This 1866 “bird’s-eye view” by John Bachmann shows why New Yorkers crossed the river to New Jersey to play baseball starting in the 1840s — they ran out of open space. In the lower lefthand corner you can see two games under way.
Fans invented themselves. To the surprise and shock of journalists and baseball players, they came uninvited to games in 1850s Brooklyn.
Baseball’s Dr. Frankenstein, Brooklyn Excelsiors star James Creighton invented modern pitching, which made him famous and then killed him.
Civil Rights activist and baseball man Octavius Catto was shot dead in the street in Philadelphia on Election Day 1871. He had successfully integrated the military and Philadelphia’s streetcar system, but in 1867 his African American baseball club, the Pythians, failed to integrate baseball.
The New York Knickerbockers did not invent baseball or racism, but after the Pythian affair in 1867, Knickerbocker James Whyte Davis (seated at center) helped draw baseball’s baseball’s original color line.
The claim that the first baseball game was played in Hoboken, New Jersey on June 19th, 1846 is only slightly less ridiculous than the idea that Abner Doubleday invented baseball in Cooperstown, New York in 1839. That did not stop both towns from holding 100th birthday parties for baseball.
A forgotten part of Civil War history is the many Northerners who fought for the Confederacy because they were pro-slavery. Some were prominent baseball players, like the New Jersey-born Alexander Babcock (standing third from right), who played with the Brooklyn Atlantics — and fought in the Union army — before Lincoln’s plans to free the slaves led him to join the infamous Confederate irregular cavalry unit Mosby’s Rangers. After the war, Babcock founded an early baseball club in Richmond, Virginia.
The late 1860s Cincinnati Red Stockings invented the modern baseball uniform, whose knee-high colored stockings became the club’s name and a famous brand. Hundreds of clubs since have been named in the same way, among them today’s Red Sox, White Sox, Cardinals, Royals and Tigers.
The socially exclusive 7th New York National Guard (State Militia) Regiment, shown marching off to war seven days after the shelling of Ft. Sumter, was full of amateur ballplayers. The unit’s return was reported by Wilkes’ Spirit of the Times less than two months later on June 5 1861: “The ball grounds at the Elysian Fields, Hoboken, begin to wear a very lively look. The members of the Empire, Eagle, Gotham, St. Nicholas, Mutual, Alpine and Jefferson clubs are mustering in full force on practice days…. Several important matches are nearly arranged. …The return of the Seventh National Guard added a reinforcement of some forty members to our prominent baseball clubs.”
In modern baseball terminology Harry Wright served the Cincinnati Red Stockings as Assistant GM, manager, scout, VP of Marketing, head of Media Relations, strength coach, pitching coach, batting coach, traveling secretary, head of analytics, centerfielder — and their entire bullpen.