00-N3182-FM 11/9/04 8:32 AM Page i ❖ baseball before we knew it 00-N3182-FM 11/9/04 8:32 AM Page ii Base 00-N3182-FM 11/9/04 8:32 AM Page iii before we knew ball it A Search for the Roots of the Game david block With a foreword by Tim Wiles University of Nebraska Press lincoln and london 00-N3182-FM 11/9/04 8:32 AM Page iv © 2005 by David Block Foreword © 2005 by Tim Wiles Chapter 3 © 2005 by Philip Block “‘A Place Leavel Enough to Play Ball’: Baseball and Baseball-type Games in the Colonial Era, Revolutionary War, and Early American Republic” by Thomas L. Altherr appeared in slightly different form in Nine: A Journal of Baseball History and Social Policy Perspectives, volume 8, number 2, and is used by permission of the University of Nebraska Press. Copyright © 2000 by Canadian Scholars’ Press, Inc., and bk Publishers. “Battingball Games” by Per Maigaard was first published in Genus, journal of the Comitato Italiano per lo Studio dei Problemi della Popolazione, Rome, Italy, volume 5, numbers 1–2, 1941, pp. 57–72. All rights reserved Manufactured in the United States of America ᭺ϱ Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Block, David, 1944– Baseball before we knew it : a search for the roots of the game / David Block; with a foreword by Tim Wiles. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. isbn 0-8032-1339-5 (cloth: alk. paper) 1. Baseball—History. I. Title. gv862.5.b56 2005 796.357Ј09034—dc22 2004016099 00-N3182-FM 11/9/04 8:32 AM Page v to my loving parents 00-N3182-FM 11/9/04 8:32 AM Page vi 00-N3182-FM 11/9/04 8:32 AM Page vii Base-ball . a play all who are, or have been, schoolboys are well acquainted with. mary lepel November 14, 1748, London 00-N3182-FM 11/9/04 8:32 AM Page viii contents ❖ List of Illustrations x Foreword by Tim Wiles xiii Preface xix Acknowledgments xxiii 1. Uncertainty as to the Paternity 1 2. Rounders, Schmounders 22 3. Abner and Albert, the Missing Link by Philip Block 32 4. Was Abner Graves Telling the Truth? 50 5. Rules of Baseball: The Prequel 67 6. How Slick Were the Knicks? 80 7. In the Beginning 94 8. Stools, Clubs, Stobs, and Jugs 105 9. Traps and Cats 124 10. It’s Starting to Look Familiar 134 11. Baseball before We Knew It 152 00-N3182-FM 11/9/04 8:32 AM Page ix Early Baseball Bibliography: Roots of the Game in Pre–Civil War Literature 163 appendix 1. Constitutions and By-Laws 223 appendix 2. Some Comments on Sporting Journals of the 1850s 225 appendix 3. “A Place Leavel Enough to Play Ball” by Thomas L. Altherr 229 appendix 4. The Letters of Abner Graves 252 appendix 5. Dr. Adam E. Ford’s Letter to Sporting Life 257 appendix 6. Battingball Games by Per Maigaard 260 appendix 7. Nine Surviving Descriptions of Baseball-like Games Written and Published before 1845 275 Notes 287 Principal Sources Consulted 323 Index 325 00-N3182-FM 11/9/04 8:32 AM Page x illustrations ❖ Engraving depicting Camp Doubleday 47 Abner Graves 54 Image of la soule from fourteenth-century manuscript 107 Image of “stoolball” from fourteenth-century manuscript 108 Hand-drawn illustration of “club ball” 109 Theoretical flowchart of baseball’s evolution 153 “Batting” game implements 261 Diagram of playing-grounds of some “battingball” games 263 Map of the world showing spread of “batting” games 271 Map of Europe showing spread of longball and rounders 272 00-N3182-FM 11/9/04 8:32 AM Page xi Following page 148 Illuminated miniature from Cantigas de Santa Maria, a thirteenth-century Spanish manuscript Illuminated miniature from The Ghistelles Calendar, Flanders, ca. 1301 Image from the fourteenth-century manuscript Decretals of Gregory IX Page from A Little Pretty Pocket-Book, 11th ed., 1763 Diagrams illustrating the games das deutsche Ballspiel and das englische Base-ball, 1796 Illustration of “trap-ball” from Youthful Sports, 1804 Illustration of “trap-ball” from The Book of Games, 1805 Illustration of a baseball-like game from Remarks on Children’s Play, 1811 Illustration from the children’s almanac Taschenbuch für das Jahr 1815 der Liebe und Freundschaft, 1815. “Playing Ball,” from Children’s Amusement, 1820 Illustration from Good Examples for Boys, 1823 Illustration from The Young Florist, 1833 Illustration of boys playing baseball on the Boston Common, 1834 Baseball engraving that appeared in numerous children’s chapbooks, 1835. Illustration from The Book of Seasons, A Gift for the Young. Autumn, 1840 Reading lesson from McGuffey’s Newly Revised Eclectic First Reader, 1844 “Boys Playing Bat and Ball,” from Sanders’s The School Reader, First Book, 1853 Illustrations of adults suited up to play the Massachusetts variety of baseball, 1859 00-N3182-FM 11/9/04 8:32 AM Page xii 00-N3182-FM 11/9/04 8:32 AM Page xiii foreword ❖ This whole subject needs elucidation, and a careful study of the rural sports of the mother country would undoubtedly throw much light upon the history of base ball. henry chadwick “The Ancient History of Baseball,” The Ballplayers’ Chronicle, July 18, 1867 The front page of the Sunday New York Times is a forum reserved for the most important news of our nation and culture. So it seems fitting that the edition of July 8, 2001, carried a story on the discovery of evi- dence showing that young men were playing an organized brand of baseball in Manhattan as early as 1823. This, of course, was twenty- three years before the New York Knickerbockers played the first match under a written set of rules at Hoboken, New Jersey, long considered a watershed moment for the organization of formal baseball teams. It was also sixteen years before the mythic date of 1839, when the game’s folklore posits its invention at Cooperstown, New York, by Ab- ner Doubleday. The Times reported that New York University librarian George Thompson Jr. had unearthed two newspaper references to baseball games published on April 25, 1823. The alert Thompson, not a scholar of the sport’s origins, had noticed the references while pur- suing other quarry. The historiography of baseball’s beginnings is dotted with simi- larly dramatic finds, such as the 1991 discovery of a notice in an 1825 Delhi, New York, newspaper, in which nine men of the town of Ham- den sought another group with whom to play “Bass-Ball” for a wager of one dollar per game. And now the latest discovery is David Block’s startling revelation of the existence of a German book, published in 1796, that contains seven pages of rules for “das englische Base-ball.” These references cast the Knickerbocker Club’s accomplishments 00-N3182-FM 11/9/04 8:32 AM Page xiv in a new light, showing that there were organized games and written rules long before 1846. Moreover, the 1796 rules for “English base- ball” long predate the earliest print references to that other English pastime, rounders, which calls into question Henry Chadwick’s the- ory that baseball evolved from that game. Yet for all the drama and in- terest that these new discoveries create, they have seemed ultimately ineffective at changing the popular conceptions of baseball’s origins. Though the existing explanations were saddled with problems, no better alternative theory had emerged, at least until now. The Doubleday Myth, as you will read in these pages, was promul- gated by the Spalding Commission in 1908 but shot down immedi- ately and convincingly by the journalist Will Irwin the following year. It was again debunked in 1939 by Robert W. Henderson of the New York Public Library, even as the baseball industry celebrated, with great pomp and circumstance, its “Centennial,” the centerpiece of which was the grand opening of the National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum in Cooperstown. Despite irrefutable evidence to the contrary, the media and the public, encouraged by the flag-waving bluster of the baseball industry, clung to the Doubleday Myth. It seemed they simply preferred the “immaculate conception” of base- ball by the war hero Abner Doubleday to the messy evolution that the historical evidence clearly indicated. Of course, just after 1939 the world plunged into total war, and the sniping in print over baseball’s origins stopped dead for several de- cades. In the suburban peace of the 1950s, it may not have appeared seemly to question the preeminent Doubleday theory. Baseball was experiencing its golden age, and was expanding westward with all the optimism and arrogance that had carried the nation itself along the same transcontinental path a century earlier. This was not a time to challenge consensus. Then again, historians may simply have felt that there was no more debunking to be done: Irwin and Henderson had done a thorough job. The Doubleday Myth, it seemed, would prevail regardless of the evidence. The myth may also have been buttressed by the pastoral beauty of my home, Cooperstown, New York, and the reverence with which the public and the media have treated the Hall of Fame and Cooperstown xiv : : : foreword 00-N3182-FM 11/9/04 8:32 AM Page xv since the founding of the shrine. During this same period of “Double- day consensus,” the Hall of Fame, arguably a much less mature insti- tution than it has become, one less concerned with research and edu- cation, saw no need to question the Doubleday story.