Baseball
In baseball’s earliest years, players beaned baserunners and often had to flout town laws prohibiting the game. The game of baseball was not always the well-ordered sport we know today, played on elegantly manicured fields bordered by crisp white lines. By 1867, baseball had taken hold of the national psyche. As historians have debunked the ‘widely held myth that Abner Doubleday of Cooperstown, New York, invented the sport out of whole cloth in 1839, they have discovered its deeper American origins. In 1787, the same year the Constitution was written, a Worcester, Massachusetts, publisher printed A Little Pretty Pocket Book, the American edition of an English book for children, which included a poem and illustration dedicated to “base-ball.” In 1791 a measure that set out to stop a rash of broken windows by prohibiting anyone from playing “baseball” within 80 yards of the courthouse building in Pittsfield, Massachusetts. Both Worcester and Cooperstown, future home of the National Baseball Hall of Fame, banned children from playing the game. Yet despite such resistance, baseball took off in New England, New York, and the Middle Atlantic states. Members of social clubs and workers in factories— organizations that did not exist in the hinterland— typically formed the first teams. Gentlemen, or men of some means, established the first baseball clubs, because they had the time and resources to practice the sport, travel to ball fields, and furnish equipment and uniforms. As the 19th century progressed, a large and prosperous middle class emerged in the United States. Workers increasingly had periods of leisure time and now often looked for a game of baseball. In the cities, political or commercial patrons sometimes supported larger clubs. The New York Mutuals, a working-class team in lower Manhattan, represented “Boss” Tweed’s Tammany Hall, the city’s Democratic political machine of the 1860s and early 1870s. Early organized American baseball took two forms. New Englanders knew the game as “town ball” or the “Massachusetts game,” which featured base paths laid out in a square instead of a diamond, and a rule allowing fielder players to put out the batter or “striker” by “soaking” him (hitting him with a thrown ball before he reached base). Town ball flourished along the eastern seaboard. A group of young men in Philadelphia, who formed the Olympic Ball Club to play town ball in 1833, may have been the first organized baseball-related team in America. In 1838 the created and published rules aptly called their “constitution.” The Knickerbocker Base Ball Club of New York, organized in the 1840s by a group of upper-middle-class Manhattan gentlemen, took town ball and developed their own rules. In 1845 Knickerbocker Alexander Joy Cartwright, Jr., a bank teller and part-time volunteer fireman, suggested that the team play scheduled games against local clubs. To govern these games, on September 23, 1845, the Knickerbockers instituted what came to be known as the “New York rules.” By 1850 the Knickerbockers, their cross-town rivals the Gothams, and such other clubs as the Mutuals, Eckfords, Unions, and Brooklyn Atlantics played regularly before crowds that often had traveled some distance. New York’s burgeoning newspaper industry championed the sport, promoting big games and glamorizing newfound stars. Transplanted Englishman and cricket booster Henry Chadwick, the country’s first sportswriter, loved baseball and devised numerous innovations, including box scores and game accounts. Known even during his own lifetime as the “father of baseball,” he tirelessly promoted the sport and through his singular advocacy helped solidify it as America’s most popular game. In 1857 the Knickerbockers and 15 other clubs formed the National Association of Base Ball Players (NABBP) to “promote additional interest in baseball playing” and to “regulate various matters necessary to its good government and continued respectability.” Adopting the Knickerbockers’ original rules, the NABBP also specified that nine men would play on each side, bases would be set 90 feet apart, and an umpire would have the power to call strikes. Players were required to catch balls barehanded, not with their caps. (Baseball gloves would not become standard until the 1880s.) In addition, no players could be paid to play, although the trend toward luring talent to join teams in return for cushy local jobs was already underway. One year after the NABBP formed, thousands of fans paid 50 cents at Long Island’s Fashion Race Course to watch the “New York All Stars” win a two-out-of-three-game series against their Brooklyn counterparts. The series’ success, along with the city’s influential press and the improvements brought about by the NABBP rules, helped make the “New York rules” the national standard, superseding the “Massachusetts game” and laying the foundation for the modern sport.
The Civil War greatly accelerated baseball’s popularity. Soldiers from the Northeast, already familiar with the game, cured boredom in camp by playing ball. Officers encouraged such games to foster camaraderie and improve morale. Regiments challenged one another, and friendly rivalries developed during breaks in combat. After the war, Army servicemen and veterans spread baseball across the country. It proved an effective salve for a nation battered by years of war a shocked by the assassination of its president. Some remembered that Lincoln had enjoyed playing ball as a young legislator in Springfield, Illinois during the 1840s. The president and his young son Tad may have viewed one of the games on a lot adjacent to the White House. The postwar era marked baseball’s first golden age. The sport had a democratizing and unifying effect then: laborers could beat gentlemen, mechanics could best attorneys, Southerners could defeat Northerners, and Baptists could battle Methodists with no hard feelings. For a while, blacks could challenge whites; men of color played on integrated teams from the lowest to the highest levels until the 1880s, when the major leagues imposed a ban that held until 1947. In 1867 the Washington, D.C., Nationals—a crack ball club drawing on government works, clerks, lawyers, and some veterans—traveled by train for game in Ohio, Missouri, and Illinois. A year later, several New York-based teams followed suit, sweeping through the Midwest and taking on all comers, spreading goodwill and deepening interest in the game. The year after that, the renowned Cincinnati Red Stockings, baseball’s first openly professional ball club (that is, the entire starting roster, or “picked nine,” received salaries), journeyed cross-country aboard the newly completed transcontinental railroad, remaining undefeated through 65 games. Its players treated like celebrities, the team traveled widely and capped their tour with lopsided victories in the San Francisco Bay Area. Each of these tours left new fans in its wake, and by the 1870s the public’s thirst for baseball seemed unquenchable. For many Americans, playing and watching baseball became two of their most cherished childhood memories. Professional baseball was built on the foundation of the amateur leagues that preceded it. Interest in baseball as a spectator sport had been nourished for more than 25 years when the first professional league began operation. The National Association fielded nine teams in 1871, and grew to 13 teams by 1875. The National Association was short-lived. The presence of gamblers undermined the public confidence in the games, and their presence at the games combined with the sale of liquor quickly drove most of their crowds away. Following the 1875 season, the National Association was replaced with the National League. Previously, players had owned the teams and run the games, but the National League was to be run by businessmen. They established standards and policies for ticket prices, schedules, and player contracts. The turn of the century brought another challenger, the American League, which started play in 1901. They raided most of the National League’s best players. In their attempt to meet the challenge, the National League owners turned on each other. A court injunction impaneled a three-man commission to run the league, and they found a way for the two-leagues to co-exist peacefully. Through the first decade of the twentieth century, baseball remained a game of strategy. The so-called "dead ball” provided few homeruns. The game relied on contact-hitters, bunting, and base-stealing for its offense. The adoption of a ball with a cork center in 1911 change the game dramatically. Forty years of batting records began to fall, and the popularity of the game began to explode. The Roaring Twenties were a great time for the United States and for baseball. A huge gambling scandal in 1919 brought sweeping reforms, and in the nation’s largest city, a legend was born. George "Babe” Ruth had been a successful pitcher with the Boston Red Sox, but the New York Yankees bought his contract and made him an outfielder. He was the most tremendous hitter the league had ever seen. Ruth revolutionized the game with his prowess as a homerun hitter. He ushered in an era of economic prosperity for baseball, and became one of the most popular individuals in American history.
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