When, precisely, did the term debut?
“That the New York game was the ‘national pastime’ was declared hopefully in the Sunday Mercury of December 5, 1856, by ‘A Baseball
Lover’ from Williamsburgh, presumably from the Putnam Club. Spirit of the Times published that club’s rules one day later, just as the Knickerbockers were meeting to issue a call for convening the ‘various base ball clubs of this city and vicinity.’”
At least that’s what I wrote in Baseball in the Garden of Eden, leaning upon an assertion by my learned colleagues Fred Ivor-Campbell and Jules Tygiel. But now I recognize that they could not have been able to date that issue precisely, as not a single copy of William Cauldwell’s weekly survives from that year. (If you find that unfathomable, see: https://bit.ly/2xHjUdT.)
Recently I noted that when Porter’s Spirit of the Times published the Putnam club’s rules on December 6, it called baseball “The American National Game” … close, but no cigar. How might a national game differ from a national pastime? The latter phrase was unusual even in its own day — suspiciously foreign — when it was printed in Virginia’s Alexandria Gazette on June 3, 1843:
In connection with these remarks, we may say something of the general character of our national amusements. They are too much of the “whole hog,” “break down” order. If we would borrow the French Philosophy of amusement — their promenades, their music, their flowers, their fountains, — and their style of refreshments, so palatable yet so devoid of the grossness and intoxication of ours — we say if we would borrow these, and add to them, in place of French indifference (bordering on infidelity) our own sense of responsibility and of gratitude to the Giver of all Good — how much superior would be our enjoyment, how much more real our gratification — because so much freer from alloy and surfeit — on holy days and public celebrations! — We have been going the “whole hog” long enough. It is time we were revolutionizing a little — it is time that we had seized upon those occasions which bring out the mass, for the improvement of their tastes and habits. National pastimes have a powerful influence over national character, and are, indeed, regarded by historians as among the strongest indices of the peculiarities as well as intelligence of a people.
A pastime was more than a game: it was an institution, one that might provide to players and spectators alike, as I wrote long ago, “an evergreen field that provides rest and recreation, myths and memories, heroes and history.”
It had not struck me, in this latest spelunking expedition, to look in the next week’s issue of Porter’s for a clue as to when the new coinage might have made its first appearance in the Sunday Mercury. But “the national pastime” did not appear in the Porter’s of December 13, either. Then voilà— in the December 20 number, there was a quotation of the passage that had first appeared in, we may presume, the vanished December 14 issue of the Sunday Mercury. (A handwritten letter that “a lover of base ball” dated Friday December 5 could have arrived in the editor’s hands no earlier than the following day, too late for publication in the Sunday Mercury edition of December 7.)
The National Pastime was originally published in Our Game on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.