At this past weekend’s baseball symposium one of the
featured activities was a recreation of an early 1800s baseball game (pre-Abner
Doubleday). (By the way, the whole “Doubleday
invented baseball” is also a myth perpetuated by A.J. Spalding to sell more of
his sporting goods products).
The game
itself was a hybrid of a children’s game called rounders and the sport of
cricket. There were many variations of
the game which originally was played on a rectangular field rather than a
diamond, there were 9 strikes allocated to the striker (batter) and you could
get runners out by hitting them with a thrown ball. In 1845 Alexander Cartwright created the set
of rules and standardized the playing field’s diamond shape to usher in the
origins of the game that is very similar to the one played today.
The pre-1845 version of the game played at Fort Bayard, New
Mexico indeed used the 9-strike rule.
They did not allow the thrown ball to render a baserunner out, but did
include the rule that a ball fielded on the first bounce was considered the
same as caught on the fly. Considering
that the game was played without gloves using a very hard ball, that was the preferred
method of fielding one’s position.
The ball itself was called a lemon peel ball. Rather than using the figure eight style of
stitching, it was started with a single piece of leather stitched together in
four quadrants resembling the way one might slice open a lemon or orange. The ball felt quite hard to the touch though
the leather over rubber was actually softer than the traditional horsehide
baseball used today. It was smaller and
lighter as well. One could only imagine
the number of finger sprains and bruises that resulted in playing the
field.
The teams playing this Saturday afternoon consisted of members
of the MABL/MSBL affiliated teams. Men’s
Adult Baseball League/Men’s Senior Baseball League is the largest and fastest
growing organization of baseball players over the age of 18 where people are
encouraged to continue to play hardball rather than migrating to either a fast
pitch or slow pitch softball league. Quite
often these teams are asked to play simulated 1800s-rules baseball, complete
with period costumes and vocabulary.
To give you a flavor of the time period, the umpire was
called “The Judge”, the batter a “Striker”, the pitcher a “Twister” and the fans
are called “Cranks”. Fines are levied
for foul language and must be paid before the game can resume (obviously
pre-dating Ty Cobb and others). The "Jolly Teuton" (large man on the far right) was a most welcome fellow, being the one to dispense beer when runners got to third base.
It was interesting to see this brand of baseball for the
first time. Pitching of the lemon peel ball was done underhand. It did take a few moments to
understand everything, such as a foul ball being caught on a bounce for an out
or a tipped ball being caught by the catcher for an out prior to the third
strike. A second period baseball game
was scheduled for Sunday early afternoon, but with a vacation coming up this
weekend I wanted to head back to get a head start on getting organized for the
trip.
4 comments:
Hey Reese what no concussion protocol back then? Kidding aside very interesting article.
Which ones in the picture are Hobie and Mack?
Did they have multi-year, multi-penny contracts back then?
Interesting article.
I hope people appreciate these kind of baseball posts by our resident baseball historian though I would like to see more comments here.
In that last photo I think that was Bill Metsiac as the batboy :)
Post a Comment