Seventh in a new series
Like Dave Smith in last week’s entry, Larry McCray’s life (1952–2023) was about the work … and family. Like Larry Ritter, another departed friend who won laurels in his day job — Ritter was an economist, McCray a political scientist — they remain better known to their baseball friends by their work in that field. Ritter’s big idea was to interview and record men who had played baseball from the 1890s on into the deadball era. Smith’s big idea was to locate play by plays for every big-league ballgame.
McCray, too, had a big idea: to describe every sort of ball game, including baseball before 1871 (the dawn of professional league play, when variation among rules and styles began to narrow), and to list its citations in print. In 2002, Tom Heitz and I had collaborated to produce a “Chronology of Early Baseball References.” That was the year Larry and I began to correspond and then occasionally meet at my office in Kingston, New York, conjuring up what an expanded chronology might look like and how far afield it might range. (Also in that year, hinting at what was to come, he wrote an article entitled “The Man Says ‘Play Ball!’ We Say ‘Whaddyamean?’”)
At one such meeting in Kingston we contemplated what catchy name (like Retrosheet) we might apply to our efforts, and we came up with Protoball, the name by which it still goes (protoball.org). We had already enlisted other researchers, notably: Tom Altherr, who in 2000 published “A Place Leavel Enough to Play Ball,” which included scores of new citations to “baseball-like” games from 1621 to 1830; George Thompson, who made the front page of the New York Times in 2001 with his discovery of a baseball match in the city in 1823; and David Block, author in 2005 of the landmark Baseball Before We Knew It. They were joined at the outset by Bob Tholkes and Richard Hershberger, among others. Today Larry is gone, the early Protoball diggers are aging (join us!), and the massive website is managed by the variously gifted Bruce Allardice.
But it all began with Larry, who launched the website in July 2005:
The Protoball list includes entries for what are taken to be “safe haven” ball games (i.e., games that use bases), including base ball, town ball, cricket, wicket, and the old-cat games, but not the many other stick-and-ball games such as golf, the racket sports, croquet, field hockey, and hurling. The earliest entries range worldwide, the middle years focus on games in the English-speaking nations, and the latter portion focuses mainly on games played in North America.
McCray launched the website with an entry for seker-hemat, the Game of the Pharaohs, ca. 2500 BCE; he was later persuaded that an earlier date — 3.5 million BCE — was more apt. “The carpometacarpal joint of Australopithecus afarensis would have allowed the range of thumb movement necessary for both key grips used in baseball.” (Overhand throwing came 1.5 million years later.)
Even from such a microscopic sampling, one may gather that for Protoball, this sort of academic rigor would extend into the Middle Ages and the dawn of a new/old game called baseball in England (first citation, in John Newbery’s Little Pretty Pocket-Book, 1744) and then in North America (1786, when a Princeton student played “baste ball”; and five years later, spelled as today, banned at Pittsfield, MA in 1791). Thence on to baseball as we would recognize it, though played amply before its purported invention in 1839 or 1845.
Larry served as guest editor of the special Protoball issue of Base Ball: A Journal of the Early Game. It featured more than thirty articles, among them his own “The Amazing Francis Willughby, and the Role of Stoolball in the Evolution of Baseball and Cricket.” In effect reviewing a book written in 1672 but not published until 2003 (yes, I have read it), he wrote:
Willughby, born in 1635, was described by a friend as having been “bitten by the snake of knowledge.” [This would pretty well describe McCray, too.] He was a leading researcher on insects, and at age 26 became an original fellow of the scientific Royal Society. In the 1660s, he began his survey of games, or “plaies.” He had hoped to travel to America, where such a survey might have continued, but in June 1672 he contracted pleurisy, and he died a month later, leaving behind 192 folio pages of notes describing over 60 pastimes, including several games of ball. This trove then disappeared into long-term storage.
Who was Larry McCray in so-called real life? After graduating from Union College with a BA and BEE (1965) and being awarded a Fulbright scholarship for 1967–68 in India, he received his Ph.D. from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1974. His dissertation, “The Politics of Regulation,” was awarded the APSA [American Political Science Association] E.E. Schattschneider Prize as the best dissertation in American government and politics for that year. Larry devoted a lifetime to impacting policy decisions for the benefit of society, including work in emerging technologies, environmental issues, and regulatory reform. He lived in Lexington, MA with his estimable wife Alexa, no academic slouch herself, whom he had met on a blind date during homecoming weekend.
Larry’s later academic and policy accomplishments are too numerous to cite in the present context but he epitomizes, in this writer’s view, the perfect profile of a top baseball researcher: one who makes his mark elsewhere, and then continues to inform his baseball studies with the curiosity and perspective he has gathered along the way.
He was a hiker, an endurance cyclist, and a player of court tennis (aka real tennis) — an indoor sport, with walls in play, from which the modern version derived. It pleases me now, as I will soon depart for his memorial service in Lexington (he died in December 2023), to reflect not only upon our friendship but also that he once played a game of court tennis with my youngest son, Mark.
PIONEERS: Larry McCray was originally published in Our Game on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.