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.