19th century baseball and why it matters
I delivered this talk via Zoom at “The Fred,” an annual conference of early-baseball aficionados, on April 23, 2021. It may well pop up on YouTube before too long.
Friends, I delivered the keynote speech at the first annual conference of SABR’s 19th Century Baseball Research Committee, at Cooperstown, on April 18, 2009. I have been invited to return, to bookend the conference and, at my age, my career. This shindig, by the way, was not yet known as “The Fred” because Fred Ivor-Campbell was the one who organized and chaired it. Anyone who knew him wishes he were with us today.
“How We Got Here” is the ambiguous title for today’s retrospective talk. It could refer to how our SABR acorn grew to be, if not yet a mighty oak, at least a sturdy stripling … but that’s a subject I addressed long ago. Suffice it to say that since 2009 we have grown larger, and fatter, and older … and better … than when Mark Rucker and I founded this group almost forty years ago.
“How We Got Here” could also refer to this Zoom conference, a sign of progress and regress both. What made this occasion necessary, to lean upon Yogi Berra, was our egress from normal life in this generation’s great epidemic. [A nod here to P.T. Barnum.] We can get together, all right, in pixelated form, but we can’t go out for a beer at evening’s end.
“How We Got Here” could also refer to baseball itself, bookended by disease and distress: at one end Covid; at the other, nearly two hundred years ago, Cholera. Later labeled correctly as a disease transmitted through foul drinking water, cholera was at that time understood as an airborne “miasma” … like Covid. Cholera killed one of every 65 New York City residents in 1832 and returned to wreak havoc in 1849. In between, dread hung over the city as the epidemic was widely believed to return cyclically every dozen years. [See: https://bit.ly/3euUG44]
Cholera then was every bit as life-altering as Covid-19 is now. When young men in New York began to play baseball, it was part of a hygienically inspired boom in gymnastics, boating, ballroom dance, and baseball. The belief was that exercise would lead not only to muscle development for spindly, deskbound clerks but also to an enlarged lung capacity that would ward off airborne disease. The breezes of Hoboken were thought especially pure. It may not be too much to say that without the flight from epidemic, there would have been no baseball as a game for grown men and, twenty years after, a paying crowd of spectators.
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In our sun-down perambulations of late, through the outer parts of Brooklyn, we have observed several parties of youngsters playing “base,” a certain game of ball…. Let us go forth awhile, and get better air in our lungs. Let us leave our close rooms…. The game of ball is glorious.
Everyone here today recognizes these words as Walt Whitman’s, exhumed in Ken Burns’s BASEBALL from an unsigned editorial in the Brooklyn Eagle of July 23, 1846. With these opening words of the nine-evening film on PBS in 1994, baseball history, particularly of that primordial time, became an overnight sensation. And we researchers of even more distant days were just getting started, finding evidence of baseball play in New York in 1823, and Pittsfield in 1791, and Princeton in 1786.
We hope to follow Whitman’s advice and leave our close rooms soon enough — certainly in time for next year’s Fred Conference in Cooperstown. For us baseball is the balm of life, with its familiarity, its regularity, its restorative rhythms: it is perhaps the only thing we have cared about uninterruptedly since childhood. It has masqueraded as the unchanging game even as we and everything around us seemed to be in a headlong rush to … what, exactly?
Baseball has been a haven from the drive, and push, and rush and struggle of the raging, tearing, booming twenty-first century. [A nod here to Mark Twain.] And an excursion into the game’s past has provided, for many of us, a safe, calming space.
Of course change is coming to baseball now (in truth it had never left), and Whitman’s quote turns out to have been plagiarized, and Cartwright has been consigned to the same dustbin of baseball history as Doubleday. Verities once thought eternal turn out have been a con. Change is the only constant, in baseball as in life, and a large part of early baseball’s appeal to us it is its wayward rise, with experimental rules, horrific missteps and, for us, endless mysteries.
In the years since the first Fred in 2009 books published by committee members and by the committee as a group have advanced the state of our knowledge and the depth of our understanding.
We have marked the graves of several worthies and this summer we will provide a headstone for Organized Baseball’s first Hispanic player, Luis “Jud” Castro. (I can hear the chirping about Cuban-born Steve Bellán, but MLB dates its onset to 1876, and he last played league ball in 1874.)
We have established interdisciplinary symposiums in different cities that have attracted scholars in fields other than baseball to enrich our appreciation for how the game grew to its present state. The next such symposium will be in Brooklyn later this year; I plan on attending and perhaps presenting.
Then there are the wonderful Protoball and Retrosheet sites, each aligned with our activities though not under the SABR umbrella. We all share our finds and insights on our listserv and on social media, particularly Facebook and Twitter. One day soon we will create a presence on Instagram, via the new Iconography Project, with pictures driving linked captions.
And then there is the Preston Orem project, dreamed of for decades and completed recently; and the wonderfully imagined “radio broadcast” of the game of June 14, 1870. And the scholarly annual Base Ball, which began its life in 2007 as a semiannual journal.
Individuals deserve credit for each of these cited landmarks in early-baseball research but I will not name them for fear of leaving someone off. I must, however, credit our committee chairman, Peter Mancuso, who oversees all of our work with the aid of Bob Bailey.
I have had a hand in much of this … except for the Overlooked 19th Century Baseball Legends, in which I vote but otherwise do not pop my head above the trench line. My MLB role militates against open advocacy though of course I hold briefs for Doc Adams, Jim Creighton, Al Reach, and Bud Fowler — pioneers all. It does seem to me, though, that the Hall of Fame has enough players from the 19th century, so I am not cheery about the prospects for Harry Stovey, Pete Browning, Tony Mullane, Ross Barnes, or other players still “overlooked” in these annual elections. This is one man’s view and no more; I am not against the polling of our expert sentiments.
What is it about 19th Century Baseball that makes us love it so?
Some of us like the players, the more obscure the better so that we may find new info and make them our trophies, like shrunken heads worn around our waists. Some of us gravitate toward the teams, whether dominant like the Cincinnati Red Stockings or forlorn like the Wilmington Quicksteps. Some like the bumptious, ornery magnates; others are drawn by the invention and novelty a game still finding its way.
Is it merely that everything about any major institution is more interesting when it was an infant? Cars, railroads, movies, rock ’n’ roll? We know the old game is not better played than today’s, or the 1950s, but there is room in any evaluation for two entries: the first and the best. The early game is not the best but it will forever compel interest as The First.
Baseball today is wealthy, efficient, respectable. It is played to a higher level of skill than ever before, even if its hold on the nation becomes more tenuous with each strikeout, walk, or home run. Once upon a time — in the very era we celebrate at this conference — the game was rough and tumble, with hobos like John McGraw or vagabonds like Rube Waddell standing out as heroes for cigarette-smoking, baseball-card-trading boys who would be men. Once upon a time the game had the melodramatic suspense of a dime novel and the pugnacity of the potboiler stage play. The bad old days, when few truly played the game well, were wild, raucous fun.
Speaking for myself, I grew up with the game as we all did. I was a fan. I loved baseball as it rolled out, season by season, long before I noticed and came to love its history. I started out drawn to the dead-ball era, largely by Ritter and the Seymours, but by 1980 found the era too crowded with other researchers. I needed the elbow room that early baseball seemed to allow me. Everywhere I looked was something that others might not have noticed, something that I could call mine. Like Cracker Jack, there was a prize in every box I opened.
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I came to realize that baseball in 1886 was not so different from baseball in 1986 — that while there were differences galore, if one were to teleport the fan of one century today to the ballpark of the other, he or she would instantly recognize the game as baseball. It is the quaintness of the old ball game that makes those at The Fred love it, but it is the similarity that has recently proven to be of practical value. Let me expand upon that.
As the epidemic raged, baseball — perhaps the least of concerns for citizens defending lives and livelihood — was put on hold. That was true of the game last year, and in the 1840s when it may be said that baseball clubs were born. The enemy then was cholera and the year was 1849. Doc Adams of the Knickerbocker Base Ball Club said of that time, when the game was new and opponents not readily found, “Our players were not very enthusiastic at first, and did not always turn out well on practice days…. I frequently went to Hoboken to find only two or three members present…. During the summer months many of our members were out of town, thus leaving a very short playing season.”
It turned out that the very short playing season of 2020, like that of 1849, provided food for thought; probably that was the year Adams came up with his brainstorm to add a shortstop to the accustomed playing field of eight men.
Despite preseason cries for a proliferation of asterisks in the record books for all things 2020, MLB presented the totals as it always has: with no symbolic annotations that would send the casual fan to endnotes or an appendix. Truly, every season has its invisible footnotes, its special circumstances recalled by the learned among us. This past season, except for its length — the first 60-game season since 1878 — had peculiarities no more eye-popping in their effects on the record books than 1894, or 1930, or 1968, or 1998.
The record of a season is what happened. Explanations may be offered but they do not alter the fact.
Because MLB officially makes no distinction between 19th-century and later records, all seasons are, despite their singularities, more alike than different. Acceptance of the 60-game regular season of 2020 may have made it easier in December to comprehend and accept the inclusion of the Negro Leagues of 1920–1948 into MLB’s historical record, despite myriad circumstances that once had made those seasons seem, to modern eyes, disqualifyingly short.
It had long been clear within MLB that the reason for the very existence of separate baseball leagues — racial exclusion — was a grievous mistake. Yet unrecalled had been an additional historic error: the failure, in 1969, of the Special Committee on Baseball Records to consider the Negro Leagues for inclusion in the historical record when it had evaluated the credentials of past professional baseball major leagues. While admitting the records of four other circuits, three of them from before 1900 and only one of these lasting beyond a single season, the Negro Leagues had come in for not a mention.
Why was the Union Association of 1884 termed a major league and the National Association of 1871–1875 not? Gosh, I don’t know, though the stated reason for demoting the NA had been “due to its erratic schedule and procedures.” No reason was offered for the inclusion of the bedraggled UA. Maybe someone here today could take that on?
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To conclude (I’ll stick around for questions): The state of early baseball research has advanced remarkably, thanks in large measure to the folks gathered here today. All of you have heard of Doc Adams and Jim Creighton and Bud Fowler. None of you believes that baseball was invented by anyone. None of you believes that baseball’s history or its records begins with an imprecisely defined “Modern Era.”
Red Smith observed, “Ninety feet between bases is perhaps as close as man has ever come to perfection.” He did not know that the distance was created neither by Cartwright nor by God but by Doc Adams. Smith made no similar claim for 60 feet, 6 inches, unchanged since 1893. The rules changes for balls and strikes, the unified strike zone, and the foul strike were important but not sacrosanct, either. The unchanging game must change, and it will find precedent and guidance in our favorite century.
How We Got Here was originally published in Our Game on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.