The Ball (18 page)

Woodcut of game of “Base-Ball,” from John Newbery,
A Little Pretty Pocket-Book
, 1744.

The ball once struck off,

Away flies the boy

To the next destined post.

And then home with joy.

The book, with the fantastic subtitle “Intended for the Amusement of Little Master Tommy and Pretty Miss Polly with Two Letters from Jack the Giant Killer,” was written by the early children's author John Newbery of the Newbery Medal. Copies of the popular book were at the time sold together with a ball for boys and a pincushion for girls, the use of which, according to the marketing copy that accompanied it, “will infallibly make Tommy a good boy and Polly a good girl.”

In all its innocence and simplicity, this first reference captures the essence of baseball as it's still played today. A ball is pitched by a fielder and struck by a player “at bat” who runs a circuit of bases in some set order in an attempt to get safely “home.” Throw in some peanuts and Cracker Jacks and we've almost got the full package!

This first reference also captures an important feature of baseball as it was played right up until the first modern rules were written down. It was, at its core, a game for boys and girls, though adults seem to have indulged as well—less for competition than for diversion and the desire to re-create the carefree days of their youth. Underscoring this childhood connection is the second historical reference to the game, which appears in a 1748 letter written about the activities enjoyed by the family of the Prince of Wales: “In the winter, in a large room, they divert themselves at base-ball, a play all who are, or have ever been, schoolboys are well acquainted with.” The inference that the royal adults would have remembered the game from their childhoods suggests that “base-ball” must have been played from at least the early 1700s.

During the game's infancy, baseball was just one of a collection of similar games enjoyed and improvised upon by English boys and girls. These included trap-ball—a game in which a batter would attempt to strike a small wooden ball released from a mechanical trap. Also played were tip-cat and a host of other “cat” games in which the player would hit a lever to catapult a small piece of wood, known as the “cat,” into the air and then hit it with a stick to score runs. But baseball most likely owes its greatest debt to a medieval game known as stool-ball, played in England as early as 1450. Stool-ball featured many of the elements that we now associate with baseball. Batters would run a circuit of wooden stools without being put out by being struck, or “soaked,” by the ball.

Like early baseball, stool-ball was a pastime enjoyed by both sexes. Young men and women took to the fields together in the springtime, exploiting the game's innocent childhood associations to spend time together at play. The “play,” however, seems to have occasionally stretched the standard rules. Shakespeare used the expression “play at stoole ball” as a thinly veiled euphemism for sex. And this exchange from a contemporary play takes the association further still, working trap-ball into the saucy mix:

W
ARD
: Can you play at shuttlecock forsooth?

I
SABELLA
: Ay, and stool-ball too, sir; I have great luck at it.

W
ARD
: Why, can you catch a ball well?

I
SABELLA
: I have catched two in my lap at one game.

W
ARD
: What, have you, woman? I must have you learn to play at trap too, then y'are full and whole.

So “America's pastime,” history confesses, actually emerged in England from a collection of children's sandlot games (including one that served as adult foreplay as much as it did child's play). What about cricket, then, that quintessentially English game that once vied for the hearts and minds of Americans? Many (particularly the English, of course) assume that it must have formed the trunk of baseball's evolutionary tree. Both games, after all, involve a ball and bat, scoring “runs” in “innings” with a set number of “outs” in games officiated by “umpires.” But as Block points out, cricket is more like an elder cousin than a parent to baseball. In an evolutionary flowchart of baseball's evolution that Block developed, cricket breaks off early on its own proud branch, the Neanderthal line that lived on and still thrives wherever the Union Jack once flew.

Cricket first appeared in the southeast of England in the 16th century where it was played among Flemish immigrants. English researcher David Terry has offered the treasonous theory that the name “cricket” may derive from the continental hockey game
met de krik ketsen
, which the Flemish brought with them to English shores. There, according to Terry, they blended it with stool-ball and other local bat-and-ball games to form cricket. As an American, I must admit, I take some comfort in knowing that while we clearly owe the English for birthing baseball, the English may also need to look east for the inspiration of their own national game.

A
s a child's game, baseball had the tug and yearn of nostalgia from the start, part of the original playbook. As early as 1870, just 25 years after the sport's rules were first written down, the Brooklyn Excelsiors were already pining for the good old days. That powerhouse of early baseball made a Fourth of July trip that year upriver to Peekskill “to avail themselves of passing the Fourth pleasantly in the country, and on a ball field where the surroundings would remind them of the good old times when games were played for the pleasure and excitement incident to the sport.”

In order to experience baseball's “good old times” for myself, I decided to forego Cooperstown, Monrovia, and every other well-revered shrine. Instead, I chose to visit the past itself—or at least a faithful reenactment of it. I spun the clock back to the early 1860s, back to the halcyon days before multimillion-dollar contracts, steroids . . . and gloves.

I kicked off my time travel in Washington, D.C., in the summer of 2009. Baseball had hit yet another low point. The sports channels were all abuzz with news about “The List.” Word had been leaked that David Ortiz and Manny Ramirez, the two powerhouse hitters for the Red Sox at the time, had in 2003 tested positive for performance-enhancing drugs (PEDs). Players and coaches were calling on the league to release the entire list of offenders and move on. PEDs were old news for the sport by this point. Jose Canseco, Mark McGwire, and other players had been called before Congress to testify four years earlier. Everyone had long forgotten that way back in 1889 “Pud” Galvin, baseball's first 300-game winner, openly injected himself with testosterone derived from the testicles of a guinea pig and a dog.

When I stepped off the metro in Anacostia on the gritty southeast side of town and asked the station attendant for walking directions to Anacostia Park, he looked me up and down and said, “There's no easy way for
you
to walk there.”

I only understood his caution later upon learning that Anacostia had one of the highest homicide rates in the country. Marion Barry, the city's former crack-smoking mayor, had been referencing Anacostia and other east-side neighborhoods when he famously remarked that, “Outside the killings, D.C. has one of the lowest crime rates in the country.” I made a call and 10 minutes later a blue minivan pulled up outside the station. Out stepped Jeff “Bucket” Turner sporting white knickers, high blue-and-yellow argyle socks, a flat-topped cap, and a bib shirt with the letter
P
embroidered on it. Jeff, a 40-year-old Baltimore accountant, is the manager of the Chesapeake and Potomac Base Ball Club, one of nearly 200 vintage ball clubs across the United States that play the game by 19th-century rules using replicas of Civil War–era equipment and uniforms.

“Sorry for the hassle getting out here,” Jeff apologized. “We were supposed to be playing down on the Mall but got bumped by a big soccer tournament.” Nineteenth-century baseball, it seems, doesn't rank the way it used to. I asked “Bucket” about his nickname.

“Oh, all our players have nicknames just like they did in the early days. I got mine 'cause when I first started with the team I had my ‘foot in the bucket' with a major hitting slump.”

We drove down to the park, which runs alongside the Potomac River, where the DC Classic was under way—an annual matchup of a dozen or so vintage teams from as far away as Minnesota and Ohio. The setting was no field of dreams. The grass was pocked with brown patches from the August sun. There were no diamonds or dugouts in sight and the base paths sprouted weeds. But families, oblivious to the urban blight, lined the field on blankets and in lawn chairs to cheer on their players, who sported a range of period outfits, many based on uniforms worn 150 years ago. Jeff's team was in the middle of the fifth inning against the Minnesota Quicksteps. On the field were men of every age, from 18 to 60, as well as a couple of young women.

“If you can swing a bat and run the bases without hurting yourself, we'll take you,” said Bob “Slow Trot” Tholkes, the Minnesota manager.

Jeff started his club four years ago and quickly gathered players via Craigslist. “I wanted to get out and be active, but I wasn't into softball and I wasn't up for sixty-mile-an-hour overhand pitching.” Mid-19th-century ball fit the bill. Long before the era of fastballs and curveballs, the pitcher was called a “feeder” and was expected to toss the ball underhand so that the batter could easily strike it. As Henry Chadwick, the Englishman credited with developing the box score and earned run average, among other innovations, described the rule in 1868, “When the batsman takes his position at the home base, the umpire asks him where he wants a ball, and the batsman responds by saying ‘knee high,' or ‘waist high,' or by naming the character of the ball he wants, and the pitcher is required by the rules to deliver the batsman a ball within a legitimate reach of his bat and as near the place indicated as he can.”

Jeff and his fellow time travelers have a weekend mission to reclaim the innocence and civility of the “gentleman's game” that was baseball in the mid-1800s.

“It's about getting back to where it started,” said Jeff as he selected a heavy antique wooden bat from a pile and got ready to take his turn. “It was a more casual game with fewer rules before the 1860s, when it started to get regulated and competitive.”

Jeff stepped up to bat. The pitcher, gloveless as all but a handful of players were until the 1880s, lobbed the slowest pitch I'd seen since I coached my son's second-grade Little League team. Jeff swung and missed. Strike one. Another pitch floated squarely over the plate, but Jeff gave it a look and let it go.

“Warning, striker!” called the umpire. According to the 1866 rules, the next time Jeff avoided hitting a ball the arbiter deemed playable he'd be called for the strike. Having been warned, Jeff connected solidly with the next pitch, sending the ball toward the shortstop, who barehanded it off the bounce and tossed it back to the pitcher.

“One hand!” called the arbiter, using the old term for an out.

I was ready to leap onto the field to protest when “Sparks,” a young electrical engineer on Jeff's team, pulled me back and explained that by the rules of the day a ball caught off the first bounce was as much an out as one caught on the fly.

More precisely, Jeff was out because of rule 12 of the very first 1845 set: “If a ball be struck, tipped, and caught, either flying or on the first bound, it is a hand out.” The man behind those first rules was a Manhattan bank clerk, bookseller, and volunteer fireman named Alexander Joy Cartwright, one of what seems to be an ever-growing list of “fathers” of baseball. For a few years, Cartwright and a group of merchants, bankers, and other solidly middle-class men had been breaking from work at 3:00
PM
to play a standing game in a vacant lot at 27th Street and Park Avenue near what would later become the first Madison Square Garden. They called themselves the Knickerbocker Base Ball Club, using a Dutch name made famous years earlier by Washington Irving, who used it as a pen name. Though Cartwright and his Knickerbockers have been given a special spot in baseball history, historian John Thorn points out that they were by no means the only game in town. Several named clubs—Gotham, Washington, Eagle, Olympic, and New York—preceded them with teams competing as early as 1823.

The term “club” is still used quaintly to describe today's bloated corporate franchises, but in the 1840s baseball clubs like the Knickerbockers were real social fraternities that brought men of similar professions and social status together. The Industrial Revolution had transformed the leisure lives of city dwellers, subjecting them to what historian George Kirsch calls “the tyranny of the clock.” Where the lines between work and leisure were once fluid and blurred, they were now sharply drawn. White-collar merchants, shopkeepers, bookkeepers, and other city dwellers found themselves working ever-longer hours to keep up with the demands of business. Free time was in short supply in a six-day workweek, with Sundays still regarded in many places as the “Lord's day,” inappropriate for frivolous games and play. At the same time, restrictive Victorian attitudes toward sport and recreation were giving way to acceptance of the healthful benefits of respectable, “manly” pastimes like baseball. And so, after a long day hunched over desks in factories these new urbanites happily escaped to nearby ball fields for recreation, exercise, and socializing. The old “child's game” of their youth, they found, was the perfect antidote to the pressures of modern life.

The Knickerbockers and other baseball clubs of the time were governed by constitutions, bylaws, and annual dues. The 40 members were divided into a “first nine,” which was their best players, a “second nine” bench squad, and a “muffin nine” last resort. The final category was gently defined by Henry Chadwick as “a class of players who are both practically and theoretically unacquainted with the game. Some ‘muffins,' however, know something about how the game should be played, but cannot practically exemplify their theory.”