Home, with Joy
Baseball is continuous, like nothing else among American things, an endless game of repeated summers, joining the long generations of all the fathers and all the sons.
Donald Hall
The year was 1859. About the time the Indian game of lacrosse was getting polished up and “civilized” in Montreal, another game played with ball and stick was spreading like wildfire along the eastern seaboard. On the eve of the Civil War, extra ferries were needed to shuttle 24,000 spectators from Manhattan to New Jersey to watch an eagerly anticipated match at Hoboken’s now-famous Elysian Fields. Commentators heralded it as “the favorite game of the country village and the country town, as well as the larger commercial cities.” From its early epicenter in New York and Philadelphia the game had swept westward, “with the advance of civilization,” as one sports weekly put it. In a short time, it had picked up players and fans in 22 states. In antebellum Savannah, New Orleans, and other southern towns, a dozen active clubs had cropped up and were signing on new members monthly. One enthusiastic promoter went so far as to suggest that the sport had “every prospect of becoming [America’s] national game.”
The game was cricket. And within a decade it would be little more than an also-ran, a quaint—and for too many, unwelcome—reminder of the nation’s colonial past.
America, it turned out, needed its own game—not some Old World hand-me-down. We needed baseball, just as we needed the telegraph and the automobile and the electric lightbulb. And so we got it, invented it, brought it to life fully formed like Athena from Zeus’s forehead onto a cow pasture in Cooperstown, New York. Or so the story goes.
Before America had a president or a Constitution, it had baseball. In the winter of 1778 at Valley Forge, the cold, jaundiced, undernourished troops played baseball for exercise and to boost their spirits. Even General George Washington was known to take to the field. According to a French visitor at camp, “he sometimes throws and catches a ball for hours with his aides-de-camp.” By 1791, baseball was a common enough occurrence in the small towns and villages of New England for it to be a public nuisance, contributing to broken windows and other damage. That year, the word “base-ball” made its first U.S. appearance in a Pittsfield, Massachusetts, bylaw prohibiting its play within 80 yards of the town’s new meetinghouse windows.
The law conjures a kind of Currier and Ives nostalgia for the joys of youth and for “the old ball game,” as the refrain from the ritual seventh-inning song goes (“Take Me Out to the Ballgame,” written in 1908 by a vaudeville star who had never actually been out to a ball game). The image is one we all know: a merry band of marauding youth playing a pickup game on a small-town green on a lazy summer afternoon. A deep, arcing fly ball connects with a small window. The sound of shattered glass scatters the boys over hedges and fields, nervous laughter trailing behind them.
Baseball was off to a great start.
Let’s be clear up front. Exploring baseball’s roots is more like joining a mass pilgrimage than it is setting off on a solitary journey into uncharted terrain. No other sport is as concerned, or as obsessed, with its founding. Tennis fans seem content knowing its roots are sufficiently old and aristocratic (and for the French, French). That one Scottish clan or another had something to do with golf’s founding somewhere near the holy links of St. Andrews satisfies most golf enthusiasts. Soccer’s only real historical debate in recent years has been whether, being the global game and all, FIFA should give an official nod to the fact that the Chinese emperor may have kicked a ball before English peasants thought of it. (In 2004, when FIFA president Sepp Blatter called China the “cradle of the earliest forms of football,” he set off a flurry of debate across Europe.) Yet over the past century, the subject of baseball’s origins has earned the attention of commissions, public hearings, press conferences, editorials, books, conferences, and more. The Society for the Advancement of Baseball Research (SABR), a 7,000-member organization formed to advance the research, preservation, and dissemination of baseball history, even has a separate “origins committee,” currently chaired by MIT political scientist Lawrence McCray.
To join the baseball pilgrimage I could have visited the Lourdes of sports shrines—Cooperstown, New York, birthplace of James Fenimore Cooper and a certain Civil War hero named Abner Doubleday, baseball’s mythological founder. Here, a young Doubleday supposedly interrupted a group of kids playing marbles in Elihu Phinney’s pasture on a summer’s afternoon, drew out a diamond-shaped field in the dirt with a stick, and proceeded to educate them on the rules of his new game. The town’s Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum today draws 350,000 devotees a year from around the world to view a collection of 130,000 baseball cards, 33,000 bats, balls, and other equipment, and 12,000 hours of recorded film clips. As French philosopher Bernard-Henri Lévy described the place after his own visit:
This is not a museum, it’s a church. These are not rooms, they’re chapels. The visitors themselves aren’t really visitors but devotees, meditative and fervent. I hear one of them asking, in a low voice, if it’s true that the greatest champions are buried here—beneath our feet, as if we were at Westminster Abbey, or in the Imperial Crypt beneath the Kapuziner Church in Vienna. And every effort is made to sanctify Cooperstown itself, this cradle of the national religion, this new Nazareth, this simple little town.
I could have gone to the far less well known but no less sacred Baseball Reliquary, a traveling museum based in Monrovia, California, and assorted nearby storage units that houses such memorabilia as a piece of skin from Doubleday’s thigh, one of Babe Ruth’s half-eaten hot dogs, and the jock strap of Eddie Gaedel, the three-foot, seven-inch player who in 1951, wearing the number “1/8th,” got to base on a walk in his one and only time at bat for the St. Louis Browns. The Reliquary even has its own alternative hall of fame, the Shrine of the Eternals, celebrating such unsung heroes as Dock Ellis Jr., the curler-wearing Pittsburgh Pirates pitcher who in 1970 threw a no-hitter while tripping on LSD.
Even before Ken Burns captured the notion so eloquently in his 18-hour Emmy Award–winning documentary series, it was widely understood—a cultural given, in fact—that, as the historian Jacques Barzun declared, “Whoever wants to know the heart and mind of America had better learn baseball.” Walt Whitman, who as early as 1846 wrote lovingly of observing youngsters playing a game of “base” in “the outer parts” of Brooklyn, later in life reflected on the emerging national sentiment toward the game:
Well—it’s our game; that’s the chief fact in connection with it; America’s game; it has the snap, go, fling of the American atmosphere; it belongs as much to our institutions; fits into them as significantly as our Constitution’s laws; is just as important in the sum total of our historic life.
Other nations and cultures have long delighted at making their own claims to baseball’s genesis. A letter sent to the Hall of Fame in 1975 by a Polish researcher, for example, reads, “For your information and records, I am pleased to inform you that after much research I have discovered that baseball was introduced to America by the Poles who arrived in Jamestown in 1609.” He cited an obscure but since verified account of Zbigniew Stefanski, one of many Polish settlers brought over to the Jamestown colony to help with glassmaking and working with pitch and tar. The workers had taken with them a popular game called pilka palantowa, or “bat ball,” to fill their few hours of recreation:
Soon after the new year, I, Sadowski, Mata, Mientus, Stoika, and Zrenic initiated a ball game played with bat. . . . Most often we played this game on Sundays. We rolled rags to make the balls. . . . Our games attracted the savages who sat around the field, delighted with this Polish sport.
Not to be outdone, in 1990 the former president of the Romanian Oina Federation suggested that baseball was inspired by his country’s national game, which involves pitching a ball stuffed with horsehair to a batter who must run a circuit of nine bases across a rectangular field. Oina is said to date to the early 14th century when it was first played by Transylvanian shepherds. The federation president has made the unverified claim that Romanian immigrants serving with Doubleday in the Civil War clued him into the secrets of that great eastern European pastime before he scratched his rules into New York soil.
Then there is the tantalizing account of the fascist Italian demographer Corrado Gini, who in 1937 encountered Berber tribesmen playing a game remarkably like baseball in a desert village in Libya. The tribesmen called the game ta kurt om el mahag, which translates as “the ball of the pilgrim mother.” As described by IBM engineer-turned-baseball-historian David Block, the pitcher stood just a few feet from the batter and tossed the ball in a gentle arc. The batter could then be retired by having the ball caught on a fly or by being hit by the thrown ball while running between two bases. Gini suggested that the game was left behind by migrating blond Europeans who visited the region during the Stone Age. That he was the author of The Scientific Basis of Fascism surely didn’t influence his interpretation at all.
When Gini first proposed his outlandish theory at a conference in Copenhagen in 1938, Danish researcher Per Maigard was in the audience. Maigard, who was conducting his own research on bat and ball games, came to his own conclusion a few years later that—surprise, surprise—the Scandinavian game of longball had influenced the development of baseball, cricket, and every other game worth playing. The mysterious Berbers, Maigard declared, must have picked up the game from Germanic Vandals who had brought it with them when they invaded North Africa in the fifth century AD.
So who threw the first pitch? Polish glassblowers, Berber tribesmen, Transylvanian shepherds, Egyptian pharaohs, and marauding Vikings have all had their backers. As, of course, has Abner Doubleday. The answer, it turns out, is none of the above.
If we’re content with locating the origins of the game with the first time bat-struck ball, then we should accept that we’ll never find that first box score, unless it’s exposed someday in the dark recesses of a Paleolithic cave. Going back to my rock-throwing theory for ball game origins, it wouldn’t have overly taxed our early hominid neurons to figure out that the club they used to brain small mammals might also launch a projectile farther than they could throw it. Stripped of baseball’s esoteric rules and historical context, the fundamental act of hitting a ball with a bat is, as George Vecsey has pointed out, a “rather basic human pleasure, easily improvised by a couple of bored sentries or monks or schoolgirls with access to a thin stick and something round. The rules sort of fall into place.” The amateur historians of the Society for American Baseball Research have in fact exhaustively documented this basic pleasure, recording nearly 300 references to bat-and-ball games before the year 1800.
Medieval bat-and-ball game, Flanders, 1301, from the Calendar of the Ghistelles Hours.
Among these references is an image dating to 1301 from a French medieval manuscript, the Calendar of the Ghistelles Hours, which clearly shows one young man hitting a line drive to another player who appears ready to snag it for the out. Another, from a 1555 poem by an English vicar condoning youthful recreation (at a time when many games were being banned), seems to indicate that base running was already a feature of some games:
To shote, to bowle, or caste the barre
To play tenise, or tosse the ball,
Or to rene base, like men of war,
Shal hurt thy study nought at al.
But the first mention by name of the sport that Ruth and Mantle and Mays built is from a popular English children’s book, A Little Pretty Pocket-Book, published in London in 1744. A woodcut image entitled “Base-Ball” shows three boys Aidan’s age wearing tricornered hats arranged on a field marked with three high posts for bases. One player looks ready to pitch a ball. The “batter” stands out for having no bat, preparing instead to strike the ball with the flat of his hand. A short child’s verse below the image reads:
Woodcut of game of “Base-Ball,” from John Newbery, A Little Pretty Pocket-Book, 1744.
The ball once struck off,
Away flies the boy
To the next destined post.
And then home with joy.
The book, with the fantastic subtitle “Intended for the Amusement of Little Master Tommy and Pretty Miss Polly with Two Letters from Jack the Giant Killer,” was written by the early children’s author John Newbery of the Newbery Medal. Copies of the popular book were at the time sold together with a ball for boys and a pincushion for girls, the use of which, according to the marketing copy that accompanied it, “will infallibly make Tommy a good boy and Polly a good girl.”
In all its innocence and simplicity, this first reference captures the essence of baseball as it’s still played today. A ball is pitched by a fielder and struck by a player “at bat” who runs a circuit of bases in some set order in an attempt to get safely “home.” Throw in some peanuts and Cracker Jacks and we’ve almost got the full package!
This first reference also captures an important feature of baseball as it was played right up until the first modern rules were written down. It was, at its core, a game for boys and girls, though adults seem to have indulged as well—less for competition than for diversion and the desire to re-create the carefree days of their youth. Underscoring this childhood connection is the second historical reference to the game, which appears in a 1748 letter written about the activities enjoyed by the family of the Prince of Wales: “In the winter, in a large room, they divert themselves at base-ball, a play all who are, or have ever been, schoolboys are well acquainted with.” The inference that the royal adults would have remembered the game from their childhoods suggests that “base-ball” must have been played from at least the early 1700s.
During the game’s infancy, baseball was just one of a collection of similar games enjoyed and improvised upon by English boys and girls. These included trap-ball—a game in which a batter would attempt to strike a small wooden ball released from a mechanical trap. Also played were tip-cat and a host of other “cat” games in which the player would hit a lever to catapult a small piece of wood, known as the “cat,” into the air and then hit it with a stick to score runs. But baseball most likely owes its greatest debt to a medieval game known as stool-ball, played in England as early as 1450. Stool-ball featured many of the elements that we now associate with baseball. Batters would run a circuit of wooden stools without being put out by being struck, or “soaked,” by the ball.
Like early baseball, stool-ball was a pastime enjoyed by both sexes. Young men and women took to the fields together in the springtime, exploiting the game’s innocent childhood associations to spend time together at play. The “play,” however, seems to have occasionally stretched the standard rules. Shakespeare used the expression “play at stoole ball” as a thinly veiled euphemism for sex. And this exchange from a contemporary play takes the association further still, working trap-ball into the saucy mix:
WARD: Can you play at shuttlecock forsooth?
ISABELLA: Ay, and stool-ball too, sir; I have great luck at it.
WARD: Why, can you catch a ball well?
ISABELLA: I have catched two in my lap at one game.
WARD: What, have you, woman? I must have you learn to play at trap too, then y’are full and whole.
So “America’s pastime,” history confesses, actually emerged in England from a collection of children’s sandlot games (including one that served as adult foreplay as much as it did child’s play). What about cricket, then, that quintessentially English game that once vied for the hearts and minds of Americans? Many (particularly the English, of course) assume that it must have formed the trunk of baseball’s evolutionary tree. Both games, after all, involve a ball and bat, scoring “runs” in “innings” with a set number of “outs” in games officiated by “umpires.” But as Block points out, cricket is more like an elder cousin than a parent to baseball. In an evolutionary flowchart of baseball’s evolution that Block developed, cricket breaks off early on its own proud branch, the Neanderthal line that lived on and still thrives wherever the Union Jack once flew.
Cricket first appeared in the southeast of England in the 16th century where it was played among Flemish immigrants. English researcher David Terry has offered the treasonous theory that the name “cricket” may derive from the continental hockey game met de krik ketsen, which the Flemish brought with them to English shores. There, according to Terry, they blended it with stool-ball and other local bat-and-ball games to form cricket. As an American, I must admit, I take some comfort in knowing that while we clearly owe the English for birthing baseball, the English may also need to look east for the inspiration of their own national game.
As a child’s game, baseball had the tug and yearn of nostalgia from the start, part of the original playbook. As early as 1870, just 25 years after the sport’s rules were first written down, the Brooklyn Excelsiors were already pining for the good old days. That powerhouse of early baseball made a Fourth of July trip that year upriver to Peekskill “to avail themselves of passing the Fourth pleasantly in the country, and on a ball field where the surroundings would remind them of the good old times when games were played for the pleasure and excitement incident to the sport.”
In order to experience baseball’s “good old times” for myself, I decided to forego Cooperstown, Monrovia, and every other well-revered shrine. Instead, I chose to visit the past itself—or at least a faithful reenactment of it. I spun the clock back to the early 1860s, back to the halcyon days before multimillion-dollar contracts, steroids . . . and gloves.
I kicked off my time travel in Washington, D.C., in the summer of 2009. Baseball had hit yet another low point. The sports channels were all abuzz with news about “The List.” Word had been leaked that David Ortiz and Manny Ramirez, the two powerhouse hitters for the Red Sox at the time, had in 2003 tested positive for performance-enhancing drugs (PEDs). Players and coaches were calling on the league to release the entire list of offenders and move on. PEDs were old news for the sport by this point. Jose Canseco, Mark McGwire, and other players had been called before Congress to testify four years earlier. Everyone had long forgotten that way back in 1889 “Pud” Galvin, baseball’s first 300-game winner, openly injected himself with testosterone derived from the testicles of a guinea pig and a dog.
When I stepped off the metro in Anacostia on the gritty southeast side of town and asked the station attendant for walking directions to Anacostia Park, he looked me up and down and said, “There’s no easy way for you to walk there.”
I only understood his caution later upon learning that Anacostia had one of the highest homicide rates in the country. Marion Barry, the city’s former crack-smoking mayor, had been referencing Anacostia and other east-side neighborhoods when he famously remarked that, “Outside the killings, D.C. has one of the lowest crime rates in the country.” I made a call and 10 minutes later a blue minivan pulled up outside the station. Out stepped Jeff “Bucket” Turner sporting white knickers, high blue-and-yellow argyle socks, a flat-topped cap, and a bib shirt with the letter P embroidered on it. Jeff, a 40-year-old Baltimore accountant, is the manager of the Chesapeake and Potomac Base Ball Club, one of nearly 200 vintage ball clubs across the United States that play the game by 19th-century rules using replicas of Civil War–era equipment and uniforms.
“Sorry for the hassle getting out here,” Jeff apologized. “We were supposed to be playing down on the Mall but got bumped by a big soccer tournament.” Nineteenth-century baseball, it seems, doesn’t rank the way it used to. I asked “Bucket” about his nickname.
“Oh, all our players have nicknames just like they did in the early days. I got mine ’cause when I first started with the team I had my ‘foot in the bucket’ with a major hitting slump.”
We drove down to the park, which runs alongside the Potomac River, where the DC Classic was under way—an annual matchup of a dozen or so vintage teams from as far away as Minnesota and Ohio. The setting was no field of dreams. The grass was pocked with brown patches from the August sun. There were no diamonds or dugouts in sight and the base paths sprouted weeds. But families, oblivious to the urban blight, lined the field on blankets and in lawn chairs to cheer on their players, who sported a range of period outfits, many based on uniforms worn 150 years ago. Jeff’s team was in the middle of the fifth inning against the Minnesota Quicksteps. On the field were men of every age, from 18 to 60, as well as a couple of young women.
“If you can swing a bat and run the bases without hurting yourself, we’ll take you,” said Bob “Slow Trot” Tholkes, the Minnesota manager.
Jeff started his club four years ago and quickly gathered players via Craigslist. “I wanted to get out and be active, but I wasn’t into softball and I wasn’t up for sixty-mile-an-hour overhand pitching.” Mid-19th-century ball fit the bill. Long before the era of fastballs and curveballs, the pitcher was called a “feeder” and was expected to toss the ball underhand so that the batter could easily strike it. As Henry Chadwick, the Englishman credited with developing the box score and earned run average, among other innovations, described the rule in 1868, “When the batsman takes his position at the home base, the umpire asks him where he wants a ball, and the batsman responds by saying ‘knee high,’ or ‘waist high,’ or by naming the character of the ball he wants, and the pitcher is required by the rules to deliver the batsman a ball within a legitimate reach of his bat and as near the place indicated as he can.”
Jeff and his fellow time travelers have a weekend mission to reclaim the innocence and civility of the “gentleman’s game” that was baseball in the mid-1800s.
“It’s about getting back to where it started,” said Jeff as he selected a heavy antique wooden bat from a pile and got ready to take his turn. “It was a more casual game with fewer rules before the 1860s, when it started to get regulated and competitive.”
Jeff stepped up to bat. The pitcher, gloveless as all but a handful of players were until the 1880s, lobbed the slowest pitch I’d seen since I coached my son’s second-grade Little League team. Jeff swung and missed. Strike one. Another pitch floated squarely over the plate, but Jeff gave it a look and let it go.
“Warning, striker!” called the umpire. According to the 1866 rules, the next time Jeff avoided hitting a ball the arbiter deemed playable he’d be called for the strike. Having been warned, Jeff connected solidly with the next pitch, sending the ball toward the shortstop, who barehanded it off the bounce and tossed it back to the pitcher.
“One hand!” called the arbiter, using the old term for an out.
I was ready to leap onto the field to protest when “Sparks,” a young electrical engineer on Jeff’s team, pulled me back and explained that by the rules of the day a ball caught off the first bounce was as much an out as one caught on the fly.
More precisely, Jeff was out because of rule 12 of the very first 1845 set: “If a ball be struck, tipped, and caught, either flying or on the first bound, it is a hand out.” The man behind those first rules was a Manhattan bank clerk, bookseller, and volunteer fireman named Alexander Joy Cartwright, one of what seems to be an ever-growing list of “fathers” of baseball. For a few years, Cartwright and a group of merchants, bankers, and other solidly middle-class men had been breaking from work at 3:00 PM to play a standing game in a vacant lot at 27th Street and Park Avenue near what would later become the first Madison Square Garden. They called themselves the Knickerbocker Base Ball Club, using a Dutch name made famous years earlier by Washington Irving, who used it as a pen name. Though Cartwright and his Knickerbockers have been given a special spot in baseball history, historian John Thorn points out that they were by no means the only game in town. Several named clubs—Gotham, Washington, Eagle, Olympic, and New York—preceded them with teams competing as early as 1823.
The term “club” is still used quaintly to describe today’s bloated corporate franchises, but in the 1840s baseball clubs like the Knickerbockers were real social fraternities that brought men of similar professions and social status together. The Industrial Revolution had transformed the leisure lives of city dwellers, subjecting them to what historian George Kirsch calls “the tyranny of the clock.” Where the lines between work and leisure were once fluid and blurred, they were now sharply drawn. White-collar merchants, shopkeepers, bookkeepers, and other city dwellers found themselves working ever-longer hours to keep up with the demands of business. Free time was in short supply in a six-day workweek, with Sundays still regarded in many places as the “Lord’s day,” inappropriate for frivolous games and play. At the same time, restrictive Victorian attitudes toward sport and recreation were giving way to acceptance of the healthful benefits of respectable, “manly” pastimes like baseball. And so, after a long day hunched over desks in factories these new urbanites happily escaped to nearby ball fields for recreation, exercise, and socializing. The old “child’s game” of their youth, they found, was the perfect antidote to the pressures of modern life.
The Knickerbockers and other baseball clubs of the time were governed by constitutions, bylaws, and annual dues. The 40 members were divided into a “first nine,” which was their best players, a “second nine” bench squad, and a “muffin nine” last resort. The final category was gently defined by Henry Chadwick as “a class of players who are both practically and theoretically unacquainted with the game. Some ‘muffins,’ however, know something about how the game should be played, but cannot practically exemplify their theory.”
Matches between clubs were arranged by written challenge. The clubs would agree upon an umpire, a place, and a time. The prize in interclub matches was typically the game ball, which was inscribed with the date and score and put in a trophy case in the club room. The ball was a fitting prize given the difficulty and cost of making one before the era of mass production of sporting goods. While the average life of a ball in today’s major-league games is just six pitches, in the early days one baseball was used for the entire game unless it was lost or completely demolished. A ripped ball was cause for a break in the action as needle and thread were brought to the field for repairs. A ball that got whacked out of shape would be remolded to a usable form. A lost ball could cause a serious delay to an already long game as players and fans set off to scour bushes and high grasses. It became enough of a problem that in 1877 a five-minute limit was put on such searches before a second ball was introduced.
As reported in the San Francisco Examiner in 1888, one of the first matches ever played in that city was nearly canceled owing to the lack of a suitable ball. With both clubs and spectators gathered and the threat of postponement looming, one industrious club member approached “a German immigrant who was the possessor of a pair of rubber overshoes. These he bought, after much dickering, for $10, and with the yarn unraveled from a woolen stocking and a piece of a rubber overshoe the first ball ever used in this city was made.”
Until the 1860s most balls were homemade from rubber, yarn, and leather, though players were known to get creative with whatever materials were available. In the lake regions of the Midwest, where fish were more plentiful than rubber, baseballs were reputedly made from sturgeon eyes! As baseball historian Peter Morris recounts, the eyes of that fish were rubbery in texture and the size of walnuts. Players wrapped the eyeballs with yarn and covered them with leather or cloth to make for what was said to be a “lively ball.”
Daniel “Doc” Adams, a lesser-known father of baseball and early president of the Knickerbockers in 1846, reminisced a half-century later about the challenge of securing suitable balls for play:
We had a great deal of trouble in getting balls made, and for six or seven years I made all the balls myself, not only for our club but also for other clubs when they were organized. I went all over New York to find someone who would undertake this work, but no one could be induced to try it for love or money. Finally I found a Scotch saddler who was able to show me a good way to cover the balls with horsehide, such as was used for whip lashes. I used to make the stuffing out of three or four ounces of rubber cuttings, wound with yarn and then covered with the leather. Those balls were, of course, a great deal softer than the balls now in use.
So soft and lightweight was the ball that even the strongest arm couldn’t get it from the outfield all the way to the pitcher. Doc Adams’s solution in 1849–1850 was a new non-base-tending position called the shortstop designed originally to intercept and relay weak throws from the outfield. Adams, one of baseball’s unsung heroes, also deserves credit for setting the base paths at 90 feet.
For the Knickerbockers and other clubs in the mid-1800s, the awarding of the game ball was just the beginning of the festivities. No matter who won or lost, the visiting club was invited to a sumptuous meal hosted by the home club at a local tavern. Kegs of lager fueled toasts, speeches, and songs well into the night. The farther a club traveled for the game, the more lavish the treatment. In 1860, the Brooklyn Excelsiors traveled to Baltimore, where they were met by their hosts and “escorted in carriages to the various places of interest throughout the city, every attention being given them by the gentlemanly members of the Baltimore Excelsiors.” When it was game time, a streetcar decked with flags and drawn by four horses was arranged to take them to the playing field.
By all accounts, however, the Knickerbockers were “more expert with the knife and fork at post-game banquets than with bat and ball on the diamond,” as the great baseball historian Harold Seymour put it. Their skills were put to the test on June 19, 1846, in what is often heralded as the first true interclub baseball game in American history (though scholars have since discovered reports of possible games played in New York a few years prior). With green space becoming scarce in Manhattan, and their old spot on Park Avenue and 27th Street under development as a railroad terminal, the Knickerbockers took their games across the river to Hoboken’s Elysian Fields (named, fittingly, after the mythological resting place of ancient Greek heroes). That June Friday they boarded the ferry in their freshly pressed blue woolen pantaloons, white flannel shirts, and straw hats to face a scrappy team known as the New York Nine. They were crushed, 23–1.
A team called a “nine” or “picked nine,” as opposed to a club, usually meant they were made up of tradesmen who worked together, drank in saloons together, and played ball together. The most common baseball nines of the period were drawn from volunteer fire companies and from pressmen and typographers in the print trade. In 1840s New York, these were among the tightest social fraternities and unions, with their own activities and rituals. As Warren Goldstein points out in his compelling social history of early baseball, Playing for Keeps, the names of early baseball teams and fire companies were nearly identical. The New York Mutuals, which became one of the leading clubs of the 1870s, was started in 1857 by the Mutual Hook and Ladder Company No. 1. Even the earliest baseball uniforms, like those sported by Jeff and his teammates, were derived from firefighter uniforms, with their distinctive shield-shaped shirt panels embroidered with the insignia of the team or company.
After being throttled, the Knickerbockers retreated with their coattails between their legs and didn’t play another interclub match for the next five years. No sooner had the rules for baseball been set forth than a struggle for the game’s soul had begun that, in a sense, continues to this day. Would baseball be a respectable game of gentlemen, played “just for enjoyment and exercise,” as Doc Adams fondly recalled from his Knickerbocker days? Or would it be a game of scrappy upstarts, played hard, played for money, and played to win?
When I next dipped my toe into the embattled past of baseball, it was five years earlier—1861—and I’d chosen a more idyllic and period-appropriate setting. It was a blustery fall day at the Spencer-Pierce-Little Farm in the picturesque New England town of Newbury, Massachusetts. The main farmhouse, which sits on 230 acres bordering the Merrimack River, is the only 17th-century stone house in New England with its outside walls still intact. Beyond a stately row of maples, Big Dave and Little Romeo, the farm’s resident pigs, rooted around behind home plate for hot dog scraps. An old-timey cheer—“Huzzah!”—was raised without a hint of irony to signal the end of a successful inning of vintage ball. The crisp white uniforms of the Essex Base Ball Club and Lynn Live Oaks stood out against the arboreal wash of reds and golds.
Jeff Peart, the bespectacled , gray-bearded umpire, stepped forward to make a request of the fleece-wrapped spectators—known in the lingo of the times as cranks, bugs, or rooters—“Please do not stretch in the seventh inning. That hasn’t been invented yet. Please do not sing ‘Take Me Out to the Ballgame.’ That has not been written yet.”
Jeff, a 53-year-old pharmaceutical company manager, played master of ceremonies, with black top hat, tails, and a gold-tipped cane that belonged to his great-grandfather, an itinerant preacher.
“Kids are always asking me why I’m dressed as an undertaker,” he said, brushing dirt off his coat.
A longtime Civil War history buff, Jeff was looking for ways to immerse himself in his favorite period. But, he says, “I’m too much of a pacifist to run around with a gun, even a fake one. So vintage baseball seemed like a better fit.”
I joked that I’d recently come from 1866 and was happy to report that, postwar, the game was still very much in vogue.
“More in vogue is the truth, and more of a national game,” said Jeff. “In 1861, baseball was still mostly played in New England and New York. After the Civil War, soldiers took the game back to their hometowns with them and it spread like wildfire.”
On the eve of the War Between the States, baseball was often promoted in the press as useful preparation for battle, with its physical demands, sharpening of skills, and promotion of the values of teamwork and fraternity. A newspaper editorial that year remarked that “Baseball clubs . . . are now enlisted in a different sort of exercise, the rifle or gun taking the place of the bat, while the play ball gives place to the leaden messenger of death.”
Jeff introduced me to Brian “Cappy” Sheehy, a cheerful, barrel-chested 28-year-old high school history teacher and club captain. Brian started the club in 2002, naming it after a club that had played in his hometown back in 1859.
As the eighth inning was kicking off, he asked me if I wanted to play.
“I’m afraid I left my knickers at home,” I replied.
“Don’t worry,” he assured me. “We’ll take you as is.”
A vintage baseball game underway in Washington, D.C.
Taking to the field with my teammates, I felt like Kevin Costner in the closing scene of Field of Dreams (without the 1980s mullet). I assessed the familiar geometry of the diamond (falsely named since the 1830s: diamonds have two acute and two obtuse angles). I manned second base as the lead-off batter took the plate, wondering whether the second base force-out had been instituted yet (it hadn’t). And whether batters were allowed to overrun first base yet (they weren’t). The batter drove the first pitch well into center field, rounded first, and headed for second. The center fielder chased down the ball and fired it hard to me. As the ball burned a hole through my fingers and kept going I thought to myself how remarkably helpful a glove would have been at that very moment.
“Muffin!” yelled a player on the other team.
With little help from me, we eventually managed to retire the side. Soon it was my turn at bat. I selected a caveman club from the pile and headed to home plate, which was literally a heavy round iron plate stuck into the ground.
The catcher pointed to the outfield. “If you hit the goat, it’s an automatic home run.” I looked and there was indeed a rather large white goat browsing in left field. I felt suddenly lucky, thinking of the curse of the angry goat brought on the Chicago Cubs in the 1945 World Series when the club’s owner ejected a local tavern owner’s goat from the ball park. Truth is, goat or no goat, a home run would have been a rare occurrence in 1861 owing to the combination of large unbounded fields and soft homemade balls. Baseball was still a “small ball” game. In the absence of gloves, it was best to attempt a line drive or a hard grounder, forcing one player to barehand the ball and throw it to another player who had to barehand it to make the out.
I let the first pitch pass, knowing there were no called balls or strikes to worry about. It bounced past the catcher and into Big Dave’s mud pit.
“It’s okay, he’s sleeping,” called out a crank as the catcher bounded over the electric fence to pluck the ball from a pile of rotten vegetables.
The second pitch came right down the middle. I swung my club and tipped it back and foul—or so I thought.
“One hand!” called the umpire.
I opened my mouth to protest but checked myself.
I stomped back to the bench, wishing I had a helmet to throw. Brian explained that I was out because the catcher had caught the ball after it bounced once in fair territory. The notion of foul versus fair territory was a welcome contribution of the Knickerbockers to the game of baseball. Before the Knickerbockers imposed order on chaos, players would commonly reverse-hit the ball behind the catcher or chip it far wide of the baselines to give themselves extra time to reach first base. Nevertheless, the rules around “tipped” balls took time to evolve and, much to my chagrin, in 1861 a ball was called fair as long as it bounced once in fair territory.
Strange as the rule was, I could live with it. But rule 12 was another story. The fly ball rule I got. A ball caught on the fly is an out. It’s the first rule any Little Leaguer learns and, as David Block points out, is probably the oldest rule in the game, forming the basis for stool-ball, trap-ball, and most other early bat-and-ball games. But being called out on a ball caught on the bounce?
“What kind of lame rule is that?” I muttered to myself.
In the 1860s, it turns out, there were plenty of other like-minded players muttering to themselves. The “bound rule,” as it was known, was a Knickerbocker innovation, and it quickly became the lightning rod in a struggle over what Goldstein calls the “two ethics of the game.”
Considering the great historic rivalries of baseball—Yankees versus Red Sox and Giants versus Dodgers to name just two of the longest lasting—and the passions they stir in players and fans alike, it’s nearly impossible to conceive of a time when excessive competition was regarded as a problem for the sport. But for its first two decades, baseball was a game of gentlemen played not for money or even victory but for fun and fraternity. Sportswriters of the time were as likely to applaud how players cheered each other at the end of the game and left the field “arm and arm” as they were to provide a blow by blow of the game itself. Players who swore or otherwise got carried away in the heat of the competition were fined on the spot—anywhere from 10 to 50 cents—the money put to good use to pay for after-game festivities. And cranks were the worst offenders of all, as they are today. As one club’s officers lamented, “What . . . can any club do? Can we restrain a burst of applause or indignation from an assemblage of more than 15,000 excited spectators, whose feelings are enlisted as the game proceeds, by the efforts of this or that player or players?”
As spirited competition became more broadly accepted as good for the sport, the bound rule came under attack as an “unmanly” remnant of baseball’s childish roots. In 1858, the newly formed National Association of Base Ball Players (NABBP), attempting to distance their manly sport from its boyish associations, voted to exclude any members under the age of 21. Younger players protested. One correspondent to a sports weekly who signed his name “Infant Ball Player,” argued, “The boys have a say in regard to this game, which they have always played, and which most of you have only just now taken out of their hands.”
The Knickerbockers had already taken concrete steps to remove the game from the domain of youth. In rule 13 they made it clear that “in no instance is a ball to be thrown” at a runner. Reasonable as that sounds in this age of 80 mph missiles fired to first base, players before this rule were put out by being “soaked” or “plugged” with the ball. Abandoning what was widely regarded as a childish practice made for a more advanced level of play by fielders and base runners. It also allowed for balls to get harder, which in turn made the thrilling crack of a Hank Aaron or “Big Papi” home run possible.
Likewise, many argued through the 1850s and 1860s, catching a ball on one bounce was, as Henry Chadwick stated at the time, “a feat a boy of ten years of age would scarcely be proud of.” He called on fielders to do their best to catch the ball on the fly, arguing that “nothing disappoints the spectator, or dissatisfies the batsman so much, as to see a fine hit to the long field caught on the bound in this simple, childish manner.”
The dwindling defenders of the old bound rule, who Chadwick chided as a “muffin fraternity,” suggested that eliminating the bound rule would make baseball too much like cricket or cause more injury to hands. Most traditionalists, however, were just trying in vain to hang on to the spirit of the game as a social outlet for fun, exercise, and friendship—a game all comers were welcome to play.
But the press and spectators favored excitement and skill over fraternity and tradition. The fly rule, codified at last in 1864, made for faster, more riveting play that pushed fielding skills to a new level. It gave outfielders a reason to make graceful, diving catches that brought fans to their feet, and it gave batters a reason to push the ball high and deep to test the pluck and athleticism of fielders. It also brought out the crowds.
By the summer of 1858 baseball fever had officially swept New York. The Brooklyn clubs, the best in the nation, issued a challenge to the New York clubs (Brooklyn then being a separate city). In what would become the very first All-Star game and New York’s first (pre-subway) subway series, each city was to pick their best “nine” from among various clubs to compete. The neutral ground chosen was the Fashion Race Course in Queens. To accommodate the crowds, which swelled to 10,000, the New York Tribune announced that steamer ships would leave the Fulton Market in Manhattan and horse-drawn carriages would take fans from the Queens slip to the ball field. Having assembled the best players in the game, the series promoters had the novel idea of charging spectators a steep admission price of 50 cents to attend the contest. The series was a wild success. Brooklyn edged New York in the third game and, after expenses, $71.09 in profits was donated to the two cities’ fire departments.
No one had imagined that there was money to be made from baseball. But as club competition became more intense and the first stars began to emerge in the game, the age of professional sport was just around the corner. By 1860, Jim Creighton, who threw the first fastball, completed the first triple play, and threw a wicked underhand change-up he called the “dew drop,” was being paid under the table by the Brooklyn Excelsiors. Under the table, because the NABBP at the time prohibited player salaries. To get around the prohibition while retaining the appearance of upholding the amateur spirit of the game, teams commonly laundered salaries through local city businesses.
One of the first to decry the hypocrisy of such arrangements was Albert G. Spalding, a rising pitching star with a club called the Forest Citys in Rockford, Illinois. When he was approached by the Chicago Excelsiors to join the team, the offer came with no salary but with a $40 a week grocery clerk job. He leapt at the chance to play big city ball but, as he wrote later in his autobiographical account, America’s National Game, “I was not able to understand how it could be right to pay an actor, or a singer, or an instrumentalist for entertaining the public, and wrong to pay a ball player for doing exactly the same thing in his way.” Spalding’s stint with the Excelsiors was brief. The team folded in his first season in uniform, and he returned to his old team in Rockford to plan his next move.
As documented by his biographer, Peter Levine, back home the 17-year-old Spalding filled his scrapbook with news clippings on subjects ranging from baseball to banking and other business stories. Highlighted in black ink were stories about the Cincinnati Red Stockings and their celebrated manager, English-born cricket pro Harry Wright, who openly recruited and paid salaries to the best players around. Also marked off was an announcement that Wright and his brother George had opened a store in New York “for the sale of bats, balls, bases and all the paraphernalia needed for outdoor games.”
Spalding’s “cannon ball” underhand caught Wright’s attention after it laid waste to the Red Stockings in a 12–5 upset in the fall of 1870. The next year, after moving the Red Stockings to Boston—where they would eventually become the Red Sox—and organizing baseball’s first professional league, the National Association of Professional Base Ball Players, Wright signed “Big Al” as a pitcher with an annual salary of $1,500.
But Spalding had bigger plans in baseball than being a star pitcher. Under Wright’s tutelage, he learned the business of managing a club. When Wright decided in 1874 to fulfill a personal dream and stage a barnstorming tour of his homeland with his Boston Red Stockings, he sent Spalding ahead as his agent to make arrangements for the visit. Although the curiosity factor of Yanks in brightly colored socks brought out spectators, the tour, intended to spread the new American gospel of baseball to English cricket lovers, lost money and did little to convince the English to forsake their wickets for bases. “Few of the youth of Great Britain,” one English commentator noted, “will desert cricket with its dignity, manliness, and system for a rushing, helter-skelter game.” But Spalding learned firsthand the power of marketing and public relations for generating buzz, skills he’d make good use of in the years ahead.
By 1876, Spalding had taken his free agency and business acumen to the Chicago White Stockings, leaving Boston in the dust and in mourning. It was a straight-up business deal, and a sweet one at that, having negotiated with team president William Hulbert a $2,000 annual contract, 25 percent of gate receipts, and a role as player-manager. Over the next 16 years, as player, manager, and later as president, he helped turn the White Stockings into the most dominant team in baseball. Over 10 seasons between 1880 and 1890 they boasted a winning percentage of .676, and in 1880 set the still unbroken record of .798, winning 67 out of 84 games.
But as anyone knows who’s ever owned a baseball or a glove, or who has grown up in the city playing stickball with that wondrous pink sphere known as a Spaldeen, Al Spalding wasn’t content with having his name inscribed only on his jersey. Baseball was finally becoming the business he’d envisioned it could be, and he was determined to lead the charge. In 1878, the New York Clipper sports weekly noted that “bats are being made by the 500,000, balls by the thousand gross.” The same year Spalding moved back to Chicago, he and his brother Walter opened their own “baseball and sporting-good emporium” at 118 Randolph Street. Walter, a bank teller, ran the business at first while Spalding played the star pitcher, bringing in publicity and sales.
In the years that followed, Spalding more or less invented sports marketing, blurring the lines between play and business long before the days of Michael Jordan or Tiger Woods. In his first year in business he launched Spalding’s Official Baseball Guide, a publication that included his full-page autographed picture on the cover. For more than a half-century, the guide was the favorite reading choice of young boys eager to get the latest how-tos from the pros.
By 1884 the publication had a circulation of 50,000 and was serving as a marketing platform for selling the firm’s sporting goods to a growing nation of baseball fanatics. Spalding quickly cornered the market after his “Spalding League Ball” scored exclusive designation as the official ball of the National League. Then there were his “wagon tongue baseball bats” made of “the finest straight grained, well seasoned, second growth Ash sticks” and used by “nine-tenths” of the players in the World Series. As pitcher and then as first baseman, he was not only an early proponent of gloves (once seen as “unmanly”) but deliberately wore a black one for greater prominence. Having boosted the popularity of baseball gloves on the mound and at first base, he then happily supplied them by the thousand to an eager public.
Like that other great huckster of his age, P. T. Barnum, Spalding was a master of marketing hyperbole. The firm warned against unscrupulous counterfeiters of “official” Spalding goods. “First be sure it’s a Spalding—then go buy” was their slogan. Their baseballs were sold in red sealed boxes with instructions to check that the seal wasn’t broken before opening. An article in Spalding’s Guide even alerted players to a rash of counterfeit catchers’ masks that were “liable to disfigure a player for life.”
By October 1888, having firmly established the Spalding brand and developed a multimillion-dollar business from scratch, he set his sights on the next big thing: bringing “America’s game” to the world. For Spalding and others in the age of Manifest Destiny, baseball represented everything unique and noble in the American character. As he later ticked off in his autobiography—alphabetically, no less—baseball was “the exponent of American Courage, Confidence, Combativeness, American Dash, Discipline, Determination, American Energy, Eagerness, Enthusiasm, American Pluck, Persistency, American Spirit, Sagacity, Success, American Vim, Vigor, Virility.” (What, no Zeal?)
Spalding decided to take all that American goodness—and, by the way, Spalding sporting goods—on a world tour. For six months an entourage of 20 major-league players barnstormed the globe, from the deserts of Egypt and Ceylon to the green fields of Australia and New Zealand and the cricket pitches of England. As with his earlier 1874 ramble, the trip had great PR value, with 42 games played before some 200,000 people. But the cricket-loving masses of the Anglo-colonial world were, again, largely unmoved. One British reporter stated that Spalding’s beloved game was “as much out of place in England as a nursery frolic in the House of Commons.”
Spalding and his band of travelers returned to the United States, nevertheless, as heroes. Three hundred guests, including Teddy Roosevelt and Mark Twain, packed into Delmonico’s in New York to toast Spalding’s “feat of pluck.” Countering the pinched views of the English press, Twain famously mused about the idea of attempting to bring baseball, “the very symbol, the outward and visible expression of the drive and push and rush and struggle of the raging, tearing, booming nineteenth century . . . to places of profound repose and soft indolence.”
Spalding’s tour had confirmed for him that baseball symbolized everything that was great about America. In the years that followed, the notion that baseball might have English roots became unconscionable to Spalding—even though as a younger man he had, along with most of his contemporaries, accepted England’s influence on the game. At the same time, baseball luminary Henry Chadwick, editor of Spalding’s Guide, began authoring pieces there about baseball’s English roots. This got Spalding’s attention and set him off on his final quest: to brand baseball “Made in America” once and for all.
After taking apart Chadwick’s arguments in the pages of the Guide, in 1905 Spalding announced the formation of a national commission to collect evidence and settle the question of baseball’s origins. He handpicked like-minded friends and colleagues, including two members of Congress and A. G. Mills, the former president of the National League. Old-timers sent in random, rambling stories of playing old-cat or tip-cat or some other such game as kids, but none of it added up to a clear historical picture. Not until the editors of the Beacon Journal in Akron, Ohio, received a letter from a mining engineer named Abner Graves written in response to an article written by Spalding. “The American game of Base Ball,” Graves declared succinctly, “was invented by Abner Doubleday of Cooperstown, New York.”
Prompted by Spalding for more details, Graves sent a second letter to the commission in which the plot thickened. He described a scene from his childhood in the rural upstate New York town. He recalled playing marbles with a group of other boys when Doubleday approached them about a new game called “base ball” and drew a diagram in the dirt with a stick to explain its rules. Graves added that unfortunately “there is not one chance in ten thousand that a boy’s drawing . . . would have been preserved.”
Luckily for him and for Doubleday’s legacy, Spalding’s commission didn’t require such evidence. Doubleday was a Civil War hero who had fired the first cannon at Fort Sumter and whose brigade had played a pivotal role in the Battle of Gettysburg. Spalding noted that “it certainly appeals to an American’s pride to have had the great national game of Baseball created and named by a Major-General in the United States Army.” And there was another, more bizarre, connection between Spalding and Doubleday that might have helped convince Spalding to embrace him as the father of the game. As David Block has uncovered, the two men were both, at different points in time, members of the Theosophical Society—a California-based occult society concerned with apparitions and other supernatural manifestations.
The commission issued its conclusions at the end of 1907. Baseball, they declared, was of American origin and “the first scheme for playing it, according to the best evidence obtainable to date, was devised by Abner Doubleday at Cooperstown, N.Y., in 1839.”
The decision was made and the story of Doubleday was folded neatly into the official lore and history of the game. Chadwick continued to protest, but no one was interested in his messy English version of events. Americans hailed the decision and textbook writers and historians happily turned it into another fact for schoolchildren to memorize. The Baseball Hall of Fame was built in Cooperstown in 1939 on the centennial of the game’s mythological founding, and a U.S. Postal Service commemorative stamp followed soon after.
Aside from all the evidence presented earlier for baseball’s steady evolution from English children’s games, there are just a few other problems with the Doubleday tale. In 1839, when Doubleday was supposed to be scratching double plays into the dirt at Cooperstown, he was actually a cadet attending West Point 100 miles away. Doubleday left 67 diaries and wrote numerous magazine and newspaper articles in his later years, but only once, in passing, did he even mention the game of baseball.
So what about that other Abner—Mr. Graves? Who was this guy who claimed to be there at the moment of the game’s immaculate conception? Well, according to his own colorful accounts over the years, he led an exciting life. At the age of 14 he sailed around Cape Horn. In 1852 he was one of the first riders on the pony express—inconveniently before the service actually started. And what he didn’t share was just as interesting. He’d been hospitalized in insane asylums twice in his earlier years. In his coup de grâce, at the ripe old age of 90, Abner—described by Spalding’s commission as a “reputable gentleman”—shot and killed his wife Minnie in an argument over the sale of their house. He was committed to a Colorado state asylum, where he died two years later.
Today, no historian or scholar of any repute subscribes to the Doubleday version of baseball’s origins. And yet the myth persists. As recently as 2010, Major League Baseball commissioner Bud Selig confessed in an Internet posting, “From all of the historians which I have spoken with, I really believe that Abner Doubleday is the ‘Father of Baseball.’ ” (One might wonder which historians the commissioner has been speaking with: is he conferring in the off-season with Byzantine scholars . . . or historians of the Norman invasion?)
Selig’s a smart guy, so I’m guessing he knows the history of his sport better than he lets on. So why does he make statements like this, and why would he lay a wreath on Doubleday’s grave in Arlington Cemetery as he did ten years ago? Why, for that matter, do millions of people still go on pilgrimage to remote, rural New York State to perpetuate a fraud that was exposed more than 60 years ago?
The exhibit panels on Abner Doubleday in the Hall of Fame answer these lingering questions as well as anything I’ve read: “In the hearts of those who love baseball, he is remembered as the lad in the pasture where the game was invented. Only cynics would need to know more.” As the baseball-loving evolutionary biologist Stephen Jay Gould once pointed out, most people, given the choice, will choose creation myths over history every time. “For creation myths . . . identify heroes and sacred places, while evolutionary stories provide no palpable, particular thing as a symbol for reverence, worship, or patriotism.”
One of the many wonders of baseball is that after being tested and tried in every possible way—the scandals, the drug tests, the player strikes, the multimillion-dollar contracts—we still believe deeply in the myths and the rites of the game. We still sing “Take Me Out to the Ballgame” in the seventh-inning stretch with sincerity. We still believe the curse of the Bambino was real (it had to be something!). We still never, ever talk about a “no-hitter” or a “perfect game” in progress. We still recite the ERAs and RBIs and OBPs of players long dead like numerological incantations. And, despite our more rational selves, we still keep a special place in our hearts for Abner Doubleday, a man who was far more expert with a rifle than a bat.
On the playing field in Newbury, I was finally hitting my stride and warming to 1860s rules. I scored a single and drove in a run with a line drive to right center field, my legs suppressing muscle memory itself so as not to overrun first base. I cleverly bunted the ball backward behind the catcher, exploiting that quirky loophole in the rules while it still lasted. Playing outfield in the hot afternoon sun, I resisted the urge to chase a pop ball, walking up leisurely instead to scoop it off the bounce for the out.
When the game ended, no one was certain of the score and no one really cared—we were gentlemen at play, after all. A truck pulled up from a local microbrewery that fielded their own vintage club (yep, “The Brewers”), just in time to reinvigorate our feeling of social fraternity. The takeout pizza arrived next in a beat-up sedan bouncing over the lumpy pasture. It wasn’t quite a Knickerbockers feast, but it would serve just as well.
Just then, my cell phone rang.
“It’s your wife calling from the distant future,” warned one of my teammates. “Don’t answer it!”
For vintage ballplayers, as for Yogi Berra, “the future ain’t what it used to be,” and its nagging call is usually best ignored, especially on a hot Saturday in summer. That’s certainly how Scott Westgate feels. Scott, whom I spoke with by phone (being a weekday, he answered), is a Michigan mortgage broker and the current president of the Vintage Base Ball Association (VBBA), the organizing body for creatively anachronistic ballplayers. Much as he loves modern baseball, having played all through high school, he feels the game lost its soul somewhere in its journey to the present.
“Baseball was once a celebration of life. Two towns would have a summer get-together and it would culminate with a game in an open field—not for competition but for exercise, for friendship, to have an entertaining event. That’s all changed.”
The VBBA, Scott said, came together several years ago as a brotherhood of guys who wanted to promote, perpetuate, and re-create the game of baseball “as it was meant to be played.” But all is not well in Scott’s version of the past.
“More and more we’re facing pitchers who are supposed to be playing by 1860 rules, but they’re putting spin on the ball, or have a special hurl to deceive the hitter, which is not how it was supposed to be played. Now we’re trying to hold on to the bound rule as it makes for a more gentlemanly game. But you’ve got guys out there diving for fly balls and barehanding it like they’re Dwight Evans or something.”
Picking up on the desire for a more competitive vintage game, Jim Bouton, former major-league pitcher and tell-all author of Ball Four, a few years ago started a rival league—the Vintage Base Ball Federation—that plays by 1880s rather than 1860s rules. That means overhand pitching, padded gloves, and called balls and strikes.
Scott’s not a fan and seems genuinely alarmed at the prospect of newfangled 1880s competitiveness creeping into and corrupting his beloved old game. “We need to keep ingraining in our members that this is not meant to be a competition. It’s just supposed to be a game.”