A rediscovery of sorts; my introduction to a 1984 reissue of baseball’s first history, originally published in 1888
I’ve been working this baseball beat for so long that I had forgotten that I wrote this. The thought process, or fugue reverie, that recalled it for me today is irretrievable, but fortunately I was able to locate my copy of the book, published in a limited edition of 500 copies by Camden House in 1984. This was before Total Baseball, before Ken Burns, before Baseball in the Garden of Eden. In fact what was to be my long romance with the early game had barely begun.
Why reissue this little book, nearly a century after its rather offhand publication? “Enlarged and republished from the Boston Herald,” the title page declares, by a firm located in the Herald Building; stiffly written by a twenty-eight-year-old correspondent of that newspaper, with a pronounced debt to the annual summaries by Henry Chadwick in the Beadle and DeWitt Guides; a paperbound throwaway pocked with typos and errors of fact — Sphere and Ash seems at best a curio of the second-hand book trade, amusing for its naive advertisements and illustrations but obviously a ringer in any list of baseball classics.
And yet … just as the book’s weaknesses are indicated on the title page, so are its strengths. Although Sphere and Ash is the title by which the book is known to baseball bibliographers, we see that History of Baseball is its proper name, and as such it is the game’s first. That a game only thirty years old as an organized sport should attract the scrutiny of a historian is surprise enough — imagine today a “History of Platform Tennis” — but even more interesting is the descriptive line “Notable Records by Primitive Clubs.”
Primitive! How rapidly the game had evolved, how distant its antiquity, how nostalgic the very essence of this national obsession on the rise — all attested to by the selection of that single word. Today we may sing the praises of a Mike Schmidt or a Tom Seaver, while reducing their stature by reference to the legendary Babe Ruth or Walter Johnson; in 1888 baseball savants might laud a Tim Keefe but reserve their idolatry for Jim Creighton, a Bunyanesque figure of the mists, now largely forgotten.
The past animates our national pastime, and elevates it. Sphere and Ash, the primitive history, sheds a singular light on that past and must be read by the student of the early game, not in preference to the later histories (Spalding, Spink, Seymour, Voigt) but as complement and counterpoint to them.
Of particular interest is the absence of a baseball creation myth, and the parallel absence of a creator: neither Abner Doubleday nor Alexander Cartwright gets a nod, and baseball’s derivation from rounders is unashamedly acknowledged. The Massachusetts Game, the version of baseball closest to rounders and, after 1860, the road not taken, is detailed nicely, as are the confusing substitution rules prior to 1893. No doubt the strongest component of Sphere and Ash, however, is the evolution of pitching rules, techniques, and conditioning methods. In this section the author tosses in tidbits which for his contemporaries may have been mere trifles, but for modern readers is pure gold.
On page 30 we learn that the term “Chicagoed,” meaning “shut out,” derives not from the ability of Chicago hurlers to blank their opponents, as is generally written, but from the ineptness of Chicago batters on a particular date, July 23, 1870.
On page 33 we see that the origin of the curve ball was a matter of dispute even in the 1880s, when all the claimants — Cummings, Goldsmith, Avery, Mann, et al. — were able to make their own cases.
On page 39 we learn that the average pitcher of the late 1880s threw 180 balls per game, half again as many as a starter of the 1980s, and that to condition a pitcher’s arm “hot water is good, as is also mild galvanism” (!).
On page 59 we read that the American Association, today regarded as the inferior of the National League during the 1880s, was actually its superior in interleague matches played in 1885–86. This is the kind of stuff that sets revisionists’ spines a-tingle.
What of the author himself, identified on the title page as J.C. Morse? His full name was Jacob Charles Morse, and he was born in Concord, New Hampshire on June 7, 1860. He entered Harvard College with the class of 1881 but was forced to leave in January of his senior year due to illness (he received his Bachelor’s degree out of course in 1906, eighteen years after graduating from Boston University Law School). Also in 1881, as a means of helping to put himself through college, he began to send freelance baseball reports to the Boston Herald, Globe, Post, Advertiser, and Courier; by 1885 he was on staff with the Herald, a post he held until 1907. “I naturally expected to die in the harness in that institution,” Morse later wrote, “but … changes in management bring changes in personnel; so it was a case of pull up your stakes and go it.”
Go it he did in the winter of ’07, launching Baseball Magazine, widely regarded still as the best periodical the sport has ever produced. In 1920 he shifted to the insurance field. A resident of Brookline, Massachusetts since the mid-1890s, Morse died there on April 12, 1937.
Jake Morse was the Boston correspondent for Sporting Life for two decades; the long-time secretary of the New England Baseball Association; a member of the Brookline Board of Trade; an active Democrat; and a member of, seemingly, every fraternal order this side of the Raccoon Lodge. But the accomplishment most intriguing to the present writer is a single agate line in the Manager Register of The Baseball Encyclopedia. This indicates that in the Union Association year of 1884, after Tim Murnane and Tom Furniss had managed the Boston team to a record of 12–23, Jacob Charles Morse — barely twenty-four and not yet in the steady employ of the Herald — took over! Not only did he finish the season at the helm, but under his guidance the Boston Unions won 46 games and lost only 28.
The man knew his baseball.
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