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Home Run: Fans Of The Game
Will Appreciate New Baseball Book
Historian’s Baseball Book Scores Abner Doubleday’s Role An Error
By Alice Shaw
Contributing Writer
Abner Doubleday did a lot of interesting things in his life. He fired the second shot in the Civil War, corresponded with Ralph Waldo Emerson, served as president of The Theosophical Society, and helped created San Francisco’s first cable car line.
But one thing Abner Doubleday did NOT do is invent baseball.
John Thorn uproots the long-held Doubleday myth along with scores of other myths about the game in his new book, “Baseball In The Garden Of Eden: The Secret History of the Early Game.” Mr. Thorn, who has been called the pre-eminent historian of baseball, was the chief consultant to Ken Burns’ TBS television series, “Baseball,” and co-author of “The Hidden Game of Baseball,” which helped to establish statistics that are now officially recognized.
Mr. Thorn said that in actuality, bat and ball games are almost as old as civilization itself. The ancient Egyptians left behind paintings of such games. According to Mr. Thorn, there are references to “baseball” in a miniature children’s book published in 1744, in an English novel by John Kidgell published in 1755 and in Jane Austen’s “Northanger Abbey,” written in 1798.
Despite these references it was of course cricket that became England’s national game. Mr. Thorn said cricket was also popular in America for many years and should be recognized as the ballgame that directly inspired the creation of baseball. In the early days, he added, it was common for sportsmen to play both games. A major factor in the demise of cricket in America, Mr. Thorn said, was that changes in its rules, like a new rule allowing “catapult bowling,” made cricket “seem even more brutal than baseball.” (In the early days of baseball, you got a runner out by hitting him with the ball. Many players were seriously injured by these “outs.”)
In the beginning, baseball was nothing if not disorganized. Groups of men would get together, take up sides and play baseball by rules they made up as they went along. It was years before there were organized clubs, leagues and written rules that everyone followed.
Mr. Thorn said it is possible that the first organized club was in Philadelphia. This was in the day when the city had teams named the Philadelphia Pythians and the Philadelphia White Stockings. The Philadelphia Athletics and the Phillies did not come into being until the latter part of the 19th century.
In early baseball, the ball — a bit larger and softer than today’s baseball — was pitched underhand. It was not until late in the 19th century that hitting runners with the ball was outlawed and the game as we know it — including overhand pitching — came into being.
Mr. Thorn writes that in the early days, baseball teams struggled to attract fans in a number of extraordinary ways. One was colorful dress — from the blazing red stockings of the Cincinnati team to the yellow silk jerseys of the Baltimore Canaries and the different color fezzes (without tassels) worn by each member of the 1876 Chicago White Stockings to denote his position. A Chicago Daily Tribute writer said the White Stockings looked like a Dutch bed of tulips.
Mr. Thorn said: “Baseball’s kinship with theater and circus may have been best exemplified by the riotous garb of 1882 in which each club’s players wore a jockey costume, a silk jersey differentiated according to his position in the field, with common stocking colors assigned to each team by the league.” (For example, one team had its catcher wear scarlet and its second baseman wore orange and black vertical stripes.)
However, the players finally rebelled against the absurdity of the garments and the unbearable warmth of the silk, and the practice was halted that same year. However, it was revived for 1883 when Albert Goodwill Spalding (who later created the Spalding sporting goods empire) had the Chicago White Stockings, which he then owned, wear tomato red jerseys and knickers.
Though gaudy costumes did little to promote the popularity of baseball, Mr. Thorn said, gambling did. Betting on baseball games was common from the very beginning and according to Mr. Thorn an occasional game was thrown, even back then.
But corruption was small time, Mr. Thorn said, until baseball’s “murderous decade of the 1890s,” when the simple bet was replaced by “a brazen management swindle: syndicate baseball.”
According to Mr. Thorn, “with interlocking ownerships in the bloated National League of 1892 through 1899, a club trailing in the pennant race might transfer a star to an allied club that was closer to the top; another franchise situated in a large market might pool its players with its wholly owned mate in a smaller market, moving the top talent to where the greater profit beckoned.... Yet another club might exert less than its best effort in a head-to-head series to benefit an affiliated club that stood higher in the standings.”
Mr. Thorn added, “the new American League, which came into being as a corrective to the brutishness of the National League, was not immune to syndicate ball either....”
Another stain on baseball was racism. It in the early days, some team owners hired African-American players. The white players vehemently objected, the owners gave in, and blacks were officially barred from playing on any white teams. Segregated baseball did not end until the middle of the 20th century.
In 1910, both the American and National leagues officially renounced syndicate baseball and very quickly faith in the game’s integrity was restored. Baseball then rose to such heights of popularity that it really did become the national pastime. Or, as Mr. Thorn put it, baseball became an American religion.
Albert Goodwill Spalding was adamant that proof must be found to show that something as important to America as baseball must be of American origin.
At Mr. Spalding’s urging, a commission was established to make that case and it did so, solely on the basis of a “bombshell letter” from a 79-year-old mining engineer named Abner Graves. In that letter, Abner Graves stated as a five-year-old boy in Cooperstown, NY he had witnessed 20-year-old Abner Doubleday scratch out in dust a diagram of a new game called baseball. Abner Doubleday, who died long before the Graves’ letter was written, had as a young man attended a military training school in Cooperstown.
Why Abner Graves should suddenly remember an event that occurred 74 years earlier is a question that has never been answered — along with scores of other questions about the mysterious mining engineer. (Graves died in an insane asylum after murdering his wife.)
However, his “bombshell letter” was just the piece of mail Albert Spalding wanted. Abner Doubleday, the hero of Fort Sumpter for being the first to return Confederate fire, and a theosophist like Spalding, was the perfect man to have invented the great American game. (Theosophy is a form of philosophical thought which claims a mystical insight into the divine nature.)
Mr. Thorn concluded, “Albert Goodwill Spalding did not invent baseball but he helped to invent its inventor.”
*
(Baseball In The Garden Of Eden by John Thorn, published by Simon and Schuster, NY NY, 2011, 365 pages.)
*
Will Appreciate New Baseball Book
Historian’s Baseball Book Scores Abner Doubleday’s Role An Error
By Alice Shaw
Contributing Writer
Abner Doubleday did a lot of interesting things in his life. He fired the second shot in the Civil War, corresponded with Ralph Waldo Emerson, served as president of The Theosophical Society, and helped created San Francisco’s first cable car line.
But one thing Abner Doubleday did NOT do is invent baseball.
John Thorn uproots the long-held Doubleday myth along with scores of other myths about the game in his new book, “Baseball In The Garden Of Eden: The Secret History of the Early Game.” Mr. Thorn, who has been called the pre-eminent historian of baseball, was the chief consultant to Ken Burns’ TBS television series, “Baseball,” and co-author of “The Hidden Game of Baseball,” which helped to establish statistics that are now officially recognized.
Mr. Thorn said that in actuality, bat and ball games are almost as old as civilization itself. The ancient Egyptians left behind paintings of such games. According to Mr. Thorn, there are references to “baseball” in a miniature children’s book published in 1744, in an English novel by John Kidgell published in 1755 and in Jane Austen’s “Northanger Abbey,” written in 1798.
Despite these references it was of course cricket that became England’s national game. Mr. Thorn said cricket was also popular in America for many years and should be recognized as the ballgame that directly inspired the creation of baseball. In the early days, he added, it was common for sportsmen to play both games. A major factor in the demise of cricket in America, Mr. Thorn said, was that changes in its rules, like a new rule allowing “catapult bowling,” made cricket “seem even more brutal than baseball.” (In the early days of baseball, you got a runner out by hitting him with the ball. Many players were seriously injured by these “outs.”)
In the beginning, baseball was nothing if not disorganized. Groups of men would get together, take up sides and play baseball by rules they made up as they went along. It was years before there were organized clubs, leagues and written rules that everyone followed.
Mr. Thorn said it is possible that the first organized club was in Philadelphia. This was in the day when the city had teams named the Philadelphia Pythians and the Philadelphia White Stockings. The Philadelphia Athletics and the Phillies did not come into being until the latter part of the 19th century.
In early baseball, the ball — a bit larger and softer than today’s baseball — was pitched underhand. It was not until late in the 19th century that hitting runners with the ball was outlawed and the game as we know it — including overhand pitching — came into being.
Mr. Thorn writes that in the early days, baseball teams struggled to attract fans in a number of extraordinary ways. One was colorful dress — from the blazing red stockings of the Cincinnati team to the yellow silk jerseys of the Baltimore Canaries and the different color fezzes (without tassels) worn by each member of the 1876 Chicago White Stockings to denote his position. A Chicago Daily Tribute writer said the White Stockings looked like a Dutch bed of tulips.
Mr. Thorn said: “Baseball’s kinship with theater and circus may have been best exemplified by the riotous garb of 1882 in which each club’s players wore a jockey costume, a silk jersey differentiated according to his position in the field, with common stocking colors assigned to each team by the league.” (For example, one team had its catcher wear scarlet and its second baseman wore orange and black vertical stripes.)
However, the players finally rebelled against the absurdity of the garments and the unbearable warmth of the silk, and the practice was halted that same year. However, it was revived for 1883 when Albert Goodwill Spalding (who later created the Spalding sporting goods empire) had the Chicago White Stockings, which he then owned, wear tomato red jerseys and knickers.
Though gaudy costumes did little to promote the popularity of baseball, Mr. Thorn said, gambling did. Betting on baseball games was common from the very beginning and according to Mr. Thorn an occasional game was thrown, even back then.
But corruption was small time, Mr. Thorn said, until baseball’s “murderous decade of the 1890s,” when the simple bet was replaced by “a brazen management swindle: syndicate baseball.”
According to Mr. Thorn, “with interlocking ownerships in the bloated National League of 1892 through 1899, a club trailing in the pennant race might transfer a star to an allied club that was closer to the top; another franchise situated in a large market might pool its players with its wholly owned mate in a smaller market, moving the top talent to where the greater profit beckoned.... Yet another club might exert less than its best effort in a head-to-head series to benefit an affiliated club that stood higher in the standings.”
Mr. Thorn added, “the new American League, which came into being as a corrective to the brutishness of the National League, was not immune to syndicate ball either....”
Another stain on baseball was racism. It in the early days, some team owners hired African-American players. The white players vehemently objected, the owners gave in, and blacks were officially barred from playing on any white teams. Segregated baseball did not end until the middle of the 20th century.
In 1910, both the American and National leagues officially renounced syndicate baseball and very quickly faith in the game’s integrity was restored. Baseball then rose to such heights of popularity that it really did become the national pastime. Or, as Mr. Thorn put it, baseball became an American religion.
Albert Goodwill Spalding was adamant that proof must be found to show that something as important to America as baseball must be of American origin.
At Mr. Spalding’s urging, a commission was established to make that case and it did so, solely on the basis of a “bombshell letter” from a 79-year-old mining engineer named Abner Graves. In that letter, Abner Graves stated as a five-year-old boy in Cooperstown, NY he had witnessed 20-year-old Abner Doubleday scratch out in dust a diagram of a new game called baseball. Abner Doubleday, who died long before the Graves’ letter was written, had as a young man attended a military training school in Cooperstown.
Why Abner Graves should suddenly remember an event that occurred 74 years earlier is a question that has never been answered — along with scores of other questions about the mysterious mining engineer. (Graves died in an insane asylum after murdering his wife.)
However, his “bombshell letter” was just the piece of mail Albert Spalding wanted. Abner Doubleday, the hero of Fort Sumpter for being the first to return Confederate fire, and a theosophist like Spalding, was the perfect man to have invented the great American game. (Theosophy is a form of philosophical thought which claims a mystical insight into the divine nature.)
Mr. Thorn concluded, “Albert Goodwill Spalding did not invent baseball but he helped to invent its inventor.”
*
(Baseball In The Garden Of Eden by John Thorn, published by Simon and Schuster, NY NY, 2011, 365 pages.)
*