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.