A baseball-themed political cartoon from 1860, when baseball was far more popular in the East and North than elsewhere. How exactly the Civil War helped, hurt or otherwise affected the young sport of baseball is a difficult historical question. We have many anecdotes about baseball games played by Union troops, Confederate troops — even some between the two. But most of these were published decades after the fact, when hearts and minds and softened. That matters. Here is an example. In his 1899 memoir Captain John G. B. Adams of the 19th Massachusetts tells the story of a Civil War “baseball ..read more

The earliest baseball clubs in Canada were founded in cities along the Great Western Railway, which brought thousands of New Yorkers and other Americans to the Midwest. The spread of baseball beyond the New York metropolitan area in the 1850s and 1860s was a railroad story. The first railroad lines were local; they were designed not to connect to other lines in other places. American bat and ball games (including baseball, town ball and the Massachusetts game) also began as local, unconnected subcultures, peculiar to their own cities or regions. But both were systematized, standardized and or ..read more

Baseball’s ethnic, racial and religious ancestry can be summed up in one sentence. The overwhelming majority of Amateur Era (pre-1871) baseball players that we know anything about were native-born white American Protestants. The place to look for the reason is baseball’s birthplace, New York City, and its homeland, mid-19th-century America. Doggett’s city directory of 1845/46 gives a picture of New York City’s religious makeup at the time of baseball’s emergence as an adult sport. It makes pretty surprising reading for those of us who think of New York as a place of diversity and a haven for ..read more

Me: Explain how baseball originated. ChatGPT: Baseball originated in the United States in the late 18th century. It is believed to have evolved from a game called rounders, which was played in England. The modern version of baseball as we know it today began to take shape in the early 19th century, with the first set of rules and regulations being established in 1845. The game quickly grew in popularity and by the late 19th century, it had become the national pastime in the United States. Me: The first sentence is pure conjecture. The second is untrue. The third contains a falsehood -- the fir ..read more

A. T. Pearsall of the Excelsiors (second from right): first baseman, physician, and friend of Alexander Babcock Counting both sides, a total of more than three million soldiers fought in the Civil War. Alexander Babcock was two of them. Alexander Babcock was the brother of William Babcock, a founding member of the Atlantic baseball club of Brooklyn, baseball’s first dynasty and the winningest club of the pre-professional era. In the 1850s both men worked as engravers, lived in Brooklyn, and played for the Atlantics. Like thousands of their fellow baseball players, when the Civil War broke out ..read more

An 1860s gold pocket watch that was not stolen by Patsy Dockney In May of 1866 newspaper publisher Colonel Thomas Fitzgerald surprised the baseball world by resigning as president of the Athletics. Cofounded by Fitzgerald, the Athletics were the most successful baseball club in Philadelphia and a contender for the national championship. Readers of his newspaper, the City Item, soon learned why Fitzgerald had quit – he disapproved of the Athletics’ use of “hired men,” or mercenaries. Nowadays, of course, the best baseball clubs are professional, and their players are all “hired men.” But baseb ..read more

Luis “Jud” “Manuel” “Miguel” “MIchael” Joaquin Bonifacio Castro Vasquez Who was the first MLB player born in a Spanish-speaking country? For a long time, the answer to this question has depended on who you ask. Was it Esteban Bellan or any of the other Cubans who played in the National Association — the first U.S. professional baseball league, which lasted from 1871 to 1875? Not according to MLB, which decided a long time ago that the NA didn’t count as a major league. MLB is the majors — but does it get to decide retroactively what historical leagues are or aren’t “major league”? I guess so ..read more

Mr. Leggett was trusted too soon after his operation in the fire department.                                                                        --Brooklyn Daily Eagle, December 22, 1877 In pre-Civil War baseball, playing the position of cat ..read more

Once upon a time, a sportswriter criticized the batters of the New York Knickerbockers for upper-cutting the ball. “No club,” he wrote, “strikes with greater power, but from their habit of striking high, they give too many chances for such excellent clubs as the Gotham and Eagle.” The strictly amateur New York Knickerbockers, founded in 1845, were one of the earliest known baseball clubs. The above quotation is from Porter’s Spirit of the Times, a national sports weekly; it was written in 1856. It may be that he was right, that outfield defense had improved to the point that too many of the Kn ..read more

The story of James Creighton is the oldest and saddest one in the baseball book. Creighton, who became baseball’s first national star in the early 1860s, possessed the game’s most indispensable skill, the ability to get good hitters out. The rare players who can do that have been overworked and abused for 150 years. Every time they take the mound, modern pitchers are doing what James Creighton was the first to do -- walk a tightrope between making effective pitches and injuring themselves. Sometimes they fall off the tightrope. Today, it hardly makes news when an exhausted, overworked pitcher ..read more