Official Rules of Baseball Illustrated

1.00: Objectives of the Game

Seemingly, it would be safe to presume that the winner of a baseball game has always been the team that scored the most runs at the end of nine innings. However, the 1857 season (which introduced many critical changes to the playing rules), was the first time in which a game was required to go nine innings, with five full innings constituting an official contest, if play were halted for whatever reason. Prior to 1857, the objective was to score 21 runs (or aces). A game thus could end after a single inning or finish without a winner if neither team was able to tally 21 aces before darkness came. Why the teams that gathered at the landmark 1857 convention to solidify the rules of the game changed its length to nine innings rather than seven or eight—or even 10—is unknown. As good an explanation as any may be that many vital features of the game and its beloved statistics and milestones exist in threes or multiples of three: three strikes, three outs, nine men on a team, 300 wins, 3,000 hits, and .300 hitters. So why not nine innings unless, of course, the score was tied after the ninth frame, in which event, additional innings needed to be played to determine a winner. This has always been the case in tie games except in three seasons—1869, 1870, and 1871—when, if both team captains agreed after the ninth inning, the game was considered a draw. The most famous instance in which captains did not agree came on June 14, 1870, when the Brooklyn Atlantics snapped the fabled Cincinnati Red Stockings’ all-time record winning streak of 81 games in 11 innings by a score of 8–7 after Cincinnati captain Harry Wright obstinately refused Atlantics captain Bob Ferguson’s offer of a 7–7 draw at the completion of nine full innings.

The first game played by the Cartwright rules—devised to an unknown degree by Alexander Cartwright, who is widely recognized for having merged the best features of several bat-and-ball games of his time to create the game we know as baseball—took place at the Elysian Fields in Hoboken, New Jersey, on June 19, 1846, between the New York Nine and Cartwright’s club, the New York Knickerbockers. The contest lasted only four innings as the Nine tallied their 21st run in the top of the fourth, added two more scores for safe measure, and then blanked the Knicks in their last turn at bat to prevail, 23–1.

Note that even though he is still considered by many historians to have been instrumental in drawing up the first set of playing rules—with the aid of club president Duncan Curry and others—it has long been is a matter of hot debate whether Cartwright is deservingly regarded as the true “father” of baseball. Much stronger cases can now be mounted for several other baseball pioneers active in the mid-1800s, most prominently Daniel “Doc” Adams who, unlike Cartwright, was also a skillful player and organizer. In addition, Major League Baseball’s official historian, John Thorn, convincingly posits that the Gothams—not the Knickerbockers—were in truth the first organized baseball club. Supporting Thorn is an 1887 interview with William Rufus Wheaton in the San Francisco Daily Examiner indicating that Wheaton’s team, the Gothams, had a set of written rules as early as 1837 and Wheaton laid claim to writing at least some of them. However, since Adams may be an unknown figure to many readers and fewer still will have heard of Curry and Wheaton, this author will streamline the controversy by referring throughout this book to the original set of written rules as the Cartwright rules with the understanding that Cartwright didn’t singlehandedly do all the baseball activities he’s credited with and perhaps never even participated at all in some of them. Cartwright, in other words, is simply the most well-known representative at the moment of the rules creation groundwork that may have been done in greater part by others.