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Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780252095528 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | University of Illinois Press |
| Publication date: | 05/02/2008 |
| Series: | Illinois History of Sports |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 328 |
| File size: | 3 MB |
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Baseball
A History of America's Game
By Benjamin G. Rader
UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS PRESS
Copyright © 2008 Board of Trustees of the University of IllinoisAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-252-09552-8
CHAPTER 1
The Fraternity and Its Game
In 1858, three years before the first shots were fired in the nation's terrible civil war, baseball excitement in the New York City area mounted to a fever pitch. The occasion was a best-of-three-game series between an all-star nine from Brooklyn and a team of New York City all-stars. After lengthy, sometimes acrimonious negotiations, the teams selected as the site for their series the Fashion Race Course, a popular Long Island horse racing track that featured a magnificent new stone grandstand. To get to the games, the fans crowded into carriages, omnibuses, and the special trains of the Flushing Railroad. Admission cost fifty cents, a price in those days equivalent to half a day's earnings for a common laborer. Proceeds from the games went not to the players but to a fireman's fund for widows and orphans. According to a press report, the spectators included "a galaxy of youth and beauty in female form, who ... nerved the players to their task." Perhaps feminine comeliness steeled the resolve of the New Yorkers the most, for they won the first game, 22 to 18. In the second game the Brooklynites evened the series, winning 29 to 8, but then the New Yorkers rebounded to win the decisive third contest, and the championship, 29 to 18.
The all-star series of 1858 was only one among many sporting spectacles that suddenly burst on the nation in the middle decades of the nineteenth century. In the 1840s and 1850s, thousands of spectators gathered at tracks in virtually every state in the Union to watch horse and foot races; equal numbers thronged along the nation's harbor, lake, and river banks to observe boat races. Although a bare-knuckle prize fight rarely attracted more than a few hundred fans (being illegal everywhere and often scheduled in remote places), literally tens of thousands heard oral accounts or read about them in the newspapers. Prior to 1845, only a few scattered references exist of baseball games, but within fifteen years several hundred clubs had been formed, and more than ten thousand boys and young men played in club matches.
Two groups, each described by contemporaries as "fraternities," were of critical importance to the rise of organized sports in the 1840s and 1850s. One was known simply as the sporting fraternity, or "the fancy." The fancy shared a love of sports, especially those games that provided opportunities for drinking, wagering, and hearty male fellowship. Remaining mostly outside the mainstream of Victorian America, the sporting fraternity offered antebellum men, in particular the younger, unmarried, ethnic, working-class population, a sense of belonging and excitement, as well as a refuge from femininity, domesticity, and the demanding routines of the new industrial economy.
The other group, known as the ball-playing fraternity, came closer to meeting Victorian standards of propriety, though the behavior of the ball players and their followers frequently made them also suspect to the guardians of mid-nineteenth-century morality. The ball players organized voluntary associations, or clubs, for the playing of baseball. Representatives of the clubs wrote and revised the rules of play, appointed officials, scheduled matches, and in 1858 formed a national association. The ball-playing fraternity provided its informal membership with the direct excitement of playing ball games and with the indirect benefits arising from male camaraderie and exhibitions of manly physical skills.
* * *
The baseball fraternity had its origins in the widespread popularity of various sorts of bat-and-ball games and the special American penchant for forming voluntary associations. As Thomas Altherr and David Block have carefully documented, long before Abner Doubleday's alleged invention of baseball at Cooperstown, New York, in 1839, men and boys in the U.S. were playing a large variety of baseball-like games. During the Revolutionary War, for example, the soldiers frequently relieved boredom by resorting to "playing ball" or "base." Early bat-and-ball games might also be called "ball," "old cat," "barn ball," "town ball," "rounders," or even "base ball." Most of these games probably originated in England, though we know that Native Americans played a variety of bat-and-ball games as well. While no written rules existed (or at least have survived) for the earliest of these games, as early as 1767 an English children's book, A Little Pretty Pocket-Book, printed in London, contained engravings of scenes of boys playing games labeled as "stool-ball," "base-ball," and "trap-ball."
These early games required a ball, a stick with which to hit the ball, and one or more bases. The bases might be stones, articles of clothing, trees or shrubs, or stakes driven into the ground. The ball might be fabricated on the spot. One of the players might offer a woolen stocking to be unraveled and wound around a bullet or a cork. The cover might consist of stitched leather. No one probably worried about the distances between bases or the number of players on each side. There was no umpire. The object of the game was to throw a ball so that it could be hit easily by the batsman.
A decisive turning point in the emergence of the baseball fraternity came in 1842 and 1843 when a group of young clerks, storekeepers, professional men, brokers, and assorted "gentlemen" in New York City began playing a bat-and-ball game at the corner of 27th Street and Fourth Avenue in Manhattan. According to unverifiable baseball folklore, it was Alexander Joy Cartwright, a bank clerk and later a partner in a stationery shop, who in 1845 convinced the young men to form a club. They called their fledgling organization the New York Knickerbocker Base Ball club, thereby identifying themselves with the hoary mystique of the area's original Dutch settlers. For a playing site, they rented a portion of the Elysian Fields in Hoboken, New Jersey, a "most picturesque and delightful" place surrounded by woods and with easy access to New York City via the Barclay Street ferry. After a hard afternoon at play, the members regularly retreated to nearby McCarty's Hotel bar, where they could regale one another with manly talk and quench their thirst with spirituous drink. For a time, McCarty's may have also served as an informal clubhouse; at least it was there that the Knickerbockers held their second annual meeting.
The Knickerbocker Base Ball club bore only a faint resemblance to a modern professional or sandlot baseball club. In contemporary sports, the words club and team are used interchangeably. The main, if not the exclusive, purpose of such organizations is to play games against other teams and sometimes to make money. To the Knickerbockers, however, the term club meant far more than simply a team of baseball players bent on victory or monetary remuneration. The Knickerbocker club, like many of the other pioneering baseball clubs, was both an athletic and a social association. While providing opportunities for playing baseball, it also scheduled suppers, formal balls, and other festive occasions in the off-season. Individuals could acquire membership only by election; the club conscientiously tried to keep out those who had a "quarrelsome disposition" or who did not fit well into the group for other reasons. The Knickerbockers drew up bylaws, elected officers, and even fined members who breached the organization's code of dress and behavior. Club members had to purchase uniforms of blue woolen pantaloons, white flannel shirts, and straw hats and attend "Play Days" on Mondays and Thursdays. The Knickerbockers at one time had more than 200 members, many of whom played little if any baseball.
In 1845, the club set down in writing the rules for its game. As with the English game of rounders, the Knickerbocker game stipulated that the infield be diamond shaped, with a base at each corner. The umpire called no strikes or balls, but three pitches that had been swung at and missed retired the batsman. Tagging a runner between bases replaced "soaking" or "plugging," a painful feature of several bat-and-ball games by which base runners could be retired by striking them with a thrown ball. The Knickerbockers limited the team at bat to only three outs. Fielders could obtain outs by catching the batted ball on the first bounce, in the air, throwing to first base ahead of the runner, or tagging the runner between bases. A game ended as soon as a team scored twenty-one "aces," or runs, provided that both teams had played an equal number of "innings." (Innings apparently was a term borrowed from cricket).
Other features of the Knickerbockers' game would be even less familiar to the modern fan. Instead of placing himself behind the catcher or in the field, the "umpire" (another term that may have been borrowed from cricket) sat at a table along the third base line, sometimes dressed in tails and a tall black top hat. Unless a play was so close that it was disputed by one of the team captains, the umpire never interfered with the course of the game. When a controversy did arise, it was the umpire's duty to weigh the merits of the opposing arguments carefully before rendering a decision. If uncertain of a proper ruling on a fair or foul ball, for instance, he could even request the opinions of nearby spectators. All of them being "gentlemen," it was presumed that the spectators would offer unbiased judgments.
Intraclub games began with the captains choosing sides, much in the manner of children on empty lots today. The captains called a tossed coin to see which team batted first. When the losing side took the field, all the infielders except the "short" fielder (the shortstop) usually stood atop their respective bases. The fielders wore no gloves, and the catcher used no protective gear. Hoping to catch pitches on the first bounce, the catcher stood several feet behind the "striker," or batter. Taking a running start, the "feeder," or pitcher, literally pitched (rather than threw) the ball underhanded with a straight arm from a distance of forty-five feet. Because the umpire called no strikes, the striker could wait patiently for a pitch to his liking. Except for fellow club members and occasional invited friends, few spectators witnessed the earliest contests.
The Knickerbockers were not the first baseball club in the country, nor did their formation immediately result in a flurry of interest by other young men in organizing such clubs. Newspaper reports indicate that one or more teams existed long before the Knickerbockers; in 1991, Tom Heitz, librarian of the Baseball Hall of Fame, reported finding an account from 12 July 1825 in which a group of nine men challenged any team in Delaware County, New York, to a game. Nonetheless, these early teams appear not to have survived for long. The Knickerbockers themselves suffered a crushing defeat (23-1) at the hands of a "New York Club" in 1846, but the winning club, if it ever existed as a separate entity, apparently met an early demise, and for a time the Knickerbockers themselves nearly collapsed from a lack of sufficient interest. They did not play another recorded game with an external foe until 1851.
Then suddenly, in the mid-1850s, a baseball mania swept through the metropolitan New York area. In 1854 and 1855 at least three new clubs appeared in Manhattan, while Brooklynites formed seven additional clubs. According to Porter's Spirit of the Times (1855), Brooklyn, which had once been known as the "City of Churches," was "fast earning the title of the 'City of Base Ball Clubs.'" The next year, the same sporting sheet reported that every empty lot within ten miles of New York City was being used as a ball field. According to "The Baseball Fever," a song that first appeared in 1857,
Our merchants have to close their stores
Their clerks away are staying,
Contractors too, can do no work,
Their hands are all out playing.
Men got up in the wee hours of the morning to practice before going to work; they spent their lunch hours playing catch; and after work, they rushed to the ball fields for yet more play. "The streets in the vicinity of our factories are now full at noon and evening of apprentices and others engaged in the simpler games of ball," reported the Newark Daily Advertiser in 1860. Doubtless some young men sacrificed their future careers in business or lost their jobs, all for the sake of the new game. Nothing, not even the biting cold of winter or expressions of displeasure by employers, seemed to chill their enthusiasm for baseball.
By the summer of 1861 at least 200 junior and senior teams were playing in Brooklyn, Queens, Manhattan, Westchester, and northern New Jersey. These teams were of two sorts. One set of teams, usually composed of petty merchants and clerks, organized social clubs such as the Knickerbockers. Although they frequently had enough resources to rent a club room or a clubhouse, they were nonetheless clearly less wealthy than the yachtsmen of the era or the members of the athletic clubs that grew in popularity in the 1870s and 1880s. The second kind of team arose from neighborhoods and workplaces. Young men from a particular neighborhood or those employed in a particular craft—shipwrights, butchers, firemen, post office employees, printing trade workers, and harness makers, for example—formed teams, some of which had no formal existence apart from the playing field. Because the activities of the latter teams, unless they were especially powerful, rarely appeared in the sporting sheets or the newspapers of the day, and because they generated few if any surviving records, we know far less about them than we do about the social clubs.
Even less information has survived about early African American baseball. Antebellum slavery in the South and low incomes among free blacks in the North no doubt severely constricted the possibilities of forming clubs. Nonetheless, after the Civil War, there is scattered evidence of blacks organizing clubs in most of the larger cities. Apparently, the Pythians of Philadelphia were the first all-black team. As early as 1867, the Excelsiors of Philadelphia and the Uniques of Brooklyn played a game hailed by the press as the "colored championship of the United States." On their arrival in Brooklyn, the Excelsiors, dressed in full uniform and headed by their colorful fife and drum corps, marched through the city's streets to the ballpark. A large crowd gathered for the contest. With the Excelsiors ahead 42 to 37 after seven innings of play, the umpire called the game on account of darkness. Led again by their fife and drum corps, the Excelsiors and their supporters marched back to the East River, which they crossed by ferry to New York City for their return trip by train to Philadelphia.
In the first recorded intercollegiate baseball contest, one played by the rules of New England town ball rather than by those of New York, Amherst subdued Williams in 1859 by a lopsided score of 73-32. Unlike Williams, Amherst had trained carefully for the contest. According to a Williams professor, Amherst took "the game from the region of sport and carried it into the region of exact and laborious discipline." When the Amherst students learned of the win, they rang the chapel bell, lit a huge bonfire, and set off fireworks. The Monday following the game brought equally exciting news to the Amherst students; they had also defeated Williams at chess. Once more, "there was a universal ringing of bells, and firing of cannons; and throats already hoarse shouted again amid the general rejoicing." The Civil War temporarily set back the game on college campuses, but in the war's wake college clubs formed in all parts of the nation. It soon became the most widely played of all college sports.
* * *
Despite the widespread enthusiasm for baseball, not all men were equally devoted to the new game. In the early days of its history, established or would-be bankers, merchants, and industrialists had little use for baseball. A few of them played within their own inner social circle or lent their approval to the sport if it did not interfere with the work of their employees, but for the most part they saw it as a waste of valuable time. "The invariable question put to a young man applying for situations in New York," reported the secretary of the Irvington, New Jersey, baseball club in 1867, "is, whether they are members of ball clubs. If they answer in the affirmative, they are told that their services will not be needed." When the wealthy engaged in or patronized sports, it was usually restricted to such socially exclusive activities as yachting, horse racing, and (after the Civil War) formal athletic clubs, polo, tennis, and golf. Because baseball entailed modest costs to play, it was poorly suited for those who turned to sports as a means of distinguishing themselves from the masses.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Baseball by Benjamin G. Rader. Copyright © 2008 Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois. Excerpted by permission of UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS PRESS.
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