Reese Kaplan -- Baseball Partying Like It's 1839

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.