty at the staunchly Presbyterian College of New Jersey (later Princeton) adopted a resolution prohibiting "a play at present much practiced by the small boys among the students and by the grammar scholars with balls and sticks in the rear campus. ..." The boys, the faculty felt, should seek to entertain themselves in ways "both more honorable and more useful."
Yet across the country, in villages and towns and on the many open fields and empty lots in its few cities, youngsters continued to play games that went by the generic designation "base ball." No doubt boys in the hamlet of Cooperstown, New York, also played such games; one of them may even have been named Abner Doubleday. In 1839, according to what would become official legend seventy years later, young Doubleday devised the basic rules for a new kind of baseball, an indigenously American version. At that time, though, the twenty-year-old Doubleday was already more than one hundred miles away at West Point, in his second year as a cadet at the U.S. Military Academy. When he died in 1893, Doubleday was known for his distinguished record as a Union officer in the Civil War and as a postwar promoter of street railways. He left no record of having ever played baseball.
By the 1830s–1840s small numbers of adult young men in the northeastern seaboard cities, evidently less interested in watching and wagering on horse races or cockfights than were many of their peers, began to spend part of their off-work time playing the bat-ball games of their boyhoods. They were mainly small merchants, clerks, lawyers, occasionally physicians — upwardly mobile, solidly middle-class urbanites (what a much later generation would call "yuppies"). As early as 1831 a group of young Philadelphians formed the Olympic Club and played a refined version of town ball, featuring a rectangular playing field with five bases. In the Boston area still another version of town ball was so popular that it came to be called the "New England game."
One group of young New York professionals who liked to bat and throw a ball around on summer afternoons followed the suggestion of Alexander Joy Cartwright, a shipping clerk, that they organize themselves as the Knickerbocker Base Ball Club. Three years later they decided to leave the Murray Hill area of Manhattan, where they'd been meeting, for more space and seclusion at the lovely Elysian Fields, part of the Stevens estate outside Hoboken. On Saturday afternoons during the summer, they would take the ferry across the Hudson River to Hoboken, climb to their playing site, and amuse themselves for a couple of hours at any of various forms of "base ball."
By 1845–1846 the Knickerbockers were regularly playing a particular kind of "base ball." Their new game provided for nine-member teams with fixed batting orders; four bases, positioned in diamond configuration, placed forty-two paces apart; and delivery of the ball underhand from a distance of fifteen paces to a "striker," who had to hit the ball between the lines stretching to the first and third bases. If he missed the ball altogether in three swings at it, he was declared "out." When three outs had been made, the teams would exchange places at bat and afield; when both sides had made their three outs apiece, an "inning" had been played. The winning team would be the first to make twenty- one "aces," or scores. Maybe the most pronounced departure from other bat-ball games was the elimination of "soaking," whereby fielders could put out base runners by throwing the ball and hitting them. In the Knickerbockers' game, the ball always had to reach a base ahead of a runner.
Nobody actually "invented" baseball, but the game the Knickerbockers played did mark the beginning of what, within a few years, was being called the "New York game." The Knickerbockers arranged matches under their new rules with a number of other clubs; soon Knickerbocker-style baseball had become the favorite bat-ball pastime in the New York area. The Knickerbockers had wanted a game that would offer lots of hitting and base-running yet could easily be concluded in two hours or less. It was supposed to be fun, a form of play for men who weren't really athletes and weren't trying to be. They differed from other American males of their age range only in that they occupied a somewhat above-average social position, were willing to engage in a limited amount of exercise away from work, and sought that exercise in a kind of activity that traditionally had been child's play.
They were friends and associates, willing to sweat a little as a pretext for some gentlemanly socializing. Besides charging annual dues, they also levied fines on members who used profanity during games or argued with whoever had agreed to serve as the umpire. Part of what they collected went toward paying for the beer and hearty dinner that usually followed their games, and for such occasions they sometimes invited along wives and girlfriends to share in the festivities.
Alexander Cartwright, the instigator of the Knickerbocker Base Ball Club, stayed around only until 1849, when he departed to seek his fortune in California in the great gold rush. On the long trip overland he taught Knickerbocker baseball to people on wagon trains, to soldiers, saloon- keepers, miners, even Indians — anybody who seemed interested. Although he failed to find quick riches in California, he and Frank Turk, another former Knickerbocker, did organize San Francisco's first baseball club. After voyaging to China, Cartwright settled in the Hawaiian Islands, where he continued to spread the gospel of baseball. Founder of a successful trading company and later a bank, a hospital, and the Honolulu fire department, he died in 1892 as one of the most prosperous and respected persons in the Islands. His connection with baseball's beginnings, though, was almost totally forgotten.
By the late 1850s, what the Knickerbockers had intended as little more than a pleasant pastime for themselves and other young gentlemen had become a serious competitive undertaking for substantial numbers of American men. In the city of New York, in much of New Jersey, in Buffalo, Rochester, Washington, Baltimore, and numerous other places, even in faraway New Orleans, baseball had emerged as the favorite form of team athletics. Brooklyn was a particular baseball hotbed, boasting dozens of clubs; in March 1858, fourteen clubs from Brooklyn and Manhattan formed the National Association of Base Ball Players (NABBP). In that first and three subsequent meetings (during which time NABBP's membership more than doubled), the delegates formulated a set of bylaws and produced the first standardized set of rules for baseball.
Essentially they adopted the Knickerbocker rules, the principal change providing that whoever was ahead after nine innings would be the winner, rather than whoever first scored twenty-one "aces." The distances between bases, moreover, were officially set at ninety feet. A proposal (from the Knickerbockers) to eliminate outs on one-bounce catches of outfield flies was turned down, despite complaints such as that of the influential weekly Porter's Spirit of the Times that nothing "is more annoying to an admirer of good fielding than to see a splendid hit to the center field ... entirely nullified by the puny effort of waiting until the force of the ball is spent on the ground and then taking it on the bound." Although the Knickerbockers went ahead anyway and banned one- bounce catches in their own matches, the NABBP didn't adopt the new fly rule until 1864.
Much of the thinking behind the proposed requirement for a clean catch on outfield flies had to do with a desire to make baseball an unimpeachably "manly" game. If baseball had already become an acceptable activity for fully grown men, then it was also beginning to move away from its origins in the male gentry. Especially in Brooklyn, club members frequently included skilled workmen — shipwrights, cobblers, coopers, and stonecutters. A majority of the players on Brooklyn's powerful Eckford club made their livings with their hands, although they were, to be sure, among the highest-paid workmen in the country.
As they attracted a following of spectators (who with growing frequency found themselves paying admissions), baseball games featured heightened partisanship and emphasis on winning. The rivalry among the Eckfords, Atlantics, and Excelsiors in Brooklyn was particularly intense. A three-game series in 1860 between the Atlantics and Excelsiors for the putative city championship drew crowds of eight to twenty thousand. With each team having won a game, the deciding contest, late in August, ended unexpectedly when the Excelsiors' captain, disgusted by heckling from the pro-Atlantics spectators, took his team off the field despite enjoying an 8–6 lead.
The Excelsior Club was the most significant in the pre–Civil War years in promoting and exhibiting baseball to people in the hinterlands. In the spring of 1860 the Excelsiors first toured the western part of New York State, winning all six games from local teams, then traveled as far south as Baltimore, again going without defeat. James Creighton, the Excelsiors' star pitcher, was the most admired player of his time and also probably the first player to be paid by his club. Winning had become a more important consideration for the Excelsiors than abiding by the NABBP's strictures against professionalism. Baseball had come a long way since the early years of the Knickerbockers.
The Knickerbockers themselves were more and more an anachronism. Persisting in their genteel approach to the game, they never sought publicity or made much of an effort to attract spectators. When the leading Brooklyn and Manhattan clubs began to talk up championship matches, the Knickerbockers quietly withdrew from such discussions. While their name would continue to carry a certain cachet in New York baseball circles, the game was rapidly moving away from the easygoing ways of the Knickerbockers and toward something more intense and keenly competitive. In short, baseball, as played by most of the clubs in and around New York and Brooklyn, had become less a "game" and more a modern organized sport.
As baseball progressed, the British game of cricket lost whatever chance it may have had of becoming a mass-appeal sport in the United States. Although that outcome wasn't inevitable, given the particular circumstances in which baseball came to flower in the middle decades of the nineteenth century, it's hard to envisage how things might have worked out differently. Baseball, as Melvin Adelman has said, "fulfilled the requirements of the sporting universe created by the changing social and urban environment of the antebellum period."
The 1840s and 1850s brought growing concern over the nation's physical health, a concern articulated mainly by and for the benefit of the swelling numbers of middle-class city-dwellers. Americans, so the argument went, were sickly, lacking any interest in "physical culture," and therefore in danger of betraying the virile, heroic heritage of their Revolutionary forebears. Outdoor recreation was not only desirable for the crowded urban masses but, according to the physical fitness propagandists, absolutely necessary to forestall national decline.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Our Game by Charles C. Alexander. Copyright © 1991 Charles C. Alexander. Excerpted by permission of Fine Creative Media, Inc..
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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Table of Contents
Contents
TITLE PAGE,COPYRIGHT NOTICE,
PREFACE,
EPIGRAPH,
1. THE NEW YORK GAME,
2. THE PROFESSIONAL GAME,
3. THE NATIONAL PASTIME AND THE SERFS' REVOLT,
4. BASEBALL FEUDALISM AND THE RISE OF THE AMERICAN LEAGUE,
5. THE DEAD-BALL ERA,
6. WAR, SCANDAL, AND BABE RUTH,
7. THE GOLDEN TWENTIES,
8. THE GRAY THIRTIES,
9. WAR, PLENTY, AND THE END OF JIM CROW,
10. SHRINKING CROWDS AND SHIFTING FRANCHISES,
11. THE EXPANSION ERA,
12. THE END OF FEUDALISM,
13. THE EMBATTLED EIGHTIES,
14. NON-SESQUICENTENNIAL REFLECTIONS,
BIBLIOGRAPHIC ESSAY,
INDEX,
ALSO BY CHARLES C. ALEXANDER,
COPYRIGHT,