Thomas L. Altherr METROPOLITAN STATE COLLEGE

"THE MOST SUMMERY, BOLD, FREE & SPACIOUS GAME": NEWCOMB AND , 1866-1871

HEN Charles King Newcomb, a Philadelphia man of letters, W ewrote in his journal in 1866 that baseball was "the completest game," his viewpoint was virtually unique among his literary col- leagues.' During the late 1860s, a transitional time when baseball was shedding its somewhat deceptive amateur character for the monetary potential of professionalism, the sport rarely attracted the interest of intellectuals. Unlike twentieth-century baseball, which has counted among its devotees humanists on the order of Roger Angell and scientists such as Stephen Jay Gould, as well as a goodly array of professors and sports historians and sociologists, mid-nineteenth-century baseball did not elicit such brainy attention. Even during the so-called "gentlemen's game" period, most thinkers and writers did not rush to the greenswards to watch the "brawny mechanics" swat pitches. Culture-oriented elitism and lingering moral suspicions about popular games drove the intellec- tuals to the museums, lyceums, libraries, and concert halls, as well as to their own studies, not to the ballparks. Mark Twain lavished praise on baseball in 1889, but in the preceding few decades, literary men such as Emerson and Thoreau barely made mention of the game.' Walt Whitman, that apostle of democracy and popular amusements, some- how overlooked baseball. Abolitionist Thomas Wentworth Higginson did describe baseball as a game "whose briskness and unceasing activity are perhaps more congenial ... to our national character than the comparative deliberation of cricket" in 1858, but his reference stands in isolation. 3 Some editors, such as George Wilkes, attempted sporadic

69 70 PENNSYLVANIA HISTORY analysis of the sport, as his May 4, 1867 paean to the game illustrated, but such writing was often effusive rather than considered.4 Charles King Newcomb, however, loved baseball for the most part and spent many hours watching Philadelphia area teams play. The numerous baseball references in his journal offer an interesting perspective on early organized baseball in America. Charles King Newcomb was an enigmatic, somewhat reclusive intellectual, who was a minor Transcendentalist in the 1840s. Born in Providence in 1820, Newcomb attended Brown University from 1833 to 1835. For long stretches between April, 1841 and December, 1845, he lived at Brook Farm, George Ripley's experimental community in Massachusetts. Other residents there remembered Newcomb as being shy or shadowy, only occasionally congenial and energetic. At Brook Farm, he imbibed the heady stuff of Transcendentalism. The July, 1842 number of The Dial, a Transcendentalist magazine, contained his single published piece, a morbidly ethereal tale entitled "The Dolon." In 1851, he embarked upon writing his journal, which he ambitiously titled "Principles of Life illustrated in thoughts on Nature, Scholarship, Shakespeare, Government, the War of the great American Rebellion, & Morals & Man in general." Over the next twenty years, he assiduously filled twenty-nine manuscript books with discursive rambles on literary and philosophical subjects, with over 1,000 erotic poems and epigrams in doggerel, and with many baseball references.5 During the Civil War, he served briefly with the Tenth Rhode Island Volunteers, but saw no action in that company's defense of Washington. In 1865, his mother died. She had held sort of a stranglehold on his affections, so her death freed him from Providence. He moved to Philadelphia, where he lived as a perenial bachelor and semi-recluse. In May, 1871, for unexplained reasons, he left America for Europe, and there traveled and lived in obscurity until his death in 1894. Whether he continued his journals after 1871 remains unknown. Despite his reclusiveness and study- bound cogitation, his journals reveal that he was inordinately concerned with manliness, potency, action, morality, and life of the mind. For at least five years, 1866 to 1871, the period of his Philadelphia residency, he found that city's baseball a fertile field for those mental quests. The baseball Newcomb witnessed during those years was in the midst of exciting, if turbulent, changes. Popular as a folk game long before the Civil War, baseball saw its first formalization around 1845.6 The war confirmed the sport's attraction and further acquainted many soldiers and civilians with the game's rules and rituals. In the immediate post-war years, the appeal of baseball burgeoned. According to various PHILADELPHIA BASEBALL 71 interpretations by sports historians, baseball provided Americans with a game symbolic of the pastoral past, an escape from industrial drudgery or alternately a leisure-time replication of workplace values, a peaceful metaphor of war, a coalescing force for community in the expanding cities, or a democratic response to elitist cricket.7 Other theories for baseball's spurt in popularity suggest that the phasing out of volunteer fire companies in cities gave rise to baseball clubs as spontaneous substitutes and that the early emphasis on uniforms, stars, and show- manship fit the American penchant for theatricality.8 Whatever the exact reasons for the rise in attention to baseball, by 1866 there were around 200 clubs in seventeen states and the District of Columbia, and a year later, Wilkes' Spirit of the Times estimated the number as "something like two thousand such organizations."9 In the Philadelphia area, there were several clubs, many of an ephemeral tenure. The more prominent clubs were the Minerva, the Keystones, the Equity, and the Swiftfoot. The most famous and long-lived was the Athletics, which James N. Kerns founded in 1860, an early powerhouse which was the progenitor of Connie Mack's and Charley Finley's dynasty and disaster teams of the twentieth century. Although "proper Philadelphia sporting life centered around the cricket clubs during the period between the Civil War and World War I," the champion Athletics attracted a steadily-increasing following among the lower and middle classes.10 Like other early clubs, the Athletics maintained a social-club tone, but the team also approached the game seriously. Hiring players in somewhat secretive fashion and practicing four days a week "like beavers" paid off in winning teams. As one newspaperman wrote in 1865, the play of the Athletics was "a practical and pertinent illustration of the efficacy of constant and steady practice; for to it almost solely are the Athletics indebted for a large proportion of their success and fame."' Baseball in Philadelphia mirrored the advances elsewhere. As Melvin Adelman noted of the rise of baseball in and , "The maturation and modernization of baseball made rapid advances in the 1860s. By the end of this decade, baseball emerged as a highly competitive, commercialized spectator sport dominated by a small group of professional players."' 2 In 1871, club owners and players organized the first professional league, the National Association of Professional Baseball Players. Such was the professionalizing sport which, together with the informal games in the parks, Newcomb observed avidly in Philadelphia. Newcomb found much to praise about baseball, much to draw him away from afternoons of reading, writing, and study. After remember- 72 PENNSYLVANIA HISTORY ing how the crowd was engrossed in the game at a Philadelphia Keystones versus West Philadelphia contest in 1867, he rhapsodized about his own feelings: "The hot glare of the early afternoon could not close the eyes to the manly sport; the mild sheen of the late afternoon chimed in subordinately with the scene like some sweet minor note in the music of an opera with the conduct of the actors."1 3 A little more than a year later, he noted that he found the ball game at Wharton Parade Grounds so pleasant that he did not wish to leave the field for the "recitation of my weekly course of Shakespeare."14 Both sets of remarks were hardly whimsical expressions of a passing fancy, but rather reflections of Newcomb's passion for baseball, of his depth of apprecia- tion for a game most intellectuals ignored. Not only did Newcomb find baseball games pleasurable, but he thought the sport would figure in the continuing moral regeneration of America. Sometimes Newcomb's fascination with baseball was merely inciden- tal, an excuse to joke about small matters or pontificate about larger philosophical questions. In the lighter vein, he employed baseball terms for several indulgent puns. Once he joked about "foul" and "fowl" homonym, and another time speculated that the reason a New York baseball club was granting President Johnson an honorary membership was "because of his propensity & practice in playing 'foul.' "IS The verbal propinquity of "beast" and "baste" (base)ball tickled his ear, and he found humor in the phrase, "What a splendid catch!" after an outfielder, who was an eligible bachelor, made a great play.' 6 A newspaper typographical error, "blink" instead of "blank," struck his curiosity, because the error tallied "with the slang phrase for nonperfor- mance: "I don't see it'."'7 More often, however, Newcomb drew upon baseball events and items for metaphors, proofs for his philosophical arguments. Newcomb's mind responded easily to parables and moralisms as well as metaphors. Shakespeare's words were, for him, "like balls aimed definitely with the hand" while those of other dramatists seemed aimed "with the bat."'8 Men of genius resembled catchers who caught close up to the plate; men of "mere talent" were like those catchers who caught the pitch on the bounce.' 9 The "tactful man" who warded "off malicious & mischievious wiles" compared to a skillful ballplayer "who not only vigorously wards off his opponents' 'missives,' but hits them farthest away from the defenders." 20 He drew upon baseball tropes to describe childhood and senility" "The first & second childhood in the ages of men is [sic] like the home-base in the game of base-ball: the starting place & the coming-in place."2" An overthrow in an 1869 Harvard versus PHILADELPHIA BASEBALL 73

Athletics game reminded him that men must use strength sensibly: "In base-ball only so much power must be used as will send the ball to its goal."2 2 The sight of a demoralized team propelled him to argue that shame should not overwhelm, but rather be a "spur to action," which in baseball was "an universal harmonizer." 2 3 The "powerful frames" of some ballplayers caused him to caution that strength should produce action, not just "large size & immobility."2 4 Newcomb felt that baseball illustrated "the co-ordination & correlation of men & principles," that "interest, beauty, art, and scope are lost when discipline, law & order are lost." 25 But men could learn even from failure in baseball: "It is worthwhile to play ball, if only to learn the moral meaning of muffing & of misplay," he mused. One must know "maladroitness" in order to learn the "nature of adroitness."2 6 Repeatedly Newcomb indulged in the trite comparison of the game of baseball to the game of life. "Muffs" on the field equalled blunders in the "conduct of life," although once he thought that life offered more continuous chances for men to redeem themselves than did a few innings of baseball.27 Most of the time, however, Newcomb's interest in baseball surpassed the purely esoteric. He found himself genuinely attracted to the sport in both its organized and playground forms. Over the years of his stint in Philadelphia, he continued to rave about the glories of the game. For example, he wrote on August 6, 1869:

I looked with admiration, yesterday afternoon, at the moral discipline & determination which were in part displayed by two sets of young men, who played a match game of base-ball in the Battery. The soberness, so far not [indecipherable word] & the orderliness of their conduct has a palpable eulogism upon the game. Young men who know no rule, perhaps in any other relation, knew, respected, & applied it here.28

The entry for October 8, 1870 expanded on that theme:

I thought, whilst happily looking on a sweetly, -because amiably, innocently, & disinterestedly-played game of base-ball, at Wharton St. Parade yesterday aftn, that work & play served men of all ages, not only preoccupying them as against morbidness, speculation, doubt, & the vices in style, feeling, fancy & all sorts of abstraction, but, also & especially, as applying, in-so-far as they go, true thoughts & true feelings itself.... No one can see these off-hand & unprofessional games of base-ball without recognizing the blessing that they are to young men. Their blending of glee & order, of 74 PENNSYLVANIA HISTORY

innocence & health, is admirable. Those games which I see played by those whom the general sport & good of the game still attracts are free from the concentration, strain, & over-eagerness of most more ambitious & contentious games; though in most or all of these games which are, so to speak, informally played as in the open field, merriment & exhilaration are almost sure to take the lead over rivalry & anxiety. . ., to combine play with work whilst games played under other motives and circumstances have more of work than of play about them.29

That passage contained some implicit criticism of organized baseball, but other comments, particularly those from a March 22, 1871 entry, showed Newcomb highly in favor of the game in general:

The determination of wit & of will, the judgment, the steadiness, the emotion, the vigilance, the pluck, the patience, the mobility, the ardor, the coolness, which base-ball requires & uses makes that, & similar games admirable & indispensable means of manly training & education. It is, as I recognized (yesterday?), while looking at a play of it which I encountered, an exercise of the mental, as well as muscular, physique.30

Clearly Newcomb loved the game and expected that it would fulfill its potential of producing great changes in the American moral character. Many of the other references he made about baseball reflected more details about his positive attitude. He felt the game promoted many good, individual qualities. Repeatedly he spoke highly of the physical exercise which baseball necessitated. The players' muscularity, steadi- ness, and vitality, resulting from that strenuousness, pleased Newcomb. The open, clean air of the ballpark seemed to him a tremendous antidote to the stale, stuffy air of the factory, the game a great respite from mechanical work. Baseball both illustrated and elicited competition and discipline, but also drew forth the innocence in most players. Paradoxi- cally baseball, Newcomb pondered, fostered manliness and yet also rekindled the childlikeness in the man. Baseball, he posited, should be part of every boy's education. "The body is as grateful for manly training, as the earth is grateful for liberal horticulture," Newcomb declared in July, 1869, while referring to baseball. 31 That the game's "gymnasty" improved the athletes' body tone gratified him.32 He compared the players to fine horses and noted their "splendid animal condition," when spectators and players crowded into a room during a rainstorm.3 3 Furthermore Newcomb observed that PHILADELPHIA BASEBALL 75 the exertion in baseball instilled "new vitality of expression" in their faces, induced so much zeal in players that once they took to the field to play before rain had stopped, and that even practice became a "process of steadiness."3 4 Baseball required, according to Newcomb, "persistent attention & calculation as well as vigor, steadiness, sobriety, & vivaci- ty."3 5 No improvement in any virtue seemed beyond the realm to baseball's power. Being an outdoor game, baseball especially impressed Newcomb as a welcome escape from indoor, mechanical work. Laborers "leave the shade & quiet of a shop for the sun & fury of a ball-ground; they stand, & they exercise, for hours, at a strict & laborious game; they attest that they mean to be men, & not machines," he remarked in 1867.36 Baseball seemed indeed a good mixture of play and work, or even a substitute for work.3 7 "Games are commended to men in a way in which trades are not," he wrote, and chuckled about how boys who would not work for five minutes would play ball for hours. That was a "lesson for education," he thought.3 " Newcomb argued strongly that men and boys should take advantage of this outdoor sport, and once even went so far as to recommend stripping partially: "The privilege of freely opening the skin to the sunshine & air would greatly enhance the delight & good of the games."3 9 Overall, for Newcomb, the physical elements of baseball combined with its mental dimension formed a satisfying sport. "The game has many of the intellectual merits of a game of chess or of cards ... without their sedentariness & confinement, and with more of manly muscle called into action," he asserted in 1868.40 Baseball not only brought men out of their shops, but it also brought them briefly out of adulthood. In July, 1866, Newcomb cheered that "middle-aged men bounded along the bases like fawns." 4 ' The next year, he embellished upon the theme: "Athletic games carry men back to their days of childhood. There is, indeed, morally, a home-base in all of them, as there is, literally, one in base-ball. -To be childlike, is evidently to be a creature of affections, of thought, of muscle, of the senses, & of action."4 2 And later that summer, he suggested that because men who were learning to play baseball exhibited exuberance, hilarity, and frolicsomeness, childlikeness must be a quality of learning.4 3 "Mechanics" playing baseball evoked the thought that "innocence itself" had "a base in industry."4 4 For boys and male adolescents growing up in an age which forced more work than play upon them, Newcomb thought that baseball permitted them at least some expression of innocence. "The interest & pleasure of young men & boys at games of base-ball, suffuses their countenances with the innocence & intelligence 76 PENNSYLVANIA HISTORY of a pure, fresh, invigorating, & healthy sentiment & sportiveness," he recorded in 1867.45 Boys simply playing catch displayed similar energy and "beaming countenances."4 6 Although Newcomb expected that children could not play baseball well yet, he applauded the game as "enhanced by its congeniality to children."4 7 Baseball would benefit "urchins" by diverting them from "demoralizing games & haunts" and teaching them "innocence, vigor, skill, discipline, & health." 48 Indeed Newcomb feared that many boys were like the one he encountered for whom baseball was "almost his only welcome occasion & operation of innocence as well as exercise."4 9 In Newcomb's estimation, however, baseball was not only a celebra- tion of youth, but equally a firm enforcer of masculine codes. Whether Newcomb derived his notion from the current attitudes about masculin- ity or from his personal anxieties and pride about manhood, he was obsessed with the concept of manliness. Melvin Adelman found that the "strong linkage of 'manly' to physical prowess found in the cricket argument, however, did not appear in the baseball discussion" of the 1850s, but Warren Goldstein suggested that over the 1845 to 1876 period the connection of the two terms became almost trite.5 0 Whatever the case, Newcomb continually characterized baseball as a great molder of the manliness quality. "Ballplaying is a continual feast of manlike determination & efficiency.... No other game sets the forces of manly condition at such stable pitch."5 1 He termed an 1869 Princeton versus Athletics game a "test of manliness."5 2 that October he elaborated most fully on the subject:

Athletical games, &, in general, many sorts of sports, form manhood, because, also, they form the childlikeness, exuberance, enjoyableness, & engagedness of disposition of which manhood is a development & confirmation: &, also, because they form in me the amiableness, accomodativeness, sensibility, & emotionalism which constitutes so much of a man as to make him, so far as those parts, in their place, are concerned, fit for the appreciative & sympathetic relation to women. Manly sports make a man on the one hand, playful, cheerful, [indecipherable word], & simple in kind as a child; & on the other hand, while they demand & develop such radically musculine & predominatory traits as vigor, energy, determination, skill, judgment, & activity in him, & so almost to masculinize him, they, also, demand a fineness, refinement, deli- cacy & gentleness of traits in him which in proper proportion, PHILADELPHIA BASEBALL 77

always different from the proportion in women, -constitute a man with so much of what . . . will enable him to be a better husband, etc. 3

Even an informal game at Fairmount Park the next spring showed him the "inalienable majesty of manhood." 54 On the face of it, Newcomb's use of the manliness comparison may seem straightforward enough, merely an incorporation of several of the other qualities baseball promoted, but his persistent employment of manliness in a sexual context throughout his journals, as in his erotic verse, would seem to indicate that he imagined baseball as an arena where men exerted symbolic masculine power over women. Newcomb's tendency to see baseball in sexual terms might be problematic, but insistence that baseball was educational for all inovlved was patent. One of his earliest references to baseball argued that "gymnastic games" should be part of "common education."55 Baseball even impressed on players the necessity for other forms of knowledge: "Base-ball teaches rough men that knowledge, as art, is not only a convenience, but a necessity. -First, players must learn how to catch & throw balls; second, they must learn by practice as well as rules; third, they see that it is dangerous to be ignorant & inapt [sic?], & that it is safe to be accomplished; fourth, they see that learning, effectiveness, & positiviness, & security are correlative." 56 Spectators could also gain from the spectacle. When not "breathing vigor" from just watching, something Newcomb claimed he did, the good spectator learned to see athletic virtues even in a poor game.57 the watchers would also see object lessons in art and science. The "art" quality of baseball pleased Newcomb. He mused that the form of a pitching was one of the "notablest postures as yet unknown to art," that the "statuesque posture assumed unaffectedly" confirmed the appropriateness of baseball as art.58 Likewise baseball was "a proof of physics." The "rush & lines of the balls in their passage through the air, assimilate games of base-ball to the action of planetary orbs."59 Overall Newcomb was elated that despite rumors of the game's demise he found interest for the game growing.' How deeply did he believe in the salutary effects of base-ball, especially on the "rowdy lower classes," was evident in his strong objection to a prohibition of baseball in Camden, New Jersey in the summer of 1870: "This policy of forbidding base-ball is as suicidal as it is homicidal. It reminds me of killing the goose that lays the golden eggs mainly to prevent the noise of the cackling."6" 78 PENNSYLVANIA HISTORY

But Newcomb did not always view baseball with such unabashed admiration. In August, 1867, he wrote worriedly of a potential decline in the level of morality of the game: If base-ball falls into disuse, the cause will be in the main inadequacy, because of crudity & immorality in the players, to the accomplishment & virtue of the game. Whether there is enough moral mettle in most as they now are who endure the heat of the hot game, is the question on which the permanence of the game in the list of popular sports depends. Moreover, the time which it requires, in clear day-light, may have much to do with the question. -Lenity, laziness, petulance, impatient ambition, mortification, betting, wedges which demoralize & threaten to beat up the thing.62 Displays of human frailty by the players and fans disappointed him, but even then his disenchantment was a measure of how profound were his hopes for the game. As a moral purist, Newcomb warmed to the purist aspects of the sport; whenever he saw evidence of the impure, his commentary turned bitter. The smoking, drinking, swearing, and other vices which surrounded the ballpark upset him, as did the players' and fans' mercenariness and gambling. Instead of promoting virtues always, baseball, Newcomb noted with chagrin, sometimes brought out conceit, deceit, laziness, and disorderliness. He worried about the intemperate outbursts and overexcitability on the part of fans. He strenuously objected to overseriousness. Players, especially children, who were taking the game too seriously disturbed his theory that games should engender play and cathartic hilarity. Sometimes Newcomb quarreled with rule changes which threatened to make the game less of an individual challenge. And personally he found his own anxieties about aging aggravated by the sight of lithe young males gallivanting on the greenswards. The appearance of vices at the ballpark made Newcomb despair for the games's goodly virtues. "Tobacco implies infidelity to manly faith, courage & beauty," he wrote, after watching players smoking at a game. 63 He expressed shock at having heard profanity, vulgarity, querulousness, and licentiousness in the speech of a "loquacious" catcher at a boys' game at Wharton Parade Ground. 64 At another game, he was sorry to overhear a ballplayer on a "club of brawny mechanics" predict "a drunk tonight" after victory, but Newcomb consoled himself that for the moment they played a healthful sport: "It was something that Bacchus should be subordinate, if only for a while, to Hercules."6 5 PHILADELPHIA BASEBALL 79

Another time he lamented that the athletics' fine training went all for nought when they fell into temptation: As I stood beside some of the Keystone Club, on the Ferry Boat, I was pained & disgusted to hear an aldermanic looking fellow, who accompanied them, advise them, whether in jest or earnest, I could not say, to get drunk, for they had gone to that contest sober, &, if they were drunk, they would have the ball at once. A young man of more thought reproved him. The Keystones played next day with the Atlantics, at the large grounds of the latter, & made scarcely a show of ability. 66 The next year Newcomb railed several times about players drinking "a keg of lager" at a game, at players who were gambling while drunk, and once stood amazed that a couple of drunk players could even function on the field.67 The gambling and mercenariness similarly saddened Newcomb. The years he followed the sport were those when baseball gave up the pretense of amateurism, a period which baseball historian Harold Seymour termed "a twilight zone between amateurism and profession- alism, a semi-professional period in which hypocrisy reigned."66 Gam- bling, fixing games, "hippodroming" (keeping the score artificially close to persuade betting one direction or another), and other assaults on the game's integrity sickened spectators like Newcomb. He warned sternly that betting would destroy baseball: The moral beauty, pleasure, & utility of base-ball is such that the prostitution of the game to gambling purposes, fast becoming as common, I hear, as in horse-racing or in elections, elicits disap- pointment & sorrow among all classes of lovers of manly sports. Simplicity in sport had a trial amongst all sorts of masculine & aspiring & active boys & men, & so commended itself to them that spontaneously & constantaneously feel they will lose a deep pleasure when they lose a pure pleasure.6 9 The next summer he thought that interest in baseball had somewhat declined "since the game has been prostituted to gambling."7 0 Likewise he lamented the trend toward mercenariness in the sport. "Manhood & mammon never conspire together," he moralized in 1869, and con- tinued, "When base-ball became, as it is among some vulgar clubs, a money-making matter, its downfall was sealed amongst mercenary players." Money lavished on players would demoralize them and affect their play. Newcomb bewailed the fact that the city editor of one 80 PENNSYLVANIA HISTORY newspaper had advocated paying players large salaries of $40 per week.71 Sometimes Newcomb perceived negative personality traits arising in players instead of the essential virtues which the game should foster. Three times he wrote disparagingly about how conceit and false pride had no place in a game which should stress humility.72 He took great satisfaction when a New York Mutuals' ruse to have a game called on account of darkness backfired and they lost the game, but he thought such deceitful attempts hurt the game instead of enlivening its drama. 73 Bad tempers flaring at one hot, sunglared game grated on his nerves.74 Players being lazy at practice displeased him, as did times when games degenerated into disorderliness. At one such game, boys "screamed, chattered, and mobilised like flock of birds" and exemplified the chaos which Newcomb feared. The disordered play at another game led him to decry that the "lawless play of the few, moreover, spoils the best play of others."7 5 Any tendency toward overseriousness in baseball especially grieved Newcomb. He was dismayed when he saw boys and young men playing too relentlessly or intensely. He felt that boys should not emulate the fiercer play of their elders too soon.76 He liked it when in one boys' game the "rigor was softened" by "hilarity." 7 7 Of one inspiring men's game he wrote that its only fault had been "a little too much seriousness." It seemed to him "as if New York intensity & overinvolvedness in business had infected even pleasure & exercise."7 8 Moreover he objected to anyone letting baseball rule his life in an obsessive manner: "It is a pleasant, & a good thing to play ball; but it is a miserable, & an evil, thing to do nothing but play ball." Even the ardent baseball player or fan must possess a "collateral scope of life."7 9 Additionally Newcomb deplored the negative effects of the spectacle on the spectators. He believed that fans identified too strongly with one side or the other. Baseball "should be a feast of exercise to the bystanders & players," he hypothesized and remarked further that if "all would see & enjoy the game as it is, all would be benefitted by it."8 0 Noise at the ballpark also diminished his appreciation, and once he was cheered by the fact that the game went on despite the raucous fans and afforded him "a welcome relief from the inanity & exhaustion of their trifling."8" Newcomb worried whether all of this overexcitement at the park signified so profound an apathy in people's daily lives that they felt compelled to behave so ridiculously at the game.82 Other reservations Newcomb had about baseball concerned the purity of the rules and his personal anxieties about aging. In May, 1869, he PHILADELPHIA BASEBALL 81 allotted three pages of his journal to a harangue about batters selecting their own pitches. He felt such a feature reduced competition and skill in batting. A couple of days later he trained his criticism on the pinch- runner rule: "The contest of strength and health in games should be as complete as possible."" 3 Perhaps his caviling of these rules marked the aging man trying to hold a vision of perfection before his eyes as a stay against time. The youthful image of baseball reminded Newcomb that he had left his own youth far behind. Repeatedly he argued to himself that age and wisdom prevailed over callow youth and took faint delight whenever an obviously older group of men defeated a younger group of boys.84 But he still regretted that the physical dimension of baseball was beyond his own capabilities. But it was that very mobility of baseball, its controlled franticness which excited Newcomb to the core. For him baseball was the national game because it both responded to and reflected American dynamism. He saw movement and action everywhere in the sport. Even the colorful slang, bits of which he recorded, bespoke the vibrancy of the game: boys were "handling the leather" well, a pitcher could throw a "red-hot" pitch, two teams "squared-away" at each other, conceited players were "showboating," and a hard-hit ground ball was a "daisy cutter."8 5 Although he once scoffed at the "national game" tag as the creation of "penny-a-liner" reporters, Newcomb believed that baseball symbolized American culture far more accurately than did its British cousin, cricket.8 6 He loved Shakespeare, the English literary tradition, and other parts of British heritage, but for popular culture Newcomb preferred his sport homebred. Much as he might admire the "predetermination, perserverance, consecutiveness, tenacity, & compass of purpose" of cricket, that it kept men "out in the fresh air longer" than did baseball, he much preferred the latter because it was for him "the most summery, bold, free, & spacious game."8 7 Baseball was a "less constrained & serious game," one which derived from a "free & vivacious spirit."" Cricket required "a bull-dog like persistency of attention to keep the spectator interested," Newcomb remarked, but baseball tended "by its urgency, vivacity, & haphazzard[ness] to enhance as well as express & exercise, the traits & manners of Americans, to whom it is peculiar & almost exceptionally congenial."8 9 He elaborated on this theme more fully in a passage from May, 1867:

Base-ball requires especially fire, activity, nerve, intensity more than cricket requires, & in that respect, is a representatively national game for America. Loyalty to a game as to an institution is 82 PENNSYLVANIA HISTORY

a foremost consideration in cricket; achievement in a game as in prowess is a foremost consideration in baseball. The play in cricket partakes more of strategy; in base-ball, of movement; one partakes more of common sense; the other of genius.90 Baseball satisfied Newcomb deeply, both emotionally and intellectually. The various deficiencies of morality which he spotted from time to time in no way discouraged his overall love of the game nor dampened his heightened expectations of its potential to work moral reform in post-Civil War America and Philadelphia. Newcomb's penchant for didacticism found wonderful demonstrations on the mound, at the plate, and along the basepaths. In his time his perceptions were somewhat unique, but scholars and writers in later decades rediscovered in baseball what so excited Newcomb in the late 1860s and early 1870s in Philadelphia.

NOTES

1. All twenty-nine volumes of Newcomb's journal rest in the John Hay Library at Brown University, Providence, Rhode Island. All citations to journal references will consist of the journal volume number, the page(s) number(s), and the date of the entry. 9:5, Apr. 4, 1866. Dr. Walter Harding, SUNY College at Geneseo has my thanks for alerting me to Newcomb's journals. 2. Mark Twain called baseball "the very symbol, the outward and visible expression, of the drive and push and rush and struggle of the raging, tearing, booming nineteenth century." See Samuel Clemens, "Welcome Home to a Baseball Team Returning from a World Tour by Way of the Sandwich Islands" (1889), The Writings of Mark Twain, Definitive Edition, 37 vols. (New York, 1922-25), XVIII, 145. 3. Higginson, "Saints and Their Bodies," Atlantic Monthly, I (March, 1958), 593. 4. "Base-Ball Matters; The Incoming Season," Wilkes'Spirit of the Times, v. XVI, n. 10 (May 4, 1867), 150. 5. For a representative sampling of Newcomb's journal themes and more biographical detail see Newcomb, The Journals of Charles King Newcomb, Judith Kennedy Johnson, ed. (Providence, 1946). 6. See Melvin L. Adelman, "The Development of Modern Athletics: Sport in , 1820-1870" (unpub. Ph.D. diss., University of Illinois, Champaign/Urbana, 1980) and Warren Jay Goldstein, "Playing for Keeps: A History of American Baseball, 1857-1876" (unpub. Ph.D. diss., Yale University, 1983) for discussions of these early formalization attempts. 7. For the pastoralism explanation, see Allen Guttmann, From Ritual to Record: The Nature of Modern Sports (New York, 1978), 100-08; for the escape from drudgery or replication of work values, see Steven M. Gelber, "Working at Playing: The Culture of the Workplace and the Rise of Baseball," Journal of Social History v.16, n.4 (Summer, 1983), 3-21; for the military metaphor theme, see David Lamoreaux, "Baseball in the Late Nineteenth Century: The Source of Its Appeal," Journal of Popular Culture, v. 11, n.3 (Winter, 1977), 597-613; for the community argument, see Benjamin G. Rader, "The Quest for Subcommunities and the Rise of American Sport," American Quarterly, v. 29, n. PHILADELPHIA BASEBALL 83

4 (Fall, 1977), 355-69; for anti-cricket argument, see Adelman, "The Development of Modern Athletics," 275-97. 8. See Goldstein, "Playing for Keeps," 41, 197-202. 9. Wilkes' Spirit of the Times, May 4, 1867, 150. 10. E. Digby Baltzell, The Philadelphia Gentlemen: The Making of a National Upper Class (Glencoe, Ill., 1958), 359. 11. Quoted in Goldstein, "Playing for Keeps," 33. 12. Adelman, "The Development of Modern Athletics," 379. 13. 14:195, Aug. 7, 1867. 14. 19:118, Oct. 7, 1868. 15. 13:345, June 4, 1867; 15:27, Oct. 4, 1867. 16. 14:45, June 20, 1867; 13:333, May 30, 1867. 17. 21:248, June 17, 1869. 18. 17:275, Apr. 30, 1868. 19. 24:234, Apr. 20, 1870. 20. 24:279, Apr. 30, 1870. 21. 14:196, Aug. 7, 1867. 22. 21:306-07, July 10, 1869. 23. 15:117, Oct. 26, 1867 and 27:162, Mar. 25, 1871. 24. 25:78-79, June 8, 1870. 25. 14:107, July 9,1867. 26. 15:163, Nov. 7, 1867; see also 14:197, Aug. 7,1867 and 15:206, Nov. 16, 1867. 27. 13:347, June 4, 1867 and 26:84, Oct. 26, 1870; see also 18:116, June 12, 1868, 21:266, June 23, 1869, and 24:330-31, May 14,1870. 28. 22:25; Newcomb's crossout. 29. 26:41. 30. 27:151. 31. 21:310, July 12, 1869. 32. 9:356, July 14, 1866; see also the comment, "Gymnastic feats give the manners, as well as the muscles, of athletes to performers." 18:151, June 25, 1868. 33. 18:107, June 9,1868. 34. 14:50, June 21, 1867; 13:311, May 23, 1867; 14:59, June 25, 1867; and 22:96-97, Sept. 7, 1869. 35. 9:165, Apr. 28, 1866. 36. 14:151, July 25, 1867. 37. See 18:188, July 7, 1868. 38. 14:166-67, July 30,1869. 39. 21:282, June 30, 1869. 40. 18:293, Aug. 8, 1868. 41. 9:370, July 23, 1866. 42. 14:41,June 19, 1866. 43. 14:278, Sept. 2, 1867. 84 PENNSYLVANIA HISTORY

44. 14:282, Sept. 4, 1867. 45. 13:316, May 24, 1867. 46. 13:344, June 3, 1867. 47. 14:39, June 18, 1867. 48. 19:65, Sept. 18, 1868. 49. 21:242, June 15, 1869. 50. Adelman, "The Development of Modern Athletics," 340; Goldstein, "Playing for Keeps," 70. see also Adelman's discussion of sports and manliness, 684-86. 51. 14:124, July 16, 1867. 52. 21:94-95, Apr. 27, 1869. 53. 22:230, Oct. 13, 1869. 54. 25:1, May 21, 1870. 55. 9:159-60, Apr. 27, 1866. 56. 14:12,June 11, 1867. 57. 21:142, May 13, 1869; 15:16, Oct. 2, 1867. 58. 9:129, Apr. 21, 1866; 22:320, Nov. 4, 1869; 25:205, July 16, 1870. 59. 19:119, Oct. 7,1868 and 13:307, May 21,1867; see also 19:234-35, Nov. 9,1868 and 21:88, Apr. 24, 1869. 60. 22:177, Oct. 1, 1867. 61. 25:251, Aug. 4, 1870. 62. 14:172-73, Aug. 1, 1867. 63. 13:225, Apr. 27, 1867. 64. 14:164, July 30,1867. 65. 13:342,June 1, 1867. 66. 22:64-65, Aug. 23, 1869; Newcomb's crosscuts. 67. 25:236, July 28, 1870; 25:300, Aug. 31,1870; 26:48-49, Oct. 12, 1870. 68. Harold Seymour, Baseball: The Early Years (New York: Oxford Univ. Pr., 1960), 51. 69. 14:270-71, Aug. 31, 1867. 70. 18:249, July 25, 1868. 71. 21:294, July 3, 1869; see also 21:312, July 13, 1869. 72. 18:230, July 19, 1868; 18:341, Aug. 25, 1868; 21:250, June 17, 1869; 21:340-41, July 24,1869. 73. 19:75, Sept ?, 1868. 74. 18:75, June 2, 1868. 75. 21:215, June 4, 1869; 24:298, May 6, 1870; 22:159, Sept. 25, 1869. 76. 14:2, June 7, 1867; 18:94, June 6, 1868; 19:252, Nov. 13, 1868; 21:270, June 25, 1869; 24:250, Apr. 23, 1870. 77. 18:153,June 26, 1868. 78. 22:25, Aug. 6, 1869. 79. 14:291, Sept. ?, 1867. 80. 22:100, Sept. 9, 1869. PHILADELPHIA BASEBALL 85

81. 19:32, Sept. 8, 1868. 82. 15:185, Nov. 12, 1867. 83. 21:195-97, May 29, 1869; 21:202, June 1, 1869. 84. 18:51, May 26,1868; 25:240, July 29,1870; 26:62, Oct. 17, 1870. 85. 13:291, May 16, 1867; 13:303, May 20, 1867; 13:316, May 24, 1867; 18:230, July 19, 1868; 13:345, June 4, 1867. 86. 15:28, Oct. 5, 1867. 87. 22:120, Sept. 16, 1869. 88. 19:131, Oct. 10, 1868. 89. 13:248, May 4,1867. 90. 13:320, May 25, 1867.