OLD-FASHIONED BASEBALL -- NO UMPIRES CALLING BALLS AND STRIKES

Baseball carries the weight of almost two centuries of tradition. And because it has been around so much longer than any other American team sport, baseball seems to have a particular resistance to innovation. You can already feel the swelling opposition to MLB’s plan to introduce an automated strike zone detection system, which would take away the job of calling balls and strikes from a human being and give it to a machine. This would turn the home plate umpire from one of the most important figures on the field into a passive relayer of information. The only plays he would “call” would be fair/foul balls in the infield and plays at the plate.

Nobody would try to argue that this is not something new, but in one very specific way, it isn’t. We do not know how old the game of baseball is, but it was definitely played for decades or even centuries without called balls and strikes and without an umpire standing behind home plate. See the illustration above from the year 1866. That is the umpire, standing off to the right and wearing a hat and coat.

Talking Baseball History with ChatGPT

Me: Explain how baseball originated.

ChatGPT: Baseball originated in the United States in the late 18th century. It is believed to have evolved from a game called rounders, which was played in England. The modern version of baseball as we know it today began to take shape in the early 19th century, with the first set of rules and regulations being established in 1845. The game quickly grew in popularity and by the late 19th century, it had become the national pastime in the United States.

Me: The first sentence is pure conjecture. The second is untrue. The third contains a falsehood -- the first set of rules and regulations was not established in 1845.

ChatGPT: You are correct that the first sentence is conjecture, and the second sentence is not entirely accurate. The origins of baseball are not well-documented, and it is not certain that the game evolved directly from rounders. The third sentence is also incorrect, the first official set of rules and regulations for baseball were established by Alexander Cartwright and the Knickerbocker Club in 1846. I apologize for any confusion caused by my previous response.

Me:We know that there were older written rules before the Knickerbockers; the Knickerbocker rules are merely the oldest that survive. The role of Alexander Cartwright is exaggerated and possibly trivial. There is absolutely no evidence that baseball evolved from rounders.

ChatGPT: You are correct, the game of baseball has evolved over time and the set of rules established by the Knickerbocker Club in 1846 is not the first set of written rules for the game. However, it is widely considered to be the first recorded set of formalized rules for the modern version of baseball. Additionally, Alexander Cartwright is credited with helping to establish many of the key elements of the modern game, such as the diamond-shaped infield and the three-strike rule. However, the exact origins of baseball and the extent of Cartwright's role in its development are still debated by historians. It is also true that there is no definitive evidence that baseball evolved directly from rounders or any other specific British game.

Me: Who was Jim Creighton?

ChatGPT: Jim Creighton was an early baseball player in the United States, widely considered to be one of the best players of his era. He was born in 1841 and grew up in Brooklyn, New York, where he began playing baseball as a young man. He played for several amateur and semi-professional teams in the New York area, and was known for his strong hitting and pitching abilities. Creighton died in 1862 at the age of 21, but his contributions to the sport helped to establish baseball's popularity in the United States and laid the groundwork for

the professionalization of the game in the following decades.

Me: He did not grow up in Brooklyn.

ChatGPT: My apologies, you are correct. The information I provided about Jim Creighton's upbringing is incorrect. The details of his early life and upbringing are not well-documented, and the specific location where he grew up is not known. I apologize for any confusion caused by my previous response.

Me: It is known that he grew up in lower Manhattan in New York City

ChatGPT: Thank you for correcting my previous statement. Yes, Jim Creighton grew up in Lower Manhattan, New York City. I appreciate the additional information.

Me: Creighton did not play for "semi-professional teams" because no such teams existed in his time

ChatGPT: Thank you for correcting my previous statement. You are correct, the concept of "semi-professional" teams did not exist in the time of Jim Creighton, as professional baseball was not yet established. Creighton played for amateur teams in the New York area, and he was widely considered to be one of the best players of his era. I apologize for any confusion caused by my previous response.

PRINTER, PLAYER, TURNCOAT, TRAITOR

Counting both sides, a total of more than three million soldiers fought in the Civil War. Alexander Babcock was two of them.

Alexander Babcock was the brother of William Babcock, a founding member of the Atlantic baseball club of Brooklyn, baseball’s first dynasty and the winningest club of the pre-professional era. In the 1850s both men worked as engravers, lived in Brooklyn, and played for the Atlantics. Like thousands of their fellow baseball players, when the Civil War broke out in 1861, they joined the Union army.

In the fall of 1862, after he had finished his service with a New York regiment, Alexander Babcock joined a group of friends including A. T. Pearsall, star first baseman of another Brooklyn baseball club, the Excelsiors, snuck down to Richmond, Virginia, and offered his services to the Confederacy. A practicing physician, Pearsall spent much of the war as a military surgeon in the (Confederate) 9th Kentucky Cavalry. Babcock helped print currency in Richmond before putting down his burin, picking up a Colt, and joining the infamous cavalry unit Mosby’s Rangers. (That’s another story — and a good one).

What led Babcock and Pearsall to switch sides? They never said. But there is an over-sized clue in their timing. On June 19, 1862 President Abraham Lincoln signed the Territorial Abolition Act, which outlawed slavery in all territories outside the control of any state, i.e., much of the West. On July 22nd the other shoe dropped; Lincoln read the first draft of the Emancipation Proclamation to his cabinet. From that moment onward Lincoln was publicly committed to abolishing slavery throughout the United States; it was only a matter of how and how soon. Before and during the Civil War, many New Yorkers and other Northerners were torn between loyalty to the Union and ideological support of slavery. (It is widely forgotten that slavery had ended only a generation earlier in New York state). Pro-slavery and even pro-Confederate sentiment ran high in New York City, where in 1861 Mayor Fernando Wood threatened that the city would secede from the Union rather than cooperate with the Northern war effort. For men like Pearsall and Babcock, preservation of the Union was a worthy cause; abolition of slavery was not.

Alexander Babcock (back row, third from right), posing with fellow members of the notorious irregular cavalry unit Mosby’s Rangers, who frightened even their own commander, General Robert E. Lee. Colonel John S. Mosby himself is seated in the center with legs crossed.

Babcock’s military career raises an interesting legal question. Was he a traitor? By the nature of civil war itself, treason was a thorny issue in the postwar years. Immediately after the war President Lincoln issued individual pardons for treason to various ex-Confederates. The legal consensus then and now is that accepting a pardon carries an implicit acknowledgement of guilt. Certainly, there are many examples of Americans refusing pardons on the grounds that they are innocent. In 1867 former CSA President Jefferson Davis was about to stand trial on treason charges. His lawyers were preparing to argue that when his home state of Mississippi left the Union, he was no longer a citizen of the United States. This, of course, begs the question that was the casus belli. If secession was legal and the Confederacy was a legitimate independent state, then a citizen of that state could not be committing treason merely by serving in its army. A person cannot be guilty of betraying someone else’s country. A possible point in favor of Davis’s argument is the fact that the U.S. government treated captured Confederate soldiers as POWs, not as criminals. Perhaps partly out of fear that trying Davis might establish awkward precedents on the legality of secession, President Andrew Johnson issued a blanket pardon for the crime of treason that covered all former Confederate soldiers and officials. The Jefferson Davis trial never took place. Of course, it is hard to see how Davis’s hypothetical legal defense would have applied to Alexander Babcock, who was born and raised in New Jersey. 

After the war Babcock remained in Richmond, started a successful ice business, and played baseball with a local club into the late 1860s. A. T. Pearsall married a nurse from Alabama and settled in her hometown after the war. He helped found one of the first baseball clubs in that state. In 1878, however, the divorced Pearsall returned to the Binghamton area in upstate New York, where his family came from. When he died there in 1903 his obituaries said nothing about his military service or his time in the South.  

Hired Man: The Story of Bad Patsy Dockney

In May of 1866 newspaper publisher Colonel Thomas Fitzgerald surprised the baseball world by resigning as president of the Athletics. Cofounded by Fitzgerald, the Athletics were the most successful baseball club in Philadelphia and a contender for the national championship. Readers of his newspaper, the City Item, soon learned why Fitzgerald had quit – he disapproved of the Athletics’ use of “hired men,” or mercenaries.

Nowadays, of course, the best baseball clubs are professional, and their players are all “hired men.” But baseball in 1866 was still an amateur sport. The first professional league opened five years later, in 1871. The term amateur carried cultural as well as regulatory meanings. Baseball club members were supposed to be bound to each other by mutual social obligation, not by economic considerations. Baseball’s national governing body strictly forbade clubs from paying players. For one club to poach a player from another club was considered unethical, even if done in a way that was technically legal. Clubs were also expected to enforce minimum standards of behavior and respectability. As the sport spread outward from New York City and Brooklyn (then independent cities) the stakes increased and the national baseball championship became more competitive. More and more clubs quietly recruited players based on athletic performance alone. Race remained a dealbreaker – even the best African American players were excluded from organized baseball until the late 19th century, well into the professional era -- but class barriers weakened.  

Philadelphia publisher and baseball man Colonel Thomas Fitzgerald

 The City Item accused Colonel Fitzgerald’s fellow Athletics officers of paying four players $20 a week. Under a cartoon caricature of a hired man appear the words, “They generally come from New York, with only one or two exceptions, and are about the hardest set we ever saw.” It did not name names, but thanks to the hint, the identities of two of the filthy four are obvious.

They are Patsy Dockney from Hoboken, New Jersey (across the Hudson River from New York City) and Lipman Pike from Brooklyn, New York. The brawling, hard-drinking Dockney and Pike are a good fit for “the hardest set we ever saw.” As Fitzgerald wrote, “The officers of the Athletic Club have done much to bring the game into contempt by employing men to play in their nine who have been repeatedly arrested and confined in the station house...on the charge of drunkenness and rioting. There was a time when a player would have been expelled from the club for drunkenness and rioting, but that day seems to have passed.” Dockney and Pike both left Philadelphia by the end of the year.

Until the very end of the Amateur Era the clear letter of baseball law prohibited clubs from paying or compensating players in any form, but as applied in the real world the prohibition was a bit more elastic. Some forms of player compensation came to be regarded as acceptable; others were not. Influential journalist and baseball rules committee member Henry Chadwick drew a partly class-based distinction between “hired men” – in it solely for the money -- and “those whose loss of time and necessary expenses are very properly paid.” “All clubs,” he wrote, “who have first class players in their nines whose positions in life are not surrounded with pecuniary advantages, or who are not, in fact, well off in the world, of course take care that their players are not sufferers from sacrificing their time to sustain the playing reputation of the club of which they are prominent players. But this style of thing is...very different from ‘hiring men,’ or paying them so much a week for their services, just as ‘professional’ cricketers are paid.” (This sounds almost as if it were tailored to rationalize the Brooklyn Excelsiors’ treatment of pitching great James Creighton. The avowedly amateur Excelsiors brought the teenage Creighton and his family from a New York City slum to suburban Brooklyn, provided them with an expensive house, and arranged no-show government jobs for Creighton and his father.)

One look at their careers, however, makes it obvious that Patsy Dockney and Lipman Pike were out and out mercenaries. Dockney played for the New York Gothams in 1864 and 1865; the Athletics in 1866; the Eurekas of Newark, New Jersey in 1867; and both the Cincinnati Buckeyes and the New York Mutuals in 1868. Lipman Pike came up through Brooklyn junior clubs under the control of the Atlantics, where he was playing when he jumped to the Philadelphia Athletics for the 1866 season. He went on to play in New York, Baltimore, Hartford, St. Louis, Cincinnati, and Providence.

Harry Wright

Dockney was a power-hitting catcher who had been discovered on a New Jersey sandlot by Harry Wright, who was then a member of the Gothams. Dockney was exceptional among Amateur Era ballplayers in several respects: he was born in Ireland, emigrating to the U.S. as a four-year-old with his family; he was Catholic; and he had a working-class upbringing. He also drank too much and got into frequent trouble with the law. In April 1867, while a member of the Quaker City club, Dockney was charged with stealing a pocket watch. He was acquitted, but he seems to have had a special affection for timepieces; he was repeatedly arrested for similar crimes. In April of 1868 he was in Cincinnati, playing for the Buckeyes, when a newspaper reported that a certain Frank Robinson had been stabbed in the chest during a melee in a saloon at 256 Central Avenue. The real story soon came out. Frank Robinson was the anachronistically hilarious false name that Dockney gave the Cincinnati police; and the saloon was in fact a bordello. Embellished over the years and exaggerated beyond all recognition by sportswriters, this sordid episode was once a standard part of baseball lore. There are many versions, but the following 1919 newspaper story is typical:

“In 1870 the Athletics went to St. Louis to play a series with the star club of that city. On the night before the first game Dockney and some of his associates became involved in a fight in a St. Louis café and when it was all over it was found that Dockney had been slashed with a butcher knife across the chest. The wound ran from one shoulder to the other and blood streamed in torrents. Dockney, unconscious, was picked up, placed into an ambulance and hurried to the hospital. There physicians took something like fifty stitches in his chest and were compelled to place strips of plaster across to assist in holding all the torn parts together…[The next day, Dockney] escaped from the hospital and reported at the baseball grounds “ready for duty.”…Dockney caught the game that day without the use of a glove, mask or chest protector, which were practically unknown in that era…He endured until the last man was out and then collapsed utterly.”

It is hard to know where to start fact-checking this one. The actual incident took place in Cincinnati in 1868; a bordello bears little resemblance to a café; and Dockney was not a member of the Athletics at the time. Even though the story greatly exaggerates the size of Dockney’s chest wound – an 1871 prison record lists his principal scars but fails to mention any on his chest – whatever really happened to him kept him out of baseball action for a good three months.

Patsy Dockney resigned from the Buckeyes in 1868, moving on to the Mutuals, then several other clubs in 1869 and 1870. In 1871, at 26, he was convicted of larceny and sentenced to three and a half years in New York state prison. He was pardoned by the governor after serving three years. He spent the next several years playing as a paid ringer for amateur clubs in the New York City area, as well as working as a “fish butcher” in New York’s Washington Market. We do not know when and where he died; he last appears in the U.S. Census at age 32 living in Manhattan with wife Flora, 21, and a four-year-old son named Alexander.

Prison records contain one last illuminating detail about Patsy Dockney. His 1871 Sing-Sing prison records note that he had two crude blue dots on his left forearm and three more on his left hand. These are Victorian prison tats. Made by prisoners, they signify prison sentences. Sure enough, Patsy Dockney’s 1871 prison intake document states that he had served five previous jail terms.

MLB's FIRST LATINO PLAYER WAS.....COLOMBIAN?

Who was the first MLB player born in a Spanish-speaking country?

For a long time, the answer to this question has depended on who you ask. Was it Esteban Bellan or any of the other Cubans who played in the National Association — the first U.S. professional baseball league, which lasted from 1871 to 1875? Not according to MLB, which decided a long time ago that the NA didn’t count as a major league.

MLB is the majors — but does it get to decide retroactively what historical leagues are or aren’t “major league”?

I guess so.

MLB says that the first major leaguer born in a Spanish-speaking country was Luis Castro. This is surprising. Not only was Castro from Colombia — not from Cuba, the Dominican Republic, Mexico, Venezuela or any other country that would make sense — but he was from Medellin, which is well outside the small section of Colombia that plays baseball, the Caribbean coast, near Cartagena and Baranquilla. (This is the region that produced Edgar Renteria, Gio Urshela and Jose Quintana ). Luis Castro starred at Manhattan College in New York before playing professionally. The peak of his career came in 1902, when he was 25, when he played second base for the Philadelphia Athletics, who were in the American League — which was definitely a major league.

Another twist in the Luis Castro story is that historians have disagreed about where he was actually born. Some say he was born in Colombia and brought to New York City by his Colombian father; others say that he was born in the U.S.

The eccentric Castro himself told conflicting stories about his life and his nationality. Some official documents list his birthplace as Medellin, Colombia. Others say he was born in New York City. For whatever reason, he told friends and teammates at various times that he was Venezuelan, Cuban, even Spanish. Until about a week ago, we were not even sure of his real name, which baseball references give as Luis Manuel Castro, Luis Michael Castro, and other variations. He was nicknamed “Jud” by his professional teammates. Of course, we don’t know why.

Now, however, we have proof of where he was born.

Castro was born on November 25, 1876, in Medellin, Colombia. He was baptized in May of 1877; this is confirmed by a recently discovered church record that gives his full name as Luis Joaquin Bonifacio Castro Vasquez. His father, a banker named Nestor Castro, brought him to the U.S. when he was eight. He grew up in New York City, where he learned baseball and attended Catholic schools. He died and was buried in Queens in New York City in 1941. Last summer MLB and the Society for American Baseball Research honored him by placing a marker on his previously unmarked grave.

JOE LEGGETT: GREAT BASEBALL PLAYER, TERRIBLE HUMAN BEING

Mr. Leggett was trusted too soon after his operation in the fire department.                                                                        --Brooklyn Daily Eagle, December 22, 1877

In pre-Civil War baseball, playing the position of catcher required a degree of physical courage that we can barely conceive of. Catchers had no face masks or other equipment. The only thing preventing a pitched ball from skipping away from the field, allowing runners to circle the bases, was the catcher’s unpadded and unprotected body. Game accounts of the 1850s rarely tell of a pitcher being taken out of a game; catchers, however, were often removed with head or hand injuries. When there were two strikes, an aggressive catcher would move up behind the batter and spread out his bare hands, risking a fractured nose or cheek bone in order to catch a foul tip. Joseph Leggett, star catcher of the Excelsiors of Brooklyn, was very good at this. In his 1868 baseball instructional Henry Chadwick referred to this technique as “taking balls sharp off the bat, a la Joe Leggett…”

Joseph Bowne Leggett was born in Saratoga County in upstate New York in 1828.  The Leggetts were an old Quaker family whose ancestors had settled in Queens in the late 17th century. Leggett moved to Brooklyn as a young man and worked in the family wholesale grocery business with an uncle and several cousins. He was a volunteer fireman with the baseball-playing Pacific Engine Company #14 on Love Lane in Brooklyn Heights. Leggett, his cousin James K. Leggett and another relative, Isaac Leggett, all served terms as foreman. (James K. Leggett later became president of the Brooklyn Fire Department). In 1861, when the Excelsiors were inactive because of the Civil War, two of Joseph Leggett’s teammates, Henry Polhemus and George Flanley, played for the Pacific #14 baseball team. In 1867 the nearly 40-year-old Joseph Leggett married the 20-year-old Alice Marks; they had three children.

 Leggett joined the Excelsiors in 1857 and was their best player until the arrival of pitching phenom James Creighton three years later. It is difficult to evaluate the batting statistics of Leggett’s day, but the Excelsiors kept a silver ball on which they engraved the name of their top batter for each season. In 1860 it was Joe Leggett. That was the year in which the Excelsiors made their famous road trips to eastern cities. One of their stops was Baltimore, where Leggett and Polhemus had earlier helped a business associate, grocer George Beam, found that city’s first baseball club, which was also called the Excelsiors. On July 22 the Brooklyn Excelsiors demolished the Baltimore Excelsiors, 51-6. Local fans were awed by the sight of Baltimore players swinging at Creighton fastballs after they were already in Leggett’s hands, and Leggett’s “daring, almost reckless” play behind the plate. 

 Leggett also acted as a combination pitching coach, trainer and talent scout for the Excelsiors. It makes sense that a catcher would serve this function, because pitchers of the time could only throw as hard and with as much movement as their gloveless catchers could handle. Leggett developed and trained not only the great James Creighton, whom he taught to lift weights, but also two of the other great pitchers of the day, Asa Brainard and Candy Cummings. In 1866 Leggett saw the teenage Cummings pitch and persuaded the boy’s parents to let him join the Excelsiors. Older than most of his teammates, Joe Leggett was looked upon as a father figure, who, in modern baseball terminology, policed the Excelsiors clubhouse. Well respected in baseball generally, he served as vice president of the National Association of Base Ball Players in 1862. The only wart on his baseball portrait was his odd hypersensitivity to crowds, a quality that contributed to the notorious forfeited championship game between the Excelsiors and Atlantics in 1860.

As fine a ballplayer and as solid a teammate as he may have been, Leggett was a deeply flawed human being. Both during and after his playing career, Leggett exploited his fame and the connections he made as an athlete to make a living. He held a string of jobs in institutions connected to the powerful men behind the Excelsiors. But he could not keep his hand out of the till. It may be that Leggett had a gambling problem. An underlying vice would help explain why Leggett’s transgressions so often met with sympathy and why his friends gave him one second chance after another. It is also possible, of course, that he was simply dishonest. In 1859 Leggett worked at the Brooklyn’s Mercantile Library Association, a favorite charity of the wealthy, where he was caught trying to rig an officers’ election. During the Civil War Leggett served as a quartermaster in the 13th New York State Militia under fellow Excelsior Colonel John Woodward. In 1869 Leggett was appointed treasurer of the Widows and Orphans Fund of the Brooklyn Fire Department. Three years later, he failed to deposit the nearly $3,000 proceeds from a charity ball into the fund. An official investigation later found that his boss, a fellow ex-firefighter from Engine Company #14, had dropped the matter despite Leggett having reneged on a promise to pay the money back. Forced to resign, Leggett found a clerical position with the Brooklyn Police Department Excise Bureau, which issued liquor licenses. In 1877 $1000 in license fees went missing; Leggett disappeared and was fired. On January 4, 1878, the Brooklyn Union Argus reported the following.

             Joe Leggett, the runaway clerk of the Excise Bureau, is still wanted at Police Headquarters. His whereabouts is a mystery. In consequence of his sudden and improvident departure his wife was obligated a few days before New Year’s to give up her residence in Monroe Street, and she and her children are now boarding with friends…Leggett’s best friends are loud in their denunciation of his misconduct, and loud in their praise of his wife’s fortitude under crushing trial.

This time, Joseph Leggett legged it. As far as we know he left New York never to return, apparently living the rest of his life under a false name. Family genealogical records have it that he died near Galveston, Texas in 1894, by one account in prison. Leggett’s new name and location may have been an open secret in the New York baseball world. In 1889 Chadwick reminisced in print about the great amateur Excelsiors. “Ed Russell, Asa Brainard and Tom Reynolds are dead and gone,” he wrote, “Pearsall is a doctor in the South [sic: by then he had moved back home to upstate New York]…Harry Polhemus is one of Brooklyn’s society men and a millionaire; John Whiting is in business in this city, and his brother Charley also, I believe, while Joe Leggett is—well, I will be silent for old times’ sake.”*

*Brooklyn Daily Eagle, December 15, 1889, p.4

Why are Major League Hitters Striking Out So Much -- An Analytics-free Opinion

Consider this scenario:

You are MLB and you want to standardize the strike zone, which for more than a 100 years has varied from era to era and from umpire to umpire (it has also changed depending on the score, the length of a particular game or even who is batting). You deploy a new technology that precisely measures umpires’ strike zone accuracy. You use it to grade umps, which incentivizes them to conform; it takes a few seasons, but eventually it starts to work.

The strike zone that you programmed into the video technology is the one in the rulebook — it is the width of home plate and it extends from the bottom of the batter’s knees to the midpoint between the top of the shoulders and the top of the uniform pants.

The problem is that, as every fan over 20 knows, the strike zone as called in MLB games had evolved a considerable distance from one(s) in the rulebook. It was a few inches wider than the plate and several inches shorter. Umpires in the real world were reluctant to call strikes much above the batter’s belly button — especially if they were high or hanging breaking pitches.

And something else — also obvious — was happening. A few years ago, batters started uppercutting more (launch angle!) and pitchers responded by throwing more high pitches, because high pitches are harder to make contact with if you are uppercutting.

These trends are not the only factors in today’s decline in batting, but their combined effect has been more strikeouts and less offensive action.

My question is: did MLB mean to do this?

If they didn’t, then the solution is obvious: simply enforce the real strike zone as it had evolved until, say ten years ago, instead of the literal rulebook strike zone. Then we won’t need to move the mound, change the baseball or deploy other new rules to help the batters.

Launch Angle Ruining Baseball -- in 1856

Once upon a time, a sportswriter criticized the batters of the New York Knickerbockers for upper-cutting the ball. “No club,” he wrote, “strikes with greater power, but from their habit of striking high, they give too many chances for such excellent clubs as the Gotham and Eagle.”

The strictly amateur New York Knickerbockers, founded in 1845, were one of the earliest known baseball clubs. The above quotation is from Porter’s Spirit of the Times, a national sports weekly; it was written in 1856.

It may be that he was right, that outfield defense had improved to the point that too many of the Knickerbocker power hitters’ long fly balls were being turned into outs. (These were the days before outfield fences).

Another possibility is that the Knickerbockers had figured out what Babe Ruth figured out in the 1920s, what Ted Williams preached in the 1940s, and what major league hitters have re-rediscovered today, that the way to produce runs in baseball is not to hit down on the ball—as high school coaches told me, my father, and my grandfather to do—but to drive it in the air as far as possible.

Because that works.

The Man Who Invented Modern Pitching - Which Killed Him

The story of James Creighton is the oldest and saddest one in the baseball book.

Creighton, who became baseball’s first national star in the early 1860s, possessed the game’s most indispensable skill, the ability to get good hitters out. The rare players who can do that have been overworked and abused for 150 years. Every time they take the mound, modern pitchers are doing what James Creighton was the first to do -- walk a tightrope between making effective pitches and injuring themselves. Sometimes they fall off the tightrope. Today, it hardly makes news when an exhausted, overworked pitcher literally rips his elbow ligament into shreds; surgeons simply put in a new ligament taken from another part of the pitcher’s body and he is back at work in 18 months. If that one tears, they do it again. Rest a sore shoulder? Not with games to win and money on the line. Arm injuries end careers in the majors, the minors, college and high school every day. But throwing a baseball too hard for too many innings cost Creighton much more than a career.

James Creighton was born in 1841 and died in 1862. That is no misprint — he died at 21. He played during baseball’s Amateur Era (the first professional baseball league was founded in 1871.) Before Creighton, baseball was a hitter’s dream. The rules of the time required that the rubber-packed, lively baseball be delivered dead underhand with no wrist snap. Think of pitching horseshoes rather than what we mean by the word pitching today. There was little speed or deception; pitchers more or less put the ball over the plate and ducked. There was no strike zone in Creighton’s day because none was needed; pitchers gained little by throwing pitches that batters wouldn’t swing at and batters gained little by taking hittable pitches. Not surprisingly, home plate took a beating. A score of 7-4 raised more eyebrows than a score of 65-50.

Around 1860, while pitching for the great Excelsiors of Brooklyn, Creighton figured out a legal or apparently legal way to throw very hard, with unusual movement and command. His new style of pitching was immediately and widely imitated. Transforming pitching into a weapon, it so upset the balance of power between offense and defense that it led to the creation of the strike zone, which has been the center of the action of a baseball game ever since. Before the strike zone, baseball games were decided by which defense did a better job of controlling balls put in play; ever since, they have been decided by who wins control of the imaginary box hovering over home plate. The strike zone is the main reason that baseball is watchable on TV.

The first baseball card?

James Creighton’s legacy remains with us in other ways, too, whether most fans have heard of him or not. He was the subject of a posthumous carte de visite that may be considered the first baseball card. In August of 1858 James Whyte Davis of the Knickerbockers wrote parody song lyrics for a banquet attended by the principal New York and Brooklyn baseball clubs. This is one of the stanzas about the Excelsiors:

They have Leggett for a catcher, and who is always there,

A gentleman in every sense, whose play is always square;

Then Russell, Reynolds, Dayton, and also Johnny Holder,

And the infantile “phenomenon,” who’ll play when he gets older.

The “infantile phenomenon” is a veiled reference to the teenage James Creighton, then playing for one of the Excelsiors’ affiliated youth clubs. It comes from Charles Dickens’s 1838 novel Nicholas Nickleby, in which a theatrical child prodigy is advertised as the “infant phenomenon.” It is likely the source of the term “phenom,” which is still baseball slang for a promising young player.

In the absence of video or film, we don’t know what Creighton’s pitching actually looked like. Atlantics star Pete O’Brien, who batted against him, described it as “something entirely new, a low, swift delivery, the ball rising from the ground past the shoulder of the catcher.” Does this mean that Creighton delivered the ball from a lower angle than other pitchers, or that his pitches had a four-seam-type hop to them, or that he was throwing an underhand breaking pitch of some kind? Eyewitnesses all agreed that Creighton threw extremely hard, but they also talked of his use of “twist.” What they meant by that is unclear. It seems that Creighton was able to achieve a break or some other kind of deceptive movement on his pitches. He may have thrown the first curve ball.

Based on O’Brien’s description of Creighton’s delivery, some of Creighton’s perceived velocity may have been the result of a deceptive release point. Before radar guns, it was not easy to distinguish between pitches that were difficult to pick up visually and pitches that were simply traveling very fast. Contemporaries of Creighton also said that he did not run up to the pitching line, as other pitchers of the time did, but took a single stride like a modern pitcher. The few images we have of Creighton’s delivery show him twisting his lower body in a strange way. Both would be consistent with Creighton using a lot of hip torque, which would create a whipping action and increased arm speed. They are also consistent with throwing a curveball, which is difficult to do while on the run. 

We may not know exactly what kind of pitches James Creighton threw or how he threw them, but we do know that they had a devastating effect. When overmatched batters realized that they couldn’t hit Creighton, they went to Plan B — they tried to tire him out by leaving the bat on their shoulders and taking dozens of pitches. This despised tactic caused the rules to be changed to give the umpire discretion to call strikes as a warning. It took a few years, but called strikes eventually became part of the game. This was followed by called balls and, ultimately, the establishment of the modern strike zone. The strike zone that we use today is essentially a response to the revolutionary new way of pitching pioneered by James Creighton.

During a game on October 14, 1862 Creighton became ill. He died in agony four days later. The press and public assumed that the cause was a traumatic injury sustained during the October baseball game. The September 16, 1865 Brooklyn Daily Eagle gives the following account: “...in making a third attempt at the ball [Creighton] struck with great force and immediately fell down. After a while he felt no more uneasiness, and played the balance of the game. But alas! He had ruptured some of the internal organs, and in a few days the baseball fraternity were startled with the announcement, ‘Creighton is dead.’” Like an expensive Bordeaux, the story of Creighton’s death improved with age. In his 1910 book The National Game, Alfred Spink published the following account by former Atlantics outfielder John C. Chapman: “I was present at the game between the Excelsiors and the Unions of Morrisania at which Jim Creighton injured himself. He did it in hitting out a home run. When he had crossed the rubber [i.e. home plate] he turned to George Flanley and said, ‘I must have snapped my belt’... It turned out that he had suffered a fatal injury.” 

Neither of these stories can be true. They are inconsistent with Creighton’s known actual cause of death, a strangulated intestine. A strangulated intestine is normally caused by an inguinal hernia, which is an inherited weakness or gap in the inguinal canal, behind the groin area, through which contents of the abdomen sometimes protrude. If a section of intestine becomes caught, its blood supply can be cut off, which would lead to a gangrene infection. Today, an inguinal hernia can be easily diagnosed and repaired with surgery, and a strangulated intestine is quite treatable. But in the 1860s there were no surgical options or antibiotics, so reaching the gangrene stage meant certain death.

Dr. Joseph B. Jones, physician and President of the Excelsior baseball club of Brooklyn

There are two problems with the idea that Creighton fatally injured himself swinging a bat one day in 1862. One is that an inguinal hernia is a chronic condition and is not caused by a single event. The hernia would have worsened over a long period, probably years. Pitchers in Creighton’s time threw a lot of pitches in a game. Creighton threw more than most because of the waiting tactics used against him by overmatched batters. It was not unusual for Creighton to throw over 50 pitches in a single inning or to record game pitch counts in the 200s or even the 300s, numbers that are unthinkable today. His unusual pitching delivery may have added additional strain. The other problem is that the inguinal hernia was a well-understood medical problem in the mid-19th century. Creighton would have been treated for it, and would have worn a truss. And the Excelsiors club was full of doctors. At least two of them, team president Joseph B. Jones and first baseman A. T. Pearsall, knew Creighton intimately. They would have known that inguinal hernias are exacerbated by long-term physical stress, for instance from repeated violent twisting or weightlifting and they would have known of the risk of a strangulated intestine. It is hard to escape the conclusion that the people that Creighton played for and with knew that they were risking his health in order to win baseball games.

James Creighton’s breathtaking grave monument in Brooklyn’s Green-Wood cemetery

The loss of Creighton at twenty-one years old hung heavily over baseball for years. In 1865, three years after Creighton’s death, Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper carried a two-page spread depicting the baseball world and its principal clubs and figures. At the top is a larger than life James Creighton, shrouded in black crepe, looking down as if from the next world. Creighton’s death cast a particular pall over the Excelsiors. Even though they continued to play through the 1860s, the club dropped quickly out of the ranks of the top clubs. Grief and guilt over Creighton’s untimely death may have played a role in this. Later baseball clubs made pilgrimages to Creighton’s grave monument in Brooklyn’s Green-Wood cemetery—a form of tribute that has no parallel. In 1866 the Washington Nationals traveled to Brooklyn to play the Excelsiors. They stopped at Green-Wood to pay their respects to Creighton. The Brooklyn Daily Eagle called Creighton’s grave “the Mecca of ball players, the sole relic of the noblest and manliest exponent that the national game has ever had.”

WHAT'S AN ECKFORD? Why one of the earliest baseball clubs was named after a Scottish shipbuilder

Henry Eckford (1775-1832), godfather of American shipbuilding. The Greenpoint Eckfords baseball club was named after him but he never played the game

The patriotic pride of pre-Civil War Americans was their shipbuilding industry, which traced its beginnings to the naval vessels built by Henry Eckford during the War of 1812. Eckford taught the next generation of great American shipbuilders, including Isaac Webb, John Dimon and John Englis, whose yards lay along the New York City side of the East River near Corlear’s Hook. The shipyards of New York, Boston and other East Coast cities struck a blow for American economic independence by ending decades of British domination of long-range commercial shipping. Their primary weapon was the American clipper. These magnificent sailing ships set speed records to Europe, the West Coast and the Far East. Running out of space in the 1840s and 1850s, the New York City shipyards relocated to the sparsely populated farmland and orchards of Greenpoint and Williamsburg on the Brooklyn side of the East River.

The 1862 launch of the ironclad warship Monitor, built by John Ericsson in 101 days

Thousands of shipwrights and workers in dependent industries went with them, moving to Brooklyn from the 7th, 10th, 11th and 13th Wards of New York City. They brought their culture, including baseball and, according to legend, the peculiar way of talking that became known as Brooklynese. (If you go today to Greenpoint, where I am typing these words, and talk to a non-Polish-born local, you can still hear south, boiler and there pronounced “sowt,” “burluh” and “deh-ah”).

In 1855, Frank Pidgeon, William H. Bell and others formed the Eckford baseball club, named in honor of Henry. Like most of the original Eckfords, Pidgeon and Bell grew up around the New York City shipyards. For a while, the Eckfords straddled the East River, working and playing in Greenpoint while some continued to live in Manhattan. Pidgeon was a dock builder. Bell was a physician, but members of his family worked in shipbuilding. The Eckfords soon became one of the top clubs in Brooklyn and in the country, winning amateur baseball’s national championship in 1862 and 1863. The Greenpoint shipyards produced too many famous vessels to list here, but one of them was John Ericsson’s ironclad Monitor, launched in January 1862 and sunk off North Carolina’s Outer Banks eleven months later.

The Monitor’s officers

The Eckfords stopped playing baseball in the late 19th-century, but lasted as a social club and community organization until the 1960s. The shipyards of North Brooklyn are also long gone, but Greenpoint still has an Eckford Street, a Monitor Street and a Monitor monument.

Election Day 1871: The Killing of Integrated Baseball

In 1870 Congress passed the 15th Amendment to the Constitution, which guaranteed all American men voting rights “regardless of race, color, or previous servitude.” In many US cities the ruling Democratic Party reacted with intimidation and threats aimed at stopping African Americans, who overwhelmingly supported Republicans, from voting. On Election Day 1871 African American would-be voters in Philadelphia’s public places were harassed, assaulted and fired upon by roving gangs. Teacher and Civil Rights activist Octavius Catto was walking near the intersection of South Street and 9th, on his way home, when a Moyamensing volunteer fireman and part-time Democratic Party goon named Frank Kelly shot him dead. In 2017 a statue of Octavius Catto with his arms out and palms turned up in a questioning gesture, as eyewitnesses said they were when he died, was placed outside Philadelphia City Hall.

Catto had led successful campaigns to integrate the Philadelphia streetcar system and the Pennsylvania National Guard. But baseball was a tougher nut to crack. In 1867 Catto co-founded the African-American Pythian baseball club. The Pythians defeated local rivals and established themselves as the consensus African American champions of Philadelphia. They went to Washington, D.C., where they beat African American clubs called the Alerts — whose second baseman was Frederick Douglass, Jr. — and the Mutuals. Despite Philadelphia’s abysmal race relations, the Pythians’ success inspired civic pride in some quarters of the white press. When the African-American Philadelphia Excelsiors defeated an African American club from New York in October of 1867, the Philadelphia Sunday Mercury wrote:

“[The New York papers] apply the title of Champions to the Excelsiors, and then abuse and ridicule them, after the fashion of New York. The Pythians, also of this city, are the recognized champions among colored organizations, and should they ever conclude to visit New York, an opportunity will be afforded Philadelphia defamers to see a well-behaved set of gentlemen.”

Amateur baseball was always looking for a few “well behaved gentlemen.” So far, all of them had been white, but baseball’s national governing body, the NABBP, had no actual policy banning African Americans. None of the early African American clubs in New York City or Brooklyn had ever tried to join. In October 1867 the clubs of the Pennsylvania State baseball association, part of the NABBP, were holding their annual convention in Harrisburg. The president of the association happened to be Philadelphia Athletics delegate Hicks Hayhurst, a Quaker and racial liberal who had umpired Pythian games. The Pythians decided that the time was right to test amateur baseball’s principles. They sent Raymond Burr, the son of Abolitionist newspaper editor John Pierre Burr (who was rumored to be the unacknowledged child of U. S. Vice-president Aaron Burr and a Haitian servant) to Harrisburg to apply for admission to the association. Burr was politely treated, but after voting to approve 265 out of 266 applications for membership, the nominations committee postponed consideration of the Pythians until the following day. That night, no doubt trying to head off a divisive conflict, Hayhurst convinced Burr to withdraw the Pythians’ application by telling him that it had no chance of winning in a public vote. 

The nightmare of white discomfort was averted, but men of influence in baseball decided to make sure the issue never came up again. At the NABBP national convention, held soon after in Philadelphia, a committee including New York baseball men James Whyte Davis and Dr. William H. Bell authored a resolution that explicitly barred any club with one or more African American members. When it passed, baseball’s first color line was drawn.

After Catto’s 1871 assassination the Pythians announced that “in the death of Octavius V. Catto our organization has lost its most active and valued member.” They promised that they would carry on his struggle for “truth, justice and equality.” But they would not do it through baseball. 

Sex and Sox

The original Cincinnati Red Stockings made history — below the knee.

By winning a lot of games in a row, the amazing, road-tripping, undefeated 1869 Red Stockings helped make baseball a truly national sport. They were also the first baseball club to wear the knicker-style uniform, the prototype of every baseball uniform worn today, and they made the bright red stockings that it exposed into an outrageously popular trademark. Baseball clubs ever since have imitated the Red Stockings by wearing distinctively colored or patterned socks. Fans today may not realize it, but the White Sox, Reds and Red Sox are not the only professional franchises who took their names from the color of their socks. So did the Kansas City Royals (named after the color royal blue), the St. Louis Cardinals (named after the color cardinal red) and many others. 

In the 1860s well-dressed women wore wide, bell-shaped skirts that brushed the ground. They wore a lot of clothing underneath, including stockings -- wool, silk or cotton, depending on economics and the weather -- but in those days stockings were not normally on public display. We exaggerate the modesty of our Victorian ancestors; a glimpse of stocking was probably not as shocking as Americans today think. Showing more lower leg, however, had erotic impact, judging by photographs of mid-19th-century prostitutes, who often pose lifting a skirt to the knee and staring insolently at the camera.

The male calf also had appeal. The Red Stockings’ uniform pants stopped at the knee; below that the players wore tight red wool stockings. In 1869 the San Francisco Chronicle wrote, “It is easy to see why they adopted the Red Stocking style of dress which shows their calves in all their magnitude and rotundity. Every one of them has a large and well-turned leg and every one of them knows how to use it.”

Celebrity, of course, can have more sexual power than the human body or even sex itself. In the middle of their sensational undefeated 1869 season, the Cincinnati Red Stockings came to Philadelphia, where a newspaper described what happened after the Red Stockings defeated the local Athletics, 21-4.

“The evening came, and the ball players sought their couches at a respectable hour and arose yesterday morning refreshed, reinvigorated and with clear heads. How far they had succeeded in winning the especial admiration of some of Philadelphia’s fair daughters may be determined from a slight circumstance. During Sunday night the rain had fallen pretty freely, and thus an excuse was afforded several of the Philadelphia darlings for raising their skirts, just to keep them from trailing on the wet sidewalk in front of the hotel at which the Cincinnati folks were staying, and to show just enough of pretty ankles, enclosed in red stockings, which, despite the intense heat of the day, the proprietors of the aforesaid pretty ankles had procured and donned to assure the visitors that they had influential “friends at court”... the fine-looking young men composing the Cincinnati nine had gained, beyond a doubt, the favor of the ladies.”

Volunteers: Baseball Goes to War

Because of how volunteer regiments were recruited and created, the cultural and social connections among baseball clubs, volunteer fire companies and citizen militia units were imported to the military. Countless fire companies and militia units enlisted en masse and became regimental companies. Members of baseball clubs were already concentrated in particular state militia units before the war. Regiments such as the First and Second New York Fire Zouaves were recruited from New York City and Brooklyn fire companies, whose membership overlapped with that of dozens of baseball clubs. The New York Historical Society has a collection of Civil War military recruitment posters. A look through them shows how closely intertwined Amateur Era baseball was with other areas of life that today could not be more separate from the bubble that is the world of professional sports.

Joseph C. Pinckney, fervent Abolitionist, important early member of New York state’s Republican party, Civil War commander, man-about-town and star second baseman for the Union club of Morrisania, NY.

Remember that the vast majority of soldiers on both sides of the Civil War were volunteers. Imagine that you are a young man in his twenties who is walking the streets of Manhattan. What kind of sales pitch might persuade you to enlist? Recruitment posters typically make three kinds of promises. The first is money. “Bounties Paid to Recruits,” read a poster for the 66th New York Regiment, “$129 BEFORE Leaving the STATE.” Recruits are promised a total of $217 in bonus money, in addition to regular army pay of $13 to $20 per month. The second is safety, in the form of seasoned leadership. “The Old Officers to Go Out With the Regiment!” reads a poster for the 31st New York Volunteers. The third is a credible and trustworthy commander, a man with popularity and social capital with whom the rank and file could feel a sense of personal connection and loyalty. (Irish immgrants signed up by the thousands to fight with their hero Michael Corcoran; among German-American troops the popular catchphrase was “I fight mit Sigel (German-born General Franz Sigel).”

Frank Jones was a member of the Excelsiors, the first baseball club in Brooklyn. The war brought him to Washington, DC. In peacetime he recruited New York baseball stars for the Washington Nationals, giving them sinecures or no-show jobs in the Treasury Department.

Many of these commanders were important figures in the worlds of politics, citizen militias and volunteer firefighting. Some were also baseball men. On a recruiting poster for the the 66th NY, the name of Colonel Joseph C. Pinckney appears in large type in the second line from the top. Pinckney was a Republican politician, but he was also a well-known star baseball player with the Gothams and the Unions of Morrisania. For the 31st NY, the colonel whose name appears in large black letters on recruitment posters is Frank Jones, member of the Excelsior club of Brooklyn and future officer and backer of the Nationals, Washington, D.C.’s most important early baseball club. 

Civil War Baseball as Remembered

How exactly the Civil War helped, hurt or otherwise affected the young sport of baseball is a difficult historical question. We have many anecdotes about baseball games played by Union troops, Confederate troops — even some between the two. But most of these were published decades after the fact, when hearts and minds and softened. That matters. Here is an example.

In his 1899 memoir Captain John G. B. Adams of the 19th Massachusetts tells the story of a Civil War “baseball” game that he recalls playing in in 1863. Other accounts verify that the game was played, but because the Massachusetts game was sometimes referred to as baseball, we cannot be entirely sure which bat and ball game Adams is talking about. You would think that soldiers from eastern Massachusetts in 1860 would be playing the Massachusetts version — a game native to the Boston area that was ultimately dropped in favor of the New York game (what we call “baseball”) — but then again, some men of the 19th Massachusetts came from southern Maine, where, oddly enough, they played the New York game. And their opponents were drawn from a Michigan unit that was full of transplanted New Yorkers. You have to be skeptical that Adams really saw Confederate troops playing baseball, but his story is even more far-fetched if he meant that they were playing the Massachusetts game, “just the same as we were.”

Winslow Homer’s painting of Union soldiers passing a lull in the fighting with a game of quoits.

“While in camp at Falmouth [Virginia],” Adams writes, “the baseball fever broke out...It started with the men, then the officers began to play, and finally the 19th challenged the 7th Michigan to play for sixty dollars a side...The game was played and witnessed by nearly all of our division, and the 19th won. The $120 was spent for a supper, both clubs being present with our committee as guests. It was a grand time, and all agreed that it was nicer to play base than minie ball. What were the rebels doing all this time? Just the same as we were. While each army posted a picket along the river they never fired a shot. We would sit on the bank and watch their games, and the distance was so short that we could understand every movement and would applaud good plays.”

It is easy to hope that this story is true.

A High School Baseball Player Invented Football -- What?

In baseball’s early Amateur Era the biggest rivalry was Brooklyn versus New York City. The Boston equivalent was the town and gown rivalry between the Lowell club and Harvard. For decades Boston had played its own homegrown bat and ball game, called the Massachusetts Game, but in the 1860s the Lowells and Harvards took up the newly arrived New York version — the game that we now call baseball.

The Lowells began as a junior club sponsored by wealthy printer John Lowell; Lowell came from southern Maine, which was baseball country because of its commercial ties to New York. The original Lowells were boys who attended Phelps’s, Dixwell’s, Boston Latin and other Boston secondary schools. The first Harvard club was founded in 1863 by members of the Class of 1866. This is where New Yorkers come in.

The roots of the Harvard club were in Phillips Exeter, a New Hampshire prep school attended by Harvard ‘66 students George Flagg and Frank Wright. As Wright recalled, during Latin class, a classmate passed him a note suggesting they start a baseball club. “A majority of the fellows wished to form a club to play Massachusetts baseball...but a few of us who hailed from New York State carried the meeting in favor of the new game, then called the ‘Brooklyn’ game.”

Double-threat founding father Gerrit Smith Miller

Born near Syracuse in upstate New York, Gerrit Smith Miller was a 16-year-old student at Dixwell’s Private Latin School when he joined the Lowell club in 1861, its first season. (He went on to study at Harvard, but out of loyalty would not play in their games against the Lowells). Dixwell’s school was near the present location of Emerson College at 20 Boylston Place — about twenty steps from the Boston Common, where prep and high school boys of the day got black eyes and muddy clothes playing various informal rugby-like games. While still at Dixwell’s, Miller amused himself in the baseball off-season by organizing a club called the Oneidas, which played its own brand of football, with tackling, passing and end zones. The Oneidas’ game is generally considered to be the ancestor of the game played by today’s NFL. Yes, the father of American football was a teenage baseball player.

The Father of Baseball -- All 13 of Them

All of these guys have been called the “Father of Baseball” in print at least once. The ones with the + sign have it written on their graves.

Robert Ferguson

Billy McMahon

John Joyce

H Chadwick +

A Doubleday

A Cartwright +

Doc Adams

Duncan Curry +

Harry Wright +

T G Van Cott

William Wheaton

Albert Spalding

Louis Wadsworth

Baseball AND THE RAILROAD

The spread of baseball beyond the New York metropolitan area in the 1850s and 1860s was a railroad story. The first railroad lines were local; they were designed not to connect to other lines in other places. American bat and ball games (including baseball, town ball and the Massachusetts game) also began as local, unconnected subcultures, peculiar to their own cities or regions. But both were systematized, standardized and organized into instruments of unification. The New York and Harlem Railroad brought New Yorkers to the suburbs of Yorkville, Harlem, Morrisania and the rest of Westchester County; clubs appeared in all of these places that played baseball. Baseball sometimes followed expanding railroad lines instead of heading straight to large population centers. Little Piermont -- 1856 population about 1500 - was the site of Rockland County, New York’s first known baseball club. It was not an important place from any point of view except one; it was the eastern terminus of the Erie Railroad, which ran from Dunkirk, New York, near Buffalo through the southern tier counties of New York State. Until the Erie Railroad was connected to Jersey City, passengers and freight were ferried between Duane Street in Manhattan and a pier at Piermont. For a brief and shining moment, Piermont was an important node in the New York metropolitan area transportation network. And during that moment railroad engineer Henry Belding, who was in Piermont to work on the Erie Railroad, founded the Belding baseball club. The small Vermont towns of Irasburg, Brandon and Pawlet all had baseball clubs before the state’s largest cities because they were on advancing railroad lines. If you draw a line on a map connecting Hamilton, Burlington, St. Thomas, London, Ingersoll, Guelph and Toronto --  southern Ontario cities where Canada’s first baseball clubs appeared between 1856 and 1860 -- you will be tracing the lines of the Great Western Railway, which linked Niagara Falls, near Buffalo to Windsor, near Detroit in 1854.

When baseball set out to conquer the nation, it took the train. Just as Major League Baseball could not have expanded to the west coast in the 1950s without the new Boeing 707 jet airliner, which made cross-country air travel practical, neither the famous Red Stockings’ national tours of 1868-1870 nor the coming national professional baseball leagues would have been possible without the transcontinental railroad and the other vast railroad systems of the 1860s and 1870s. From double-headers (a train with an engine on both ends) to schedules to making the grade, professional baseball is full of terminology that springs from its long, intimate relationship with railroad travel.

The destruction of the South’s railroads by Union troops in the Civil War set back the sport of baseball in Dixie for at least a generation. Ironically, this photo was taken by Henry T. Anthony, a member of the Knickerbocker baseball club of New York City.

The famous Cincinnati Red Stockings were built specifically to travel. Multi-city baseball tours were an idea that dated back to the Excelsiors’ 1860 trips to upstate New York, Philadelphia and Baltimore, if not further. During the Civil War years, clubs regularly travelled between the east coast cities. As railroads expanded, longer tours became possible. In 1840, when adult New Yorkers were starting to form the first baseball clubs that we know much about, New York State had a total of 453 miles of railroad lines. In 1850 that number had risen to 1,409 and in 1860 -- the year of baseball’s first multi-city tour -- to 2,682. There was similar growth in Pennsylvania and Virginia. Railroad growth in the booming upper midwest was even more dramatic. In the two decades between 1840 and 1860, Indiana went from 20 miles of railroad tracks to 2,163; Illinois from 26 to 2,799; and Ohio from 39 to 2,946. Not long after settlers, war and trade brought baseball to these states, the established eastern clubs arrived — by train. An extension of the old custom of sporting clubs, militias and firehouses exchanging visits and hospitality, the original purpose of these trips was to spread the game. In the post-Civil War years, they became more about profit, but they continued to popularize baseball. The tours also pointed the way, with a big bright arrow, to baseball’s future as a national entertainment business. Essentially, this is what a modern professional sports league is: a series of road trips organized and structured to produce a credible champion. Even when they are both playing at home, we still call the two sides in every baseball game from Little League to the major leagues the “home team” and the “visitors.”

Baseball in a Civil War POW Camp

In 1862 fifty-one-year-old Captain Otto Boetticher of the German-American 68th NY celebrated the Fourth of July in a North Carolina POW camp. A highlight of the festivities was a baseball game played by prisoners. A professional painter and lithographer who had served in the Prussian Army, Boetticher was known for military subjects; his 1851 work, Seventh Regiment on Review, now in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, shows the famous New York City militia unit parading on Washington Square. Boetticher returned to the city after the war, serving as a German consular agent, and died there in 1886. He drew a poignant panorama of the Salisbury prison camp that includes the baseball game of July 4th, 1862. The drawing served as the basis of the above color print, published in 1863. Dozens of the participants, the umpire, scorers and spectators are clearly portraits of individuals. The players on one side are wearing red ribbons pinned to their their shirts.

Boetticher conveys prison life with some humor. Pigs are being fed. Oblivious to the baseball game, Confederate prison guards are throwing dice. A prisoner is caught stealing food from the camp kitchen. Behind a low wall in the distant shadows we get a glimpse of a man squatting on a latrine. In 1912 the Buffalo Enquirer reported that Chicago Cubs owner Albert Spalding had discovered a copy of the Boetticher print and was looking for former Salisbury POWs to help him identify its subjects. “Those who have carefully examined the drawing,” wrote the Enquirer, “feel convinced” that two of the men in the picture were the famous Generals Phil Kearny and Franz Sigel. Convinced or not, they were wrong; neither one was ever imprisoned at Salisbury (and Kearny would have been pretty conspicuous with his one arm). But the officer with the good seat, the rightmost spectator, is clearly Colonel Michael Corcoran, the charismatic Irishman who commanded New York’s Fighting 69th. Both the uniform details and the unusual forward sweep of his hair are correct. 

In his memoirs Oberlin College Classics professor Giles W. Shurtleff, one of the second basemen in this game, describes playing daily baseball games at Salisbury. He recalled one particular game in which his team held a late-inning, one-run lead. “A long fly ball was hit toward the Captain in right field,” Shurtleff said, “but in order to catch it and win the game, he was forced to cross the ‘deadline,’ the demarcation between the prison yard and escape. In that instant he had to decide if he would cross the line, with the very real risk of being shot, or let the ball drop harmlessly to the ground giving advantage to the other team. He opted to make the catch because he was fairly certain the guard on duty that day would not shoot. They won the game.”

Baseball, Fathers and Feminism

The sport of baseball famously has many founders. Among them were physicians and public health reformers who led a national movement to convince our notoriously pallid and sedentary ancestors that exercise would improve and prolong their lives. In the first half of the 19th century they experimented with boxing and gymnastics before settling on baseball — a game that until the late 1850s was played almost exclusively in New York — as the sport that would appeal to the widest cross-section of Americans. The story of the 1850s and 1860s is how they converted Philadelphia and Boston to the New York game, and ultimately succeeded in creating our first national sport.

A young woman working out with Indian clubs, which were imported by British soldiers from South Asia. Early 19th century feminists were divided on whether women should practice light exercise like calisthenics or compete in more strenuous sports like baseball. Emma Willard, Mary Lyon and other founders of the first women’s colleges stood in the latter camp.

Dr. Jones was not the only prominent member of the American sports movement to fly in the face of Victorian mores by advocating exercise for female as well as male Americans. This was politically risky. After opening Brooklyn’s first gym worthy of the name in 1849, Jones hired trousers-wearing English feminist Madame Beaujeu Hawley to teach exercise classes for females. This provoked a controversy that sounds like something out of modern Tehran or Riyadh. Defending himself from a storm of criticism from Brooklynites who considered it indecent for women and girls to work up a sweat, and especially for men to see them, Jones reassured the public that he would keep the sexes strictly separate at his facility. To cover his glutes, he also published a statement in the Brooklyn Daily Eagle newspaper from Abolitionist minister Henry Ward Beecher and other free-thinking Brooklyn mullahs attesting to the moral probity of gymnastics for women and girls.

Newspaper publisher Thomas Fitzgerald, also a committed Abolitionist, co-founded the Athletics club in 1859 and played a central role in spreading baseball to the city of Philadelphia. Among his friends and allies were the feminist writer and editor Sarah J. Hale, who co-founded Vassar College and supported physical education and sports for women and girls. Students at Mount Holyoke and other women’s colleges formed some of the earliest collegiate baseball clubs. The first Harvard baseball club was founded by the class of 1866; Vassar had two clubs in 1866.

Anne Fitzhugh Miller and Susan B. Anthony

Another important baseball proselytizer, Gerrit Smith Miller was a 16-year-old student at a Boston prep school when he became an original member of the Lowells, Boston’s second baseball club, in 1861. Born in Peterboro, New York, Miller was named after his grandfather Gerrit Smith, a 19th-century land reformer, station master on the Underground Railroad, Temperance activist and supporter of the vote for women. Gerrit Smith was also a friend and ally of political radical Thomas Ainge Devyr, the father of Brooklyn baseball star Tom Devyr. Gerrit Smith’s daughter and Gerrit Smith Miller’s mother, Elizabeth Miller was the first woman to appear in public in bloomers, the baggy pants worn as a political statement by 19th-century feminists, and co-founded the National Woman Suffrage Association with Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony.

In August 1868, Thomas Fitzgerald’s Philadelphia City Item ran the following story.

“At Peterboro, writes Mrs. [Elizabeth] Cady Stanton, there is a baseball club of girls. Nannie Miller, a grand-daughter of Gerrit Smith, is the captain, and handles the bat with a grace and strength worthy of notice. It was a pretty sight to see the girls with their white dresses and blue ribbons flying, in full possession of the public square, while the boys were quiet spectators of the scene.”

Nannie Miller, who grew up to be the famous feminist Anne Fitzhugh Miller, was Gerrit Miller’s sister.

The WASPiness of Early Baseball: Part II

Baseball’s ethnic, racial and religious ancestry can be summed up in one sentence. The overwhelming majority of Amateur Era (pre-1871) baseball players that we know anything about were native-born white American Protestants.

The place to look for the reason is baseball’s birthplace, New York City, and its homeland, mid-19th-century America.

Doggett’s city directory of 1845/46 gives a picture of New York City’s religious makeup at the time of baseball’s emergence as an adult sport. It makes pretty surprising reading for those of us who think of New York as a place of diversity and a haven for immigrants. Doggett’s lists 205 houses of worship. Sixteen are Roman Catholic and 9 are synagogues. One hundred-eighty are Protestant, including 21 Baptist, 5 Congregational, 17 Dutch Reformed, 4 Quaker, 3 Lutheran, 24 Methodist Episcopal, 29 Presbyterian and 8 listed as “African-American Protestant.” Expressed in percentages, synagogues made up (4.4%) of all houses of worship; Catholic churches made up 7.8%.  Compare this to today, when there are 296 Roman Catholic parishes in New York City, serving 2.8 million people, almost 30% of the city’s total population. If we read the New York City newspapers of the 1830s, 40s and 50s, we see that the African-American baseball scene, which we know from circumstantial and other evidence existed and even thrived, is virtually ignored. The reason for this is the lack of interest on the part of the mainstream press --- and, presumably, its readers -- in anything that African-Americans were doing, saying or thinking. We also see that baseball’s surprising tolerance of the Jewish community and its unsurprising intolerance of Roman Catholics, the Irish in particular, reflected the attitudes of the larger community.

The New York Clipper of 3/27/1869 ran a reminiscence of life in New York in the 1840s and 1850s by “Paul Preston Esq.,” the pen name of Thomas Picton, who was born in New York City in 1822. He writes: “Few persons can imagine, nowadays, the intensity of animosity which pervaded the native-born population, in my younger days, against professors of Romanism, and in particular against those of Irish origin…strange to say, fraternal privileges, universally extended to the fair daughters of Judea by the haughtiest landowner’s son were invariably withheld from those of Romanish communion, while to intermarry with a [Catholic] belle, in this wise tabooed, was regarded as an enormity, surely followed by social outlawry.”

According to an article in the New York Times of 3/24/1854, “Probably 6,000 Jews are to be found in the city of New York. Their children attend the same schools with our children, and, until we reach their religious peculiarities, there is little to distinguish them from others of our citizens.”

These views were largely shared by the urban bourgeoisie of Boston, Philadelphia and other eastern cities that took up baseball and formed clubs on the New York model in the late 1850s and the 1860s. The vast majority of members of the Amateur Era clubs in those cities were native-born white Protestants. (Reflecting the early German immigration to Pennsylvania, In Philadelphia a noticeably higher percentage of tbaseball players carried German surnames). The rare foreign-born exceptions – mostly players who were born in Ireland or in the UK – were exceptional in other ways as well. Like Al Reach, Andy Leonard and Fergy Malone, they had emigrated to the US in infancy or as young children, played at the very end of the Amateur Era, or both. A handful of Latinos played baseball for top clubs in the 1860s, but, like Esteban Bellan of the Troy Haymakers, all were sons of the Cuban bourgeoisie, whose families had previous close ties to the US and who were sent to New York secondary schools to escape social and political unrest in Cuba. Like the early Jewish players, they were profoundly similar in class identity to their WASP counterparts.

American nativism was intensified by the arrival of hundreds of thousands of Irish Catholic potato famine refugees in the period of 1845-1851, along with large numbers of new Germans, many of them Catholic, but this did not begin to affect the institution of baseball until well into the professional era. The reason for this is that, both then and now, people who immigrate from non-baseball playing countries after late childhood almost never master baseball as players. The impact of the sons and grandsons of Irish, Italians, Poles and other immigrants on baseball would have to wait at least one or two more generations, as well as for the advent of professionalism, which eroded the sport’s nativist culture and values by incentivizing the selection of players by merit.