Second in a new series, with new criteria
Among those who changed things in how, forever after, we looked at the world and ourselves, Charles Darwin might lead the pack, though Newton and Galileo and Watson & Crick might come in for a holler, too. In baseball, it’s Chadwick and Bill James, last week’s entrant in this series. What James did for baseball today, David Block has done for its past … and is just as important for its future.
How do you know where you’re going if you don’t know where you’ve been? For this we look to historians: to archaeologists of play, that phenomenon so common to all cultures that few have bothered to write about it.
In baseball there has been a hunger for inventors and inventions, although evolution is almost always the better answer. “Who is the father of baseball?” is the wrong question; the game was not invented so much as it was accreted.
Nearly 20 years ago, when Block’s Baseball Before We Knew It was published, only a handful of people were exploring the dusty trails before Abner Doubleday’s purported invention of the game in 1839. Robert Henderson struggled against the Cooperstown story even before the Hall of Fame was launched on June 12, 1939. Responding to Henderson’s conclusion that baseball was “made in England,” John Kieran wrote in his April 11, 1937, column for the New York Times:
Oh, Abner of the Doubledays in far-off fields Elysian,
Your claim to fame is called a foul by later-day decision.
Some prying archeologists have gone and found some traces
Of baseball footprints ages old in sundry English places.
Sixty years later, even within the Society for American Baseball Research (SABR), most folks were intent on obtaining bronze plaques for overlooked luminaries like Deacon White. Study of baseball’s origins were, even for SABR’s experts in history and statistics, the dark side of the moon. The massive Protoball.org website, dedicated to the prehistory of the game, did not yet exist, though Block’s exemplary finds would seed it.
What are the key dates in early baseball history that, before Block, hardly anyone knew? While he did not take a direct hand in every one of these, they all followed in the wake of his great book.
1609: Polish workers play ball at Jamestown, Virginia
1621: Pilgrims play stoolball
1744: John Newbery publishes A Little Pretty Pocket-Book, with baseball rhyme
1749: Prince of Wales plays baseball
1755: English diarist William Bray describes a baseball game
1786: Princeton student John Rhea Smith plays “baste ball”
1791: Pittsfield, Massachusetts bans baseball in a bylaw
1796: German book describes das englische base-ball
One of Block’s key discoveries was that that the American game of baseball had evolved not from rounders — the game that Henry Chadwick had played as a boy in western England — but from baseball itself, a far older game here and in the mother country.
Block, now 80, was born in Chicago and went on to a career as a systems analyst. He had been a collector of baseball cards and other standard material, but then he began to branch into ephemera — chapbooks, pamphlets, and ever more ancient memorabilia, things that were more difficult to find even though few other collectors had stolen a march on him. His research extended to dictionaries, novels and diaries that contained references to the game rather than to players or clubs.
If academic historians are driven by story and issue, Block was driven by artifact. His projected bibliography of early texts that mentioned baseball grew into Baseball Before We Knew It. He was particularly fascinated by John Newbery’s A Little Pretty Pocket-Book, issued in England in 1744. The first edition in America was published by Isaiah Thomas in 1787 — and featured a page on … baseball.
In 2001 Block was amazed to find a German text by a gymnastics professor named Johann Christoph Friedrich GutsMuths — a 1796 text that had never been translated into English: Spiele zur Uebung und Erholung des Körpers und Geistes für die Jugend, ihre Erzieher und alle Freunde Unschuldiger Jugendfreuden (“Games for the Exercise and Recreation of Body and Spirit for the Youth and His Educator and All Friends of Innocent Joys of Youth”). In it he found the rules and diagrams for “Das Englische Base-ball.”
It was a staggering find. He came to understand, over time, that English Baseball was an earlier game than American Baseball, that it was almost always played without a bat, and was enjoyed by both sexes. In 2007, while filming a documentary for mlb.com (“Base Ball Discovered”), Block discovered a diary in Suffolk by William Bray that discussed an Easter Monday outing to go to play baseball on March 31, 1755:
Went to Stoke Ch(urch) this Morn. — After Dinner Went to Miss Jeale’s to play at Base Ball, with her, the 3 Miss Whiteheads, Miss Billinghurst, Miss Molly Fluttor, Mr. Chandler, Mr. Ford, H. Parsons & Jolly. Drank tea and stayed till 8.
The hits kept on coming. Next was Block’s discovery of an English newspaper called the Whitehall Evening-Post. On page 3: “On Tuesday last his Royal Highness the Prince of Wales, and Lord Middlesex, played at Base-Ball, at Walton in Surry; and notwithstanding the Weather was extreme bad, they continued playing for several Hours.”
The date of the game was September 12, 1749.
Block’s next book would be Pastime Lost: The Humble, Original, and Now Completely Forgotten Game of English Baseball. It was a brilliant book, with nary a word about Mickey Mantle … or Deacon White.
PIONEERS, Season Two: David Block was originally published in Our Game on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.