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 Yor… — 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.”