The 1833 game was not merely a competition. It also had the character of a corporate courtship leading to merger. The two groups joined to form a new organization, keeping the name Olympic. The Olympic Ball Club of Philadelphia would go on to be by far the longest-lived club of the early baseball era, playing into the late 1880s. It would long keep its association with the holiday, for many years including a picnic, the singing of national songs, and the reading of the Declaration of Independence by the club’s president.

The game of 1833 has been called by some the first known match game of baseball. Others have denied it this status. It certainly lacks the satisfying details of other, later candidates for the honor. We don’t know the score, much less have a box score. We can only guess at who the players were. We know the name of one side, but not of the other (nor do we know whether it even had a name). But these are beside the point of the question: Was it a match game of baseball? Or, more precisely, of two questions: Was it a match game, and was it baseball?

“Match game” was a technical term in the 19th century. It denoted a formal competition between two defined sides. In its classic form from the heyday of amateur baseball, a match game was between two clubs. More broadly, the two sides might be selected from neighboring villages or might be students from different classes.

The distinction was that in a non-match game the two sides were selected ad hoc from a single body: two captains choosing sides from the student body of a school, or from the membership of a single club. In a match game the structure of the two sides existed outside of that one game.

This was considered important enough that isolated clubs, with no nearby outside competition, would try to replicate the match-game experience by choosing sides along some arbitrary but objective criterion: fat versus skinny, old versus young, or the especially popular single versus married (usually described as “bachelors versus Benedicts,” showing a Shakespearean flair sadly absent from the modern game).

The 1833 game is not quite the classic match game, as only one side seems to have been an organized club. But both sides had an existence outside of that game. This places it well within the range of what could fairly be called a match game.

The second question is trickier: Were they playing baseball? They didn’t call it that. They called it “town ball.” Later in the 19th century, town ball would come to be understood as an ancestor of modern baseball. Many modern writers still subscribe to this interpretation, but it has serious problems. For one thing, “base ball” is the much older term, being attested nearly a century before “town ball.” For another, modern baseball derives from a version played in New York City, where town ball is unattested.

The actual usage of the time was to apply various regional dialectal terms for a family of closely related informal games. The most important of these were base ball, town ball, and round ball. The modern game is known as baseball because it derived from the New York version, in base ball territory. Had the modern game derived from the Philadelphia version, in town ball territory, it would be called town ball today and base ball would be regarded as a quaint name for its predecessor.

The Olympics would switch to the New York game in 1860. New York writers would routinely dismiss the Olympics’ claim to seniority by pointing out that before 1860 they were merely a town ball club, not a proper base ball club at all. This perspective may be reasonable when discussing modern baseball, but is anachronistic for the 1830s.

The New York game would have some distinctive features, but the available evidence suggests that these features had not yet developed in 1833. While we know in hindsight that New York was the birthplace of the form of baseball that would displace all others, in the context of 1833 it had no particular claim to special status among the innumerable local variants. So unless we restrict the discussion to modern baseball, this game in Camden is as much baseball as any other of the day.

This might be thought unsatisfying, but it really is in concert with other early baseball firsts. These rarely are so clear-cut as is often imagined. Baseball wasn’t really invented in 1839, or 1845, or in any other year one might choose. The Knickerbockers weren’t really the first baseball club. The Cincinnati Red Stockings weren’t really the first professional club. Any claim to identifying the first professional baseball player is at best an educated guess, and at worst pure speculation.

However we might like pat answers to trivia questions, history rarely works this way. The reality is usually more nuanced, if not confused and obscure. Is the “first match game of baseball” a poorly documented game played between two obscure groups under vaguely understood rules? This fits right in.

This essay was originally published in “Inventing Baseball: The 100 Greatest Games of the 19th Century” (2013), edited by Bill Felber. Download the SABR e-book by clicking here.

Notes

1 The most important sources for the early history of the Olympics are two pamphlets printed by the club: “Constitution of the Olympic Ball Club of Philadelphia” (Philadelphia: John Clark, 1838), and “Constitution and By-Laws of the Olympic Ball Club of Philadelphia” (Philadelphia: Ashmead, 1866). These pamphlets were typical of clubs of all sorts in that era. The 1838 pamphlet includes the club constitution, by-laws, and membership roster. The 1866 pamphlet added to these the contemporary rules of baseball, and most importantly for our purposes a brief history of the club and historical membership roster from its founding to that day.

Two years of haphazard information-gathering produced a ragged body of data unlikely to ratify either man’s theory. But amidst it all, Spalding found something he liked. A 71-year-old Denver mining engineer named Abner Graves wrote in 1905 two letters (one to the editor of the Akron, Ohio Beacon-Journal and the other to Spalding) recounting how, in his childhood home of Cooperstown, New York, a boy named Abner Doubleday surprised his playfellows one fine day with a concept for a game called “base ball.”[fn]The two letters, dated April 3 and November 17, 1905, are printed in David Block, Baseball Before We Knew It: A Search for the Roots of the Game (Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 2005), pp. 252-256.[/fn] Spalding must have been overjoyed when he realized that not only had he found an eyewitness account affirming baseball’s American origin, but that its purported inventor grew up to be a military hero in the Civil War![fn]For more on connections between Spalding and Doubleday, see Philip Block, “Abner and Albert, The Missing Link,” Chapter 3 (pp. 32-49) in David Block, Baseball Before We Knew It.[/fn] Lacking anything more substantive or suitable to their inquiry, Spalding and the commission ran with it.

Henry Chadwick passed away only a month after Spalding published his Doubleday blockbuster in March 1908, but there has never been any shortage of challenges to baseball’s singular Creation Myth.[fn]On the creation and debunking of the Doubleday Myth, see Robert W. Henderson, Ball, Bat and Bishop: The Origin of Ball Games (New York: Rockport Press, 1947; reprinted Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2001), pp. 170-194; David Block, Baseball before We Knew It, pp. 32-66; John Thorn, Baseball in the Garden of Eden:The Secret History of the Early Game (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2011), pp. 1-24.[/fn] Elementary fact-checking reveals the future General Doubleday to have been enrolled at West Point at the time of his alleged invention. Graves, we learn, was a man of questionable stability who later shot his wife and died in an asylum. Numerous accounts of earlier baseball activity have since been documented.

There remains a sense, nonetheless, that the old story cannot be wholly without substance. Even in the testimony of a great liar, there is usually some kernel of truth. The Doubleday legend may prove of value despite the shortsighted rubberstamping it received from a stacked jury a century ago, and what Abner Graves witnessed by the banks of Glimmerglass surely deserves a second look.

It was sometime in spring and probably in the year 1840 when a certain Abner Doubleday introduced a novel version of ballplay to his youthful peers.[fn]Graves never pinpointed 1839 as the year of Doubleday’s invention. In his first letter on the subject he said it was “either the spring prior or following the Log Cabin & Hard Cider campaign of General Harrison for President.” In his second letter he said it was “either 1839, 1840 or 1841.” The second letter provides an additional clue. Again referring to President William Henry Harrison, Graves states: “The incident has always been associated in my mind with the Log Cabin and Hard Cider campaign of General Harrison, my father being a Militia Captain and rabid partisan of Old Tippecanoe.”[/fn] It is now known that two persons of that name lived in Cooperstown during Graves’s time there, and it is essential to consider both in trying to make sense of the legend.

The “famous” Abner, son of Ulysses Doubleday, had departed for West Point by September 1838 and was unlikely to have been indulging in idle recreation back in Cooperstown at the time in question. But he had a younger cousin, Abner Demas Doubleday, son of Ulysses’ brother, Demas. Abner Demas was born about six miles north in Pierstown in March 1829,[fn]Record for Abner Demas Doubleday at www.familysearch.org.[/fn] and so would have been 11 years old in spring 1840.

As for our eyewitness, Abner Graves, he was younger yet, having just turned six in February. It is certainly easier to envision him a playmate to the 11-year-old Doubleday than to the 20-year-old future major general.

Graves recalled “several of the best players of sixty years ago,” naming Thomas Bingham, Nelson Brewer, Joseph Chaffee, John Starkweather, and his own cousin John Graves, as well as another Doubleday cousin, John.[fn]Letter of Abner Graves to Beacon Journal of Akron, OH, April 3, 1905.[/fn] But perhaps the most significant other participant was Elihu Phinney, whose family had run a printing business in Cooperstown since the 1790s, and lived on a farm about half a mile up the west side of Lake Otsego. Graves specifically cited the Phinney Farm as a favored location for ballgames.[fn]Ibid.[/fn]

Picture, then, Abner Demas directing a group of these boys, laying out a unique playing field in the meadow at Phinney Farm. Instead of just the two bases — the batter’s home and an out-goal to which he ran — used in the hybrid of Old Cat and Town Ball the Cooperstonians always played, there was now a circuit of four, marked by flat stones set in a diamond shape.[fn]All details concerning the manner of ballplay — both of the old “Town Ball” and the new “Base Ball” — are derived directly from the two letters of Abner Graves cited in footnote 1.[/fn]

To the disappointment of Abner Graves and the other youngest enthusiasts, this new version of ball does not allow for dozens of boys, all ages and sizes, to swarm about, colliding with each other in pursuit of fly hits. There are now but eleven players on the field at a time, in distinctly-assigned positions.

Four spread symmetrically across the outfield. Five man the infield: one at each base, then two extra within the basepaths — one between first base and second; another between second and third.

In their old Town Ball, a “tosser” would stand next to home base, throwing the ball straight upward for the batter to strike upon its fall. Doubleday’s plan puts this player in the center of the diamond, pitching underhand to the batsman. This necessitates a final fielder, the catcher, to stand behind home base and corral stray pitches.

Whereas, in Town Ball, every man tallied runs for himself, and the catcher of a fly ball went to bat no matter how many times he might have already batted, participants now are divided into two teams of equal number and bat in predetermined order. The batter must circle through three bases and reach home again in order to tally for his team.

In a holdover rule, “plugging” a runner with the ball is still good for a put-out. But a proviso declaring a batter out if he swings and misses at three pitches is new to the Cooperstown lads.

The frolic in Cooperstown that so impressed Abner Graves was undoubtedly but one of a myriad of early experiments — variations on a theme of bat and ball and bases. Taking his recollections at face value, however, tells us that the seeds of “The New York Game” were planted in the provinces five years before the Knickerbockers put their rules into writing. Glancing backward to that dim past we have conjured a mental snapshot, depicting a day when our game was very young, very free, and growing with great boyish eagerness toward its maturity.

This essay was originally published in “Inventing Baseball: The 100 Greatest Games of the 19th Century” (2013), edited by Bill Felber. Download the SABR e-book by clicking here.

This is a big topic, upon which I have written previously and will again. For the purposes of this book, let’s focus on October 1845.

The Knickerbockers, recently organized under that name after several years’ play at New York’s Madison Square and Murray Hill, played their first recorded game on October 6. Although they commenced formal play in brisk weather, the Knickerbockers managed to squeeze in 14 games before shutting down to await April 1846 and the opening of a new season. The scoring for these contests survives in their Game Book, held by the New York Public Library and, gloriously, readily available to researchers.

In the first intrasquad game, seven Knickerbockers won by a count of 11–8 over seven of their fellows in three innings. The rules calling for the victor to accumulate 21 runs over as many innings as that might take was, clearly, observed in the breach. Not for a dozen additional years would the rules of baseball require a set number of innings or players to the side, and these were at first settled upon as seven, not nine!

The umpire of this practice game was William Rufus Wheaton, who by his own account had reduced the rules of the Gotham Base Ball Club to writing in 1837. A skilled cricket player, Wheaton came to prefer baseball in the 1830s; his Gothams also went by the name Washingtons, signifying either their primacy among baseball clubs or their possible origin among the butchers and produce vendors of the Washington Market. As the years went by, the Gothams spawned offshoots, including both the New Yorks and the Knickerbockers. In 1887 Wheaton told a reporter for the San Francisco Examiner, for a piece titled “How Baseball Began: A Member of the Gotham Club of Fifty Years Ago Tells About It”:

The new game quickly became very popular with New Yorkers, and the numbers of the club soon swelled beyond the fastidious notions of some of us, and we decided to withdraw and found a new organization, which we called the Knickerbocker. For a playground we chose the Elysian fields of Hoboken, just across the Hudson river. … We played no exhibition or match games [emphasis mine], but often our families would come over and look on with much enjoyment. Then we used to have dinner in the middle of the day, and twice a week we would spend the whole afternoon in ball play.

William H. Tucker, who in some unknown measure assisted Wheaton in laying down the Knickerbocker rules, played in ten of the 14 contests, including the one on October 6, in which he scored three of the losing squad’s eight runs. Like Wheaton and other Knickerbockers, he had been a player with the New York Ball Club and maintained a tie to them, indeed playing in two formal matches of the New Yorks with the Brooklyn Club on October 21 and 24 of 1845, a month after he had helped to form the Knicks. In his 1998 history of American cricket, Tom Melville pointed to an even earlier contest between these two clubs, on October 11 (actually October 10), reported in the New York Morning News. Research more than a decade later has revealed a somewhat fuller account in the obscure and short-lived newspaper the True Sun:

The Base Ball match between eight Brooklyn players, and eight players of New York, came off on Friday on the grounds of the Union Star Cricket Club. The Yorkers were singularly unfortunate in scoring but one run in their three innings. Brooklyn scored 22 and of course came off winners.

Wheaton also umpired the game of October 24, 1845, between New York and Brooklyn, and played in the game of November 10 to mark the second anniversary of the New York Club, which, like the recently discovered Magnolia Ball Club, had commenced play at Hoboken’s Elysian Fields in 1843 — two years before the Knickerbockers.

Many of the early New York baseballists had cut their teeth on cricket, and this was true of the Brooklyn players as well. In the game of October 21, conducted at the Elysian Fields, the Brooklyn Club (possibly not the same men who had played in the game of October 10, as no box score survives) were originally reported to be the victors once again, but this report proved an error. As was reported the next day, the eight players of the New York club won handily, and did so again in the game of October 24, played at the grounds of the Union Star Cricket Club, opposite Sharp’s Hotel in Brooklyn, at the corner of Myrtle and Portland Avenues, near Fort Greene. The scores were, respectively, 24–4 and 37–19. On both these occasions the Brooklyn club included established cricketers John Hines, William Gilmore, John Hardy, William H. Sharp, and Theodore Forman. Their lineup appears to have been identical for the two games, as the Ayers of October 21 and the Meyers of October 24 may be the same individual, while the other seven men match up.

There is more work to be done with all this, certainly, but the NYBBC anniversary match of November 10, 1845, seems to have much in common with the purported “first match game” of June 19, 1846, while the games of October 1845, particularly the latter two, seem to be true match games between differentiated clubs.

This essay was originally published in “Inventing Baseball: The 100 Greatest Games of the 19th Century” (2013), edited by Bill Felber. Download the SABR e-book by clicking here.

• Related link: Read “New York’s First Base Ball Club,” by John Thorn (2017 The National Pastime)
  

Before that game, there is no surviving record of a true match game since the famous June 19, 1846, contest between the Knickerbockers and the New York Club, won easily by the latter, 23-1. The 1846 game, which took place at Elysian Fields in Hoboken, New Jersey, has been called the first baseball game, the first documented baseball game and/or the first game played by the Knickerbocker rules. Neither of the first two claims is accurate and the third may not be.

In the fall of 1845 the New York Club played three games against a Brooklyn team, losing one and winning two, so the 1846 match was definitely not the first documented baseball game. There is also some basis for believing the earlier New York Club games were played by the Knickerbocker rules or their equivalent since William Wheaton helped write the rules for both the Knickerbockers and the New York Club.1

Perhaps more importantly, since there were no repeat performances for five years, the 1846 affair didn’t establish match play as an idea whose time had come. Some of this might be put down to reluctance by the Knickerbockers to associate with a club they had left because the Knickerbockers were more “fastidious.” However, that is unlikely, because less than two weeks after the 1846 contest, a game was played between two teams, each a mixture of Knickerbocker and New York Club players. Another possibility is after being thrashed 23-1, the Knickerbockers saw no point in competing with a team that never seemed to lose. In addition, since the Knickerbocker Club hadn’t been formed to play other clubs, further match play probably wasn’t a priority.2

Regardless of the reasons for the five-year hiatus, things had clearly changed by 1851. The June 3 match may have been facilitated by a reorganization of the old New York/Gotham/Washington Club into a new Washington Club. The Knickerbockers seem to have taken the impending match very seriously, since by June 2 they had played almost twice as many intersquad matches as in the same period in 1850.

Somewhat surprisingly, the match was played at the Red House in Harlem instead of Elysian Fields in Hoboken. The most logical explanation is that in the wake of the May 27 riots in Hoboken between immigrant Germans and a Nativist group called the Short Boys, the clubs may have felt it wiser to allow passions to cool before playing at Hoboken.3

The running score doesn’t indicate which team batted first, but in the early going the Knickerbockers may have wondered whether anything had changed in five years. Washington led 2-0 after one inning, 7-3 after two and 8-6 after three. The fourth inning marked the turning point, as the Knickerbockers added three aces while blanking the Washington Club.

The more “fastidious” bunch then exploded for five more runs in the fifth and a 14-9 lead, only seven short of the winning score of 21. Scoring was limited over the next two innings and the Knickerbockers led 15-11 as the game went to the eighth inning. This time they were not to be denied, tallying six times for a 21-11 win and sweet, albeit much delayed, revenge.

Unlike the 1846 affair, the game wasn’t a one-time thing; a return match took place two weeks later, this time at Elysian Fields. The Knickerbockers prevailed in a much closer, 22-20 game that took 10 innings.4

Why was the June 3 match historic? Unlike the 1846 contest, the 1851 game marked the beginning of regular team competition — competition that has continued to this day. Competition is a key word here. To that point the New York/Washington Club not only won its matches, but did so easily. With little prospect of success, other clubs had little incentive to venture beyond interclub play. Real competition would, however, be much more appealing to both the players and potential spectators. Similarly, there is also a direct path between the rules in 1851 and the rules of today’s game. Once regular competition between the clubs became the norm, the rules had to be standardized and modified as necessary — a process that continues.5

The Knickerbocker victories also marked one of the first transitions in organized baseball. Before this match, the Washington Club (by whatever name it was called) was the preeminent club. The club had been formed earlier, had effectively spun off the Knickerbocker Club, and appeared to have no peers on the field. But after losing to the Knickerbockers twice in two weeks, in spite of having some of the old guard from 1845-46, the older club was no longer dominant.

In fact, it would be four years before the Washington Club (by then called the Gothams) would defeat their new/old rivals. The 1851 Knickerbocker win was also therefore the beginning of a cycle of change that has continued. When the two clubs took the field on that long-ago June day, the players probably weren’t thinking beyond what the game meant to them and their respective teams, but almost regardless of the details, the day was truly historic.6

This essay was originally published in “Inventing Baseball: The 100 Greatest Games of the 19th Century” (2013), edited by Bill Felber. Download the SABR e-book by clicking here.

Line score:

Imitation, as the expression goes, is the sincerest form of flattery. It was the former, and most certainly not the latter, that the Massachusetts Association of Base Ball Players (MABBP) had in mind when they created a standard set of rules in May of 1858. One year earlier, a group of clubs from the cities of New York and Brooklyn, brazenly calling themselves the National Association of Base Ball Players (NABBP), had codified the rules for their version of the game.1 These rules ultimately helped establish the “New York game” as the progenitor of modern baseball.

Looking to “improve and foster the Massachusetts game,” six Boston-area clubs organized a convention in Dedham, a Boston suburb, on May 13, 1858.2 Representatives from the 10 participating clubs formed the MABBP, elected officers, and agreed to a constitution, bylaws, and “rules and regulations of the game of base ball.”3

Unlike the NABBP, which had agreed to some requirements new to some of its members, the MABBP adopted rules that closely reflected how their members played. One bedrock of the Massachusetts game that the MABBP retained was defining the end of a game as the moment when a certain number of tallies (runs) were scored, a value they set at 100. The NABBP had jettisoned a similar practice common to the New York game, instead specifying that their games ended after nine innings, absent a tie – a stroke of genius that remains a defining feature of the sport to this day.

In addition to “100 tallies [constituting] the game,”4 rules enshrined by the MABBP that were unique to the Massachusetts game included:

• The bases were arranged in a square pattern, with the striker (batter) standing midway between home plate and first base.
• Throwers (pitchers) stood 35 feet from the batter.
• Bases were wooden stakes four feet high.
• Teams consisted of 10 to 14 players.
• Fielders could retire baserunners by striking them with the ball (“soaking”).5
• Balls must be “caught flying” to count as outs (no bound outs).6
• The batting team was retired once a single out was recorded (also known as the “one out, all out” rule).

On Monday, May 31, two weeks after the conventioneers departed for home, a pair of clubs that helped organize the conclave played the first match under the new MABBP rules: Boston’s Olympic Club and the Winthrop Club of Holliston.

The Winthrop Club, one of several Whig social clubs by that name across the commonwealth,7 hailed from a town located about 30 miles southwest of Boston Common. Named for seventeenth-century Harvard College benefactor Thomas Hollis, Holliston was also home to the burgeoning community of Mudville, a neighborhood settled in the 1850s by Irish railroad workers. Many believe that Holliston was the setting for Ernest Thayer’s baseball epic, Casey at the Bat, penned in 1888.8 It is unclear when the Winthrop Club of Holliston began playing base ball. Surviving newspaper archives make no mention of any matches played by the team before this one.

On the other hand, we know that the Olympic Club played match games as early as September 1853.9  In June of 1857, Olympic were swept by the Massapoag Ball Club of Sharon in a best-of-five tournament that the Boston Herald (and at least one other Massachusetts team) considered the state championship.10  

While most prominent 1850s base ball matches came about as the result of a challenge, this one did not. The Winthrop Club invited Olympic to play them in a match game. As such, Olympic could have declined without risk to their reputation. Their acceptance was reported by the Boston Herald.11

Beautiful weather greeted “an immense concourse” of 2,000 to 3,000 spectators on match day.12 Standing seven or eight deep, the crowd encircled the roped-off playing area, located on the parade ground at the southwest corner of the Boston Common.13 Policemen “stationed at regular intervals” kept the crowd behind the ropes,14 allowing only a few lucky patrons bearing entrance tickets to pass through the barrier and gather on the west side of the enclosure.

Three referees (umpires) officiated the match, including, as MABBP rules specified, one member from each side and another from a third club affiliated with the association. The referee provided by the Olympics was their president, A.S. Frye, who also served as MABBP secretary.15 The third-party referee was a member of the Rough and Ready club of South Walpole.16 A trio of tallymen (scorers) were similarly selected, with the third-party scorer provided by the Union Club of Medway.

Play began at about 2 P.M., with Winthrop “having the first innings” – i.e., batting first.17 No details were provided in newspaper accounts of how runs were earned in the first inning or any other. The Boston Herald, Boston Traveller, and New York Clipper provided batting orders, with the number of runs scored by each player, but did not identify the positions they played or the number of “hands” each lost (outs recorded), information that was commonly, though not always, included with New York-game box scores.18 As a result, its unknown who pitched, who were the base tenders (infielders), and who were the scouts (outfielders).

The three box scores published for the match largely tell the same story, with a few exceptions.  The New York Clipper account identified Winthrop’s fourth and sixth strikers as “E.G. Whitney” and “T.M. Whitney,” respectively, while the Boston newspapers claimed the pair’s surname was Whiting.19 The Traveller identified the number-five batter for the Olympics as “B. Crowley,” and the number-nine batter for Winthrop as “B.C. Bigelow.” The other two game accounts listed the pair as “B. Crawley” and “R.C. Bigelow.” In each of these instances, the author has assumed that spellings that match in two of the three publications are the correct ones.

A few players who were (or would be) prominent in the Boston baseball community appeared in the lineup for each side. Batting second for Winthrop was P.R. Johnson, who weeks earlier had been elected MABBP president.20 Olympic club vice president B.F. Rollins played, as did Olympic treasurer G.C. Grimes, director Henry F. Gill, former vice president Harrison Forbush, and former secretary E.T. Allen.21 Batting 10th for Olympic was B.H. Hoyt, who three months later became the first president of the Boston Base Ball club.22 Olympic’s number-four batter, Moses E. Chandler, then in his mid-20s, later served as an umpire in a handful of National Association (1872-1874) and National League (1877) games played in Boston and Hartford, Connecticut.23

Winthrop managed a single tally in the top of the first inning, which Olympic matched in their first turn at bat. Four runs in the second inning gave Winthrop the lead. Olympic was blanked in innings two through five as Winthrop put up a pair of 10-run innings, building a 30-1 lead.

Twenty Winthrop tallies in the 10th, followed by another eight in the 11th gave it 69 runs against a measly 7 for Olympic. More than two-thirds of the way to the 100, the Winthrop offense slowed, while Olympic inched a bit closer. After 22 innings, the Hollistoners led 85-27. Finally, in the 33rd inning, 4½ hours after the game began, Winthrop reached the century mark and won the match. Olympic, which went scoreless over the final 11 innings, “bore their defeat manfully,” according to the Boston Herald.24

High scorers in the match were Winthrop’s number-five and -six hitters, Edward Rockwood and T.M. Whiting, respectively, who each recorded 11 runs. A trio of Olympic batters, George W. Wadsworth, G.B. Stone, and B. Crowley, paced the losing side with 4 runs each.

In one respect, this game was no different than many base ball matches held 200-plus miles to the southwest in New York City. After the competition was over, both sides adjourned to a local hotel where they “partook of a sumptuous repast.”25

Ten months after this game, The Base-Ball Player’s Pocket Companion first became available to the public for the price of 25 cents from Boston publisher Mayhew & Baker. Advertised as “a complete manual of Base Ball,” it “[contained] all matters relating to both Massachusetts and New York Games,” including the rules for each style of play.26

Ten years after this game, on the last Monday in the month of May 1868, Memorial Day was first observed, commemorating the sacrifices of those who died to preserve the Union in the Civil War. One of those was Sergeant E.G. Whiting, Winthrop’s cleanup batter, killed in action during the Battle of Charles City Court House on June 30, 1862.27  By the time Whiting’s ultimate sacrifice was honored nationwide, the New York game had become the dominant style of baseball in New England, making the pages within The Base-Ball Player’s Pocket Companion devoted to the Massachusetts game little more than a curiosity.

Acknowledgments

This article was fact-checked by Kevin Larkin and copy-edited by Len Levin.

Photo credit: New York Clipper, May 29, 1858.

Sources

In addition to the sources cited in the Notes, the author consulted Peter Morris, ed. Base Ball Founders: The Clubs, Players and Cities of the Northeast That Established the Game (Jefferson, North Carolina: McFarland & Company, 2013), and John Thorn, Baseball in the Garden of Eden (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2011). The author reviewed accounts of this and other Massachusetts game matches published between 1855 and 1859 in the New York Clipper, Boston Herald, Boston Traveller, Worcester Spy, and Spirit of the Times. He also examined the Baseball-Almanac.com, Retrosheet.com, and the National Park Service Civil War Soldiers and Sailors system (www.nps.gov/civilwar/soldiers-and-sailors-database.htm) websites for pertinent information.

Notes

1 The New York and Brooklyn clubs had settled upon their NABBP sobriquet just weeks earlier, but had codified their rules in early 1857. “Base Ball,” New York Clipper, April 3, 1858: 396; “Rules for Sports and Pastimes: No. II,” New York Clipper, May 2, 1857: 13.

2 “Base Ball Convention in Massachusetts,” New York Clipper, May 29, 1858: 44.

3 “Base Ball Convention,” Spirit of the Times, May 22, 1858: 180.

4 “Base Ball Convention in Massachusetts.”

5 Retiring a baserunner by throwing a ball at him was expressly prohibited in the Knickerbocker rules of 1845, recognized as the first detailed set of rules for the New York game. “Knickerbocker Rules,” Baseball Almanac website, https://www.baseball-almanac.com/rule11.shtml, accessed October 3, 2023.

6 A bound out was a ball caught after one bounce. NABBP rules adopted in 1857 allowed bound outs and continued to do so for several more years. “Rules for Sports and Pastimes: No. II,” New York Clipper, May 2, 1857: 13; John Thorn, Baseball in the Garden of Eden, 75.

7 The Worcester Winthrop Club is described as participating in a Whig political rally in 1851, while the Boston Winthrop Club hosted an evening social event for Whigs the following year. The clubs’s namesake was either the house in which they held their first meeting or an early Massachusetts Bay colony governor. “The Winthrop Club,” Boston Globe, March 11, 1874: 8; “The War-Time Park-St. Pastor,” Boston Evening Transcript, January 18, 1892: 4. “Ward Ten,” Boston Evening Transcript, November 6, 1851: 2; Social Entertainment,” Greenfield (Massachusetts) Recorder, May 10, 1852: 3; New York Times, May 24, 1852: 2.

8 Tom Moroney, “Mudville: Name in a Game?” Boston Globe, March 17, 1996: 10-West.

9 Bruce Allardice, “Olympic Club of Boston,” Protoball website, https://protoball.org/Olympic_Club_of_Boston, accessed September 14, 2023.

10 The Union Base Ball Club of Medway referred to Massapoag as the state champion in a match challenge they issued to that club in September of 1857. “An Exciting Game of Base Ball on the Common,” Boston Herald, June 30, 1857: 2; “Challenge,” Boston Herald, September 3, 1857: 2.

11 “Base Ball Match – Olympic vs. Winthrop Club,” Boston Herald, May 29, 1858: 4.

12 “Great Base Ball Match of Boston,” New York Clipper, June 12, 1858: 163.

13 Newspaper reports described the playing area as between one and three acres. “Great Base Ball Match of Boston”; “The Base Ball Match on the Common,” Boston Traveller, June 1, 1858: 2.

14 “The Base Ball Match on the Common.”

15 “Olympic Ball Club,” Boston Evening Transcript, April 8, 1858: 4.

16 The South Walpole club was presumably one of many Rough and Ready social clubs that sprang up across the United States in 1848 to support General Zachary “Rough and Ready” Taylor’s successful bid for the presidency. “Great Base Ball Match of Boston”; The Inauguration of Gen. Zachary Taylor (Philadelphia: Smith & Peters, 1849), https://www.loc.gov/resource/pga.00307/, accessed September 20, 2023.

17 “Base Ball Match on the Common.”

18 See, for example box scores published in “Ball Play,” New York Clipper, May 29, 1858: 43.

19 “Great Base Ball Match of Boston.”

20 “Baseball of the Vintage of 1859,” Boston Globe, October 27, 1912: 49.

21 “Ball Playing,” Boston Herald, April 3, 1857: 2. Forbush’s last name was listed as both “Porbush” and “Furbush” in newspaper listings of club’s officers for 1857. “Olympic Ball Club.” “Ball Playing,” Boston Evening Traveller, May 2, 1857: 5.

22 “Boston Base Ball Club,” Boston Evening Transcript, August 25, 1858: 1.

23 Chandler crossed paths with a pair of early catching pioneers in games he umpired in 1877. On April 15 of that year he worked an exhibition between the National League Boston Red Stockings and Harvard College, whose catcher, Jim Tyng, had days earlier become the first catcher to don a catcher’s mask in competition. In Chandler’s final championship (regular) season game as an NL umpire, on August 21, Cincinnati Reds catcher Scott Hastings, who several weeks before had become the second catcher to wear a mask in a major-league regular season match but then abandoned it, once again donned “the wire mask invented by Thayer of the Harvards.” “Summer Pastimes,” Boston Globe, August 22, 1877: 5; “The Bostons Beat the Harvards, Five to Two,” Boston Globe, April 16, 1877: 1; “General Notes,” Evansville (Indiana) Journal, April 17, 1877: 8; Larry DeFillipo, “August 8, 1877: Brown Stockings’ Mike Dorgan becomes first major leaguer to adopt a catcher’s mask,” SABR Games Project.

24 “Base Ball Match on the Common.”

25 “Great Base Ball Match of Boston.”

26 “The Base Ball Players’ Pocket Companion,” New York Clipper, May 21, 1859: 39.

27 “The Sixteenth Massachusetts Regiment,” Boston Evening Transcript, July 14, 1862: 4. Several other members of the Winthrop Club also fought in the War Between the States. Rufus Durfee, Winthrop’s number-eight batter, served alongside E.G. Whiting in the 16th Massachusetts Regiment. Initially reported as missing after the battle in which Whiting was killed, Durfee was later wounded in action on May 3, 1863. The other Whiting in the Winthrop lineup, T.M., spent three years fighting with the 17th Massachusetts. Edward Rockwood, who batted between the two Whitings in this match, may have served in the 57th Massachusetts. An Edward P. Rockwood was gravely injured during a June 1864 battle in Virgina, then “taken prisoner, and starved for several months.” The author has identified several other names in Massachusetts regiment Civil War muster lists that match those of participants in this match: For the Olympics, G.B. Stone (either 13th or 56th Massachusetts), B. Crowley (2nd, 19th, or 28th), M. White (2nd, 3rd, 28th, 31st, or 51st), H. Forbush (44th) and B.H. Hoyt (23rd) and for the Winthrop Club, J.W. Cutler (10th Massachusetts), George Hoffman (11th or 47th) and J. Puffer (5th, 26th, 32nd, 43rd, or 57th). “Seeley’s Battery,” Washington Evening Star, May 13, 1863: 1; “Death of T.M. Whiting,” Indianapolis Star, July 2, 1905: 12; “Couldn’t Kill Him,” Fall River (Massachusetts) Evening News, July 20, 1865: 2.

Drawn almost equally from the Empire, Gotham, Eagle, Knickerbocker, and Morrisania clubs, the New York nine included well-known names such as Charles DeBost and the relatively unknown Harry Wright. In Brooklyn’s case, the Atlantics had been the dominant 1857 club, but only three Atlantics started the first game, with the Excelsiors, Putnam, and Eckford also represented. Offensive prowess was apparently a criterion; two-thirds of the Brooklyn starters averaged more than three runs a game in 1857.[fn]Wright, Marshall D. The National Association of Base Ball Players, 1857-1870, (Jefferson, North Carolina, McFarland & Co, 2000), pp. 18-27; New York Clipper, July 24, 1858; Brooklyn Daily Eagle, July 21, 1858; New York Daily Tribune, July 21, 1858; Porter’s Spirit of the Times, June 19, 1858, July 3, 1858.[/fn]

A crowd estimated at between 4,000 and 10,000 was in place for the July 20 opener of the series. While newspaper coverage emphasized the “respectable” nature of the attendees, the “baser element” — gamblers and other purveyors of games of chance — were also present.[fn]Schaefer, Robert H. “The Great Base Ball Match of 1858,” Nine; New York Daily Tribune, July 21, 1858; New York Times, July 21, 1858; New York Clipper, July 24, 1858; Brooklyn Daily Eagle, July 22, 1858.[/fn]

As the game began, the odds offered by gamblers favored the Brooklyn team. This seemed to be confirmed by the early going. The Brooklynites led 3-0 after one inning, 5-1 after two and 7-3 going to the bottom of the fourth before New York rallied to tie things at 7-7. Brooklyn briefly regained the lead by scoring four times in the top of the fifth, but New York scored seven times in the bottom of the inning, taking a lead it wouldn’t relinquish. New York led 22-18 after eight innings and any hopes of a Brooklyn ninth-inning comeback were quickly dashed by “three brilliant catches” that “did their [Brooklyn’s] business.”[fn]New York Daily Tribune, July 21, 1858; New York Times, July 21, 1858; New York Clipper, July 24, 1858.[/fn]

New York’s pitcher, Theodore Van Cott, helped his own cause by scoring four times, with Hoyt (4 runs), Pinckney (3), Benson (3), and Wadsworth (3) also contributing offensively. Future Hall of Famer Harry Wright was, however, shut out. Van Cott threw 228 pitches, incredible by today’s standards, but was topped by Brooklyn’s Mattie O’Brien, who threw 264 pitches in only seven innings. Future Brooklyn great Joe Leggett scored only once and was replaced at catcher after he lost “two balls in succession.” Leggett’s poor performance led to his removal from the lineup for the rest of the series. Clearly the Excelsiors had fallen from grace as the other two members of the club were also dropped. Two more Atlantics were added for the second contest, including another future star, Dick Pearce, at shortstop. Like Leggett, Harry Wright was dropped from the lineup and didn’t appear again in the series.[fn]Brooklyn Daily Eagle, July 21/August 18, 1858; New York Daily Tribune, July 21, 1858; Porter’s Spirit of the Times, July 24, 1858.[/fn]

By the time of the August 17 rematch, some of the excitement had worn off, as evidenced by a somewhat smaller crowd. If there was less excitement, there was even less drama as Brooklyn was in complete charge. A porous New York defense helped. With two out in Brooklyn’s first and one run in, two fielding errors followed by some overthrows led to five more runs. With Brooklyn ahead 11-3 after three innings, further overthrows “too numerous to mention” contributed to six more runs for a 17-3 lead on the way to a 29-8 victory.[fn]New York Times, August 18, 1858; New York Daily Tribune, August 18, 1858, Brooklyn Daily Eagle, August 18, 1858.[/fn]

Not surprisingly, Brooklyn decided to stay with a winning combination after its easy second-game victory. The one substitution (Borum for Masten at catcher) was described as being due to the latter’s “unavoidable absence.” Masten’s loss was described as putting the New York players “in fine feather.” For its part, New York made wholesale changes, replacing two-thirds of the second-game lineup. Pitcher Van Cott was replaced by Dick Thorn; Van Cott reported being injured and didn’t want to “risk the match.”[fn]New York Times, September 11, 1858; Porter’s Spirit of the Times, September 18, 1858.[/fn]

As in the first two games, Brooklyn took an early lead in the September 10 contest, but New York answered with a seven-run first and led 15-6 after six innings. Brooklyn tallied four times in the seventh to close the gap to five runs, but New York matched that with five of its own in the bottom of the inning. The match ended with a 29-18 New York victory. New York’s optimism about Masten’s absence was apparently well-founded, as his replacement allowed 8 passed balls.[fn]Schafer, Robert H. “The Great Base Ball Match of 1858,” Nine; New York Times, September 11, 1858.[/fn]

The immediate result of the Fashion Course games was a New York triumph. As important as the result was at the time, the series had an even more important influence on base ball’s long-term development. The public’s willingness to pay to watch this relatively new game provided the most tangible proof possible of base ball’s growing popular appeal. The matches also marked the formal beginning of one of the most intense rivalries in sports history. Base ball competition between Brooklyn and New York took many forms, but for more than 100 years it provided great passion and drama. The Fashion Course games also marked a transition. While New York won the series, the Brooklyn teams would dominate the sport for the next decade and more. The difference was more than geographic. For the most part the Brooklyn clubs consisted of workingmen, very different from teams like the Knickerbockers, who were not “from the world of physical toil.” To some degree, the 1858 matches were the last hurrah of gentlemanly organizations like the Knickerbockers, Eagles, and Gothams. By winning, the New Yorkers honored their historic contributions. By agreeing to play against men from a different social class, they also contributed to baseball’s future expansion and popularity.[fn]Schafer, Robert H. “The Great Base Ball Match of 1858,” Nine; Ryczek, William J. First Inning: A History of the National Game Through the Civil War (Jefferson, North Carolina, McFarland & Co., 2009), p. 44.[/fn]

This essay was originally published in “Inventing Baseball: The 100 Greatest Games of the 19th Century” (2013), edited by Bill Felber. Download the SABR e-book by clicking here.

Fifteen New York area clubs convened in early 1857 and adopted almost all of the Knickerbocker rules as official, making what we call the New York rules. Later that same year, a young baseball enthusiast named Edward G. Saltzman moved from New York to Boston and began promoting this style of play. A former second baseman for the Gothams of New York, a rival of the Knickerbockers, Saltzman soon formed the first club in New England dedicated to playing the New York game — the Tri-Mountains of Boston (named after the three hills that dominated the early Boston skyline).[fn]Brian McKenna. “Edward G. Saltzman, Baseball Pioneer.” http://www.baseballhistoryblog.com, July 1, 2010.[/fn]

On May 13, 1858, ten Massachusetts clubs met in Dedham, Mass., to form the Massachusetts Association of Base Ball Players and to codify their regulations. The Tri-Mountains advocated the adoption of the New York rules but were voted down, and the rules of the Massachusetts Game became official in the region.[fn]Ibid.[/fn]

The Tri-Mountains could not find another club to face them on the field, so they spent more than a year practicing and playing intrasquad games. No one else in the area played by the New York rules, and no one from New York would make the trip to Massachusetts to oppose them. At last the Portland Club, Maine’s first organized team[fn]Harry Gratwick. Hidden History of Maine. (Charleston, South Carolina: The History Press, 2010).[/fn], agreed to travel to Boston for a match. On September 9, 1858, the two teams met on Boston Common in the first recorded game played in New England under the New York rules. The following day the Boston Herald ran this account of the contest:

An Interesting Game of Base Ball on the Common –
The Portland Club of Portland, Me., vs. the Tri-Mountain Club of Boston

A very closely contested game of base ball was played on the Common in this city yesterday afternoon, between the Portland Club of Portland, Me., and the Tri-Mountain Club of Boston. The game was that known as the New York game, and the Portland boys won by five runs. The rules of the New York game differ materially from those adopted by the Massachusetts Association of Base Ball Players last fall. The bases are placed at the angles of a rhombus instead of a square, the home base being the position of the striker; provision is made for “foul hits,” and the ball is caught on the “bound” as well as on the “fly.” The game consists of nine innings instead of one hundred tallies, and the ball is pitched, not thrown.

The playing commenced about three o’clock, the Tri-Mountain Club having the first innings, and the ninth innings of the Portland Club was finished at a quarter to six. … The playing was witnessed by a large and interested crowd of spectators.[fn]“An Interesting Game of Base Ball on the Common—The Portland Club of Portland, Me. Vs the Tri-Mountain Club of Boston,” Boston Herald, September 10, 1858, reprinted in Troy Soos. Before the Curse: The Glory Days of New England Baseball, 1858-1918, rev. edition. (Jefferson, North Carolina: McFarland, 2006), p 163-164.[/fn]

A half-century later, the New York Times republished an account of the game and added this note about the contest’s final runs:

The finish of the game was highly sensational.

It should be borne in mind that, at that time, a “home run” counted two.

When the score was “tied” for the last time, in the last half of the “ninth,” “Capt. Sidney” (who was then thirty years of age, weighed two hundred and thirty pounds, and was a steam-boat captain, in active service, between New York and Portland) went to bat with the bases full and two men out.

The fates allowed him to “knock a long fly,” which let the four of ’em around, scoring the five extra runs.[fn]“A Baseball Story of Long Ago—The Oldest Ball: Note The Difference Bteween the Account of This Game in 1858 and the Victory of the New York Americans Over Washington Yesterday.” New York Times, April 25, 1909.[/fn]

The popularity of the New York game steadily grew in New England, and by September 1859 there were 13 clubs in Massachusetts that played according to those rules.[fn]William J. Ryczek. Baseball’s First Inning: A History of the National Pastime through the Civil War. (Jefferson, North Carolina: McFarland, 2009).[/fn] The New York rules continued to spread for a variety of reasons, which brought together teams from all parts of the Union. In 1865 one of the nation’s leading sports weeklies predicted the demise of the Massachusetts game and emergence of the New York rules — a prediction that soon proved true:

The National Association or “New-York game” is now almost universally adopted by the Clubs all over the country; and the Massachusetts, and still more ancient style of playing familiar to any school-boy, called “town ball,” will soon become obsolete. No lover of the pastime can regret this, as the New-York mode is superior and more attractive in every way ; and better calculated to perpetuate and render “our national game” an “institution” with both “young and old America.”[fn]Wilkes’ Spirit of the Times, March 18, 1865.[/fn]

This essay was originally published in “Inventing Baseball: The 100 Greatest Games of the 19th Century” (2013), edited by Bill Felber. Download the SABR e-book by clicking here.

The conduct of such an experimental “fly” game had its impetus from a desire in the mid-1850s by the Knickerbockers to change the rules of the game “from the easy mode in which they have hitherto played it.”3 They were particularly uncomfortable with the “bound” out counted as an out any ball caught on one bounce.

The desire to update the rules led to the holding of a convention of New York and Brooklyn ball clubs in Manhattan on Feb 25, 1857. The Knickerbockers proposed, according to the New York Clipper, abolishing the bound out in order to make the game “more manly and scientific.” Other players, particularly younger ones who had only begun playing in the mid-1850s, argued that such a rule change would make the game of base ball “too much like Cricket” and that balls caught on the fly rather than the bound “would hurt the hands more. A compromise proposed by the bound advocates was unanimously adopted. The bound out continued to be permitted under the proposed new rule: “[The striker is out] if a fair ball is struck, and the ball is caught either without having touched the ground or upon the first bound.” But as an inducement for players to attempt to catch the ball on the fly, the committee also proposed that “if a man was caught out before the ball touched the ground, that then the players who were running to the different bases, or home, could neither make an Ace nor Base, but had to return to their original position.”

Although the Knickerbockers had failed to get the bound out excluded, they nevertheless forbade it during their intra-club practice games. In early 1859, they were finally able to persuade another club, the Excelsiors of South Brooklyn, “between whom and themselves the most cordial sentiments of friendship exists,” to play an experimental club-vs.-club game that excluded the bound out. The quality of play during the first half, which had the Excelsiors leading 24-15 after five innings, was sloppy. The Sunday Mercury reported that “There was some very bad fielding, and wild throwing on both sides, and on the part of some of the Knickerbocker members, a want of judgment in disposing of the ball, was plainly discernable.” The last was perhaps best epitomized in the second inning, when, with one out and runners on second and third, the Knicks’ right fielder Samuel Kissam caught a fly ball struck by Edwin Russell of the Excelsiors and, “apparently forgetting himself, sent the ball to third base, instead of second (which the lead runner had left and was bound to return to).”4 The lost out would have terminated the inning without the Excelsiors scoring a run. Instead subsequent strikes by John Holder, Thomas Reynolds, and Harry Ditmas Polhemus brought in four runs.

The fielding noticeably improved in the latter half, however, and the play moved along so crisply that the 26-22 Excelsior victory became the shortest on record in terms of time — two hours and ten minutes. But while conceding the game was “in spots” very interesting, especially a ninth-inning rally by the Knickerbockers, a skeptical Mercury reporter failed to discern any aspects of the game that would make him prefer the new “fly” system:

“We do not think that any balls were caught on the fly that would not have been so caught under the regular rules, but there were several balls lost, which might, perhaps, have been caught upon the bound; and one or two pretty catches were made upon the bound (one by Mr. [James Whyte] Davis) which, of course, did not count. Had the game been one governed by the regular rules of catching, our impression is that it would have been much more pleasing, and certainly shorter by several runs.5

In contrast, positive assessments of the “fly” game —probably written by Henry Chadwick — appeared nearly a week later in Porter’s Spirit of the Times and in the New York Clipper.6 The Porter’s account found that the experimental “fly” game

“was such as to satisfy any unprejudiced mind of the superiority, in every respect, of the [fly] method. In fact … but for the catch on the bound, which so often gives rise to a display in the field unworthy the efforts of the merest tyro, we should certainly claim for base-ball the merit of affording more frequent opportunities for brilliant fielding in one match, than can be had in a dozen cricket matches.”

Despite confident predictions in the Porter’s and Clipper accounts that the next convention of the National Association of Base Ball Players would surely eliminate the bound out, that action would not come to pass until December of 1864, when the thinning out of weaker and older clubs finally reduced sufficiently the conservative opposition to a rule change.7 In the meantime, however, other clubs, inspired by these experimental games, began testing and/or even regularly playing the “fly” game during the next few years.8

This essay was originally published in “Inventing Baseball: The 100 Greatest Games of the 19th Century” (2013), edited by Bill Felber. Download the SABR e-book by clicking here.

Notes

This made the two schools fit opponents on July 1, 1859, for the first intercollegiate baseball game. The Williams–Amherst game was played by Massachusetts Rules, a wide-open form of the sport commonly known as roundball, in which all ground was fair, runners could be put out by being hit by a thrown ball, and a single out ended each inning. A game consisted of an indeterminate number of frames, since the winning side would be the first to reach a pre-established score.

This would explain the lopsided 73-32 trouncing Amherst gave Williams, exceeding the agreed-upon 65-run limit during a 10-run 26th inning. But since the innings were all one-out long, the game, which took 3½ hours to play, in one respect pretty much equaled a modern game. There were only two fewer outs recorded than in a modern nine-inning contest.

The challenge match required considerable negotiation, including a June meeting on neutral ground at a small railside town between the two colleges at which representatives worked out arrangements.[fn]Amherst Express “extra edition,” July 1-2, 1859.[/fn]

A neutral site in Pittsfield, 20 miles from Williamstown, was selected. This was not just a game, but a two-day social event that included a banquet and a chess match between the schools. The Williams student body insisted on the chess match on July 2 to provide “a trial of mind as well as muscle.”[fn]Ibid.[/fn]

In a nice touch, the game site was next to the Maplewood Young Ladies Institute, a finishing school. The Maplewood girls turned out in great numbers, the first clue to their interest being “a silken flag suspended from the balcony of the Institute … intimating that bright eyes would look on the contest.”[fn]Berkshire County Eagle, July 8, 1859.[/fn]

The Amherst student body had been playing ball for at least a year.[fn]George Rugger Cutting, Student Life at Amherst College, Its Organizations, Their Membership and History. (Amherst: Hatch & Williams,) p. 113.[/fn] Although Williams men had also been playing, Amherst was clearly the better prepared. Williams baserunners enthusiastically ran themselves into avoidable outs (half of their 26 outs occurred on the basepaths, as against only seven for Amherst), and “in passing in, they threw too wildly, each where he pleased.”[fn]Amherst Express, July 1-2, 1859.[/fn] In other words, the Williams outfielders missed the cutoff man many times.

The performance of the leadoff batter, Amherst senior James Claflin, was a tipoff to that team’s edge in experience. He hit a first-inning home run on a “back hit,” a tricky variation in which a batter would swing backwards with the flight of the pitched ball, put it into play to the rear, where there were few fielders, and run the bases, since there was no foul territory under Massachusetts rules.

Williams actually scored nine runs in the second inning, but Amherst came back with eight in the third and never then trailed, putting the game away with 12-run bursts in the fourth and 16th innings.

The “science” of batting order formation undoubtedly hadn’t been developed yet, but Amherst, possibly by sheer chance, had its lineup stacked for maximum production. Its first four hitters, Claflin, Edward Pierce, Sam Storrs, and Frank Tower, scored 26 “tallies” and accounted for only four outs, while Williams’ first four made 15 outs and produced only five runs.

Amherst’s “thrower,” Henry Hyde, a sophomore, pitched a complete game with such gusto that a rumor began circulating among the spectators that he was actually a “ringer” of sorts, the college’s blacksmith, since “nobody but a blacksmith could throw in such a fashion for three-and-a-half-hours.”[fn]Ibid.[/fn]

Amherst’s account of the game provided exact specifications for its ball (2.5 ounces in weight and 6.5 inches in circumference) and estimated the Williams ball at about the same.[fn]Ibid.[/fn] A modern-day baseball weighs at least twice that and is about 50 percent larger around. Mathematics and physics dictate that a present-day ball is harder than the balls used in Pittsfield that day. While that was good for the baserunners who were put out by being hit by throws, it would have cut down on the long ball and strong throws from fielders.

Both teams were feted that evening by their Pittsfield hosts, where the Williams players presented their game ball as a trophy to the Amherst team. Both balls are still displayed, side by side, in a glass case at Amherst. The next day Amherst, with Claflin one of its three players, also won the chess match, Williams resigning on the 48th move.

Almost all of the 26 collegians playing in the first game went on to graduate from Amherst, Williams, or some other school. Claflin, the only man to participate in both the baseball and chess competitions, went into education and wound up a high-school principal and state representative in Chicago. Pierce, the first of the three productive hitters behind him, eventually became city administrator and police chief in New Orleans.[fn]Chicago Daily Tribune, October 2, 1891 (Claflin); Obituary Record of Graduates and Non-Graduates of Amherst College for Academic Year Ending June 20, 1917. Amherst: Published by the College, 1917, p. 340 (Pierce).[/fn]

The Civil War was just over history’s horizon as the young men played that day, and at least 11 of them served the Union cause as officers or doctors before war’s end. The Williams starting thrower, Robert Edes Beecher, a nephew of the famous abolitionist preacher Henry Ward Beecher, became a lieutenant colonel in the Union Army.[fn]New York Times, March 29, 1920.[/fn]

One player from each side died in the war. Henry Gridley of Amherst, a lieutenant with a New York infantry regiment, was shot dead on a Georgia battlefield in 1864.[fn]Charles E. Benton, As Seen from the Ranks, A Boy in the Civil War. (New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1902,) p. 102.[/fn] George Alanson Parker of Williams became a naval doctor and died on shipboard that same year of a fever contracted from sailors he was treating.[fn]Catalogue of the Sigma Phi. Printed for the Society, 1891, p. 255.[/fn]

Amherst and Williams students continued playing ball, and today they are rivals in the New England Small College Athletic Conference. Along with a third prestigious private college, Wesleyan in Connecticut, they form the Little Three within NESCAC. As the Williams Athletic Department puts it, “There are at least two athletic seasons for each Williams varsity team, the regular season and the Little Three.”[fn]www.athletics.williams.edu/The_Little_Three (accessed April 1, 2011).[/fn]

This essay was originally published in “Inventing Baseball: The 100 Greatest Games of the 19th Century” (2013), edited by Bill Felber. Download the SABR e-book by clicking here.

HURRAH FOR THE EXCELSIORS!
Come my lads and listen
To what I now relate,
How Upton was defeated
By the Champions of the State.
Give ear unto my ditty,
It will contain no lie,
How Medway boys got leave
To sing, Root, Hog, or Die.

The base ball game played at Worcester on October 11 and 12, 1859 was a rematch, but it was more of a grudge match. The game played the previous July at Ashland with the Medway Unions ended badly, the score 100 to 78, and unfairly according to the Upton Excelsiors. Allegations that gamblers tampered with one or two of the Upton players who were allegedly offered $500 to manage an Excelsior loss — a charge denied — left the “Championship of the State” unresolved in the minds of the Excelsiors and their loyal fans. In order to set things right, repair Upton’s reputation, or deny the Medway club any more glory, the Mechanics’ club of Worcester offered a $500 prize for the match game to settle the championship.

The Upton Excelsiors Base Ball Club, as was the Medway Union Club, was made up of farmers, storekeepers and clerks who gathered after work afternoons and Saturdays to practice the game once known as round ball and subsequently the Massachusetts game of base ball as codified at the Dedham Convention of 1858. Fourteen players comprised a team, the four bases were arranged in a square and they were marked by four large sticks driven into the ground.

The Upton players were renowned for their skill at catching a base by their hands, swinging around them with force enough to throw themselves completely through the air, and leaping flamboyantly forward to the next base. From the beginning, the Upton club enjoyed a reputation as one of the most prominent ball clubs in Massachusetts.

“Tip” Norcross, as Upton town history records, was the first ball player to introduce the art of sliding to bases in a ball game, and it came about this way: In round ball, as with the Massachusetts game of base ball, “spotting” was allowed and a runner between the bases could be “touched out” with the ball. Norcross started the art of sliding to a base when he saw an opposing player starting to “spot” him and was able to deftly avoid the throw.

Publicity for the game reached all the way from Boston to Springfield, and even caught the attention of the New York Herald, which would later report that the game was “witnessed on both days by a large and enthusiastic crowd, among whom were many ladies.” A parade that included the two clubs, the Grafton and Worcester clubs, along with a huge procession of fans headed up by Fiske’s Cornet Band arrived at the Worcester Agricultural Grounds, where a crowd estimated at more than 6,000 spectators bought tickets, while another thousand avoided the admission fee and tried to catch a glimpse of the game from outside the gates.

CHORUS – Hurrah for the Excelsiors!
Their science and their skill!
In Ashland, where the game was played,
The Unions got their fill.
They can’t compete with Upton,
Our boys do her defy.
Big Pig, Little Pig,
Root, Hog, or Die.

Every mode of transportation was commandeered to bring people to Worcester, and many walked the 15 miles. Loyalties were evenly divided as all the towns north of Upton, including Worcester and the Brookfields, were solidly for the Excelsiors while towns south of Upton, including Milford, Holliston and Franklin, were solidly with the Medway club. The Upton team arrived in Worcester a day before the game and was kept closely guarded in its hotel. One star player almost didn’t get to Worcester in time. He had hay to get in on his farm. When word got out he was not with the club, a man was sent to the farm to get the job done for him.

The game was for 100 tallies, with play commencing at 10 o’clock on the morning of October 11. Upton won the first innings and went out after making one tally. Medway jumped ahead with 4 tallies. At 12:30, the game stopped while the players had lunch delivered to the grounds from the Bay State House. At the end of the day’s play at 5 o’clock, the score was Upton 67, Medway 33.

The game resumed the next day with the Unions making things lively by scoring 10 tallies in one hour’s time to Upton’s 4. Eight innings were played before either team scored again, and the score was Upton 71, Medway 43. After an hour, Upton surged ahead, adding 11 more tallies while Medway was held to only 3 more. At 2 o’clock, with the score standing at 84 to 55, the players stopped for lunch.

The Excelsiors appeared to have benefitted more from the break, for they scored 16 tallies in less than an hour. The final 100 to 56 score rewarded them with the $500 prize, the championship of Massachusetts and the victory banner that is still to this day in possession of the Town of Upton. The prize money, the Worcester Spy reported, was by previous arrangement divided between the two clubs, the Excelsiors getting $300, and the Unions receiving $200. The Excelsiors also claimed the Championship of the United States, as a “Western club” later refused to play them for a $500 prize.

The Massachusetts Spy heaped praise on the Excelsiors. The game had “fully justified the opinion held by many who all along considered the Excelsior Club to be superior in science and skill.” It noted rumors that one of their players had been offered $500 to throw the game, but said the offer was “rejected with scorn.” And furthermore, “Upton’s command of the ball was wonderful. There was something magical in the certainty with which the ball was present at any point where it was wanted. And the Excelsiors are scarcely less admirable as batsmen. Their pre-eminence is fully established; and, henceforth, no one is likely to dispute it with success.”

Yes, indeed, magical.

Against the odds, in crowd and judge,
Did Upton fight that day,
They won respect from every one
Who came to see them play.
“Excelsior,” their motto,
Perfection is their aim,
They’re bound to fight another day,
And if they’re whipped, Die, Game.

— Anonymous, 1859.

This essay was originally published in “Inventing Baseball: The 100 Greatest Games of the 19th Century” (2013), edited by Bill Felber. Download the SABR e-book by clicking here.