by John Fox
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.