1872.1: Difference between revisions

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|Year Suffix=
|Year Suffix=
|Year Number=1
|Year Number=1
|Headline=Chadwick Wants Pitching Rules Changed; Opens Door to Curve Ball?
|Headline=Forest City Club Lists Player Duties, Role of Team Captain, Etc.
|Salience=1
|Salience=3
|Tags=Base Ball Stratagems,  
|Tags=Base Ball Stratagems,  
|Location=
|Location=
|Country=United States
|Country=United States
|Coordinates=40.7127753, -74.0059728
|Coordinates=41.49932, -81.6943605
|State=
|State=OH
|City=New York
|City=Cleveland
|Modern Address=
|Modern Address=
|Game=Base Ball
|Game=Base Ball
Line 17: Line 17:
|Holiday=
|Holiday=
|Notables=
|Notables=
|Text=<p>"PITCHING VS. THROWING: WHAT IS A SQUARE PITCH?</p>
|Text=<p>"1.&nbsp; THE CAPTAIN.&nbsp; The captain of the club shall be elected by the board of directors and shall serve at their pleasure. . . .</p>
<p>The time has arrived when the code of rules n base ball should no longer be burdened with any dead letter laws [including]&nbsp; that which requires the pitcher to confine himself to the simple act of 'pitching.'</p>
<p>3. No member of the club will be excused from practice or play unless upon a written certificate from Dr. N. B. Prentice . . .&nbsp;</p>
<p>[. . . discusses evolution of base ball delivery, and how faster pitches, including 'lightning throws,' and suggests that such were&nbsp; necessary to the full development of the game']</p>
<p>6. No member of the club shall accept any gift of money to lose or assist in losing a game and violation of this rule and will subject the member to be expelled in disgrace. . . .&nbsp;</p>
<p>[T]he rules should be cleared of he prohibition of throwing the ball to the bat, at least to the extent of allowing any delivery except that of an overhand or raised hand throw."</p>
<p>8.&nbsp; . . . No member will be allowed to use the uniform of another player without the permission of the owner.</p>
<p><em>See full text below</em></p>
<p>&nbsp;&nbsp;</p>
|Sources=<p><em>New York Clipper,</em> February 17, 1872:&nbsp;</p>
|Sources=<p><em>Cleveland Plain Dealer,&nbsp;</em>3/9/1872.</p>
|Warning=
|Warning=
|Comment=<p><span><span>Richard Hershberger summarizes, (FB posting, 2/17/2022):</span></span></p>
|Comment=<p><span><span>&nbsp;</span></span></p>
<p><span><span>&nbsp;</span></span></p>
<p><span><span>Richard Hershberger posted the following, 3/10/2022:</span></span></p>
<p><span><span>"150 years ago in baseball: Chadwick advocating a loosening of the pitch delivery rules. This will happen, but the timing will be complicated, and a subject for another day. Today we look at Chad's argument.</span><br /><br /><span>His claim is that pitchers have been routinely violating the delivery rules since Creighton's day, over a decade earlier. He makes the argument that the rules should be brought into alignment with reality.</span><br /><br /><span>This argument is reasonable on its face, but very peculiar coming from Chadwick. First off, his discussion about the elbow and the wrist is partially off point. There was an ongoing discussion in cricket whether the wrist was involved in a "throw." The eventual consensus was that it is not, allowing for spin bowling. Baseball arrived at the same conclusion, and in fact had five years earlier. The 1867 rules added language defining what was a "throw," discussing the elbow but with no mention of the wrist. Chadwick was on the rules committee that recommended this, yet here he is writing as if he did not know the rule.</span><br /><br /><span>It gets worse. He argues that pitchers have been illegally throwing the ball for over a decade, but he never thought to mention this before this year, despite having the bully pulpit as the rules guy published in multiple venues, and the cricket background to understand the issue. And we have to figure that he was one of the two or three persons who heard Lillywhite's comment. This is,, so far as I know, the earliest mention of that comment, here thirteen years later (Chad having misremembered that the cricket visit was in 1859). Yet only know does he tell us about it.</span><br /><br /><span>What changed? This being Chad, he might had sat up in the middle of the night, turned to his wife, said "Gadzooks! They are throwing the ball!" and ran with it from there. This doesn't seem to match with any of his usual ideological priors. It seems pretty random. This might also seem like a trivial discussion of an obscure obsolete rule, but it in fact will be hugely important to the development the game, opening the door to modern overhand and curve ball pitching. More on this later."&nbsp;</span></span></p>
<p><span><span><em>150 years ago in baseball</em>: the Rules and Regulations adopted by the Forest City Club of Cleveland for its players. It rather jumps out that they felt it necessary to specify that players weren't allowed to throw games for money, with the penalty of being "expelled in disgrace."</span><br /><br /><span>But the topic for today's sermon is the <strong>role of the captain</strong>. This touches on a persistent modern misunderstanding of the early professional era. Look at the list of the captain's responsibilities and this looks similar to the modern field manager. Look up the 1872 Forest City club and you will find two "managers" listed: Scott Hastings, going 6-14 and Deacon White going 0-2. (The team was, it turns out, not good, and won't last the season.) They actually were the captains. The "manager" in this era was a different role. The details varied, but the manager typically was in charge of the business side of things: supervised the gate on game day, made travel arrangements on the road, and so on. Sometimes the manager was in charge of hiring and firing players, making him more like the modern general manager.</span><br /><br /><span>The captain always was a player. The manager usually was not, but there were a few exceptions such as Harry Wright. Here in 1872 not all teams had a full time manager, the officers running things directly. Later this summer when the Forest City team goes on a trip, a report identifies the "manager" for that trip, meaning the guy who will corral the players get them from city to city. Within a few years the job will have grown to a full time position, nearly always held by someone hired specifically for that job.</span><br /><br /><span>The problem is that the modern listings of managers are a mess for the 19th century. We have this modern concept of what is a "manager"--Earl Weaver or Billy Martin and so on--and we try to impose this model on the past. So some researcher reads a report with the captain doing stuff we expect of a modern manager, and lists that guy as the manager. Or a researcher sees some other guy called the "manager" and lists him. This eventually got distilled down to a standard list, with the two roles jumbled together in an incoherent mess. The moral is that if we want to understand what was going on, we have to set aside modern understandings of how these things work.</span></span></p>
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|Query=<p>Do we know if there are interesting variants in other clubs' rules?&nbsp;</p>
<p><span>&nbsp;</span></p>
|Source Image=Forest City Club Rules 1872.jpg
|Query=
|Source Image=chad on pitching rules.jpeg
|External Number=
|External Number=
|Submitted by=Richard Hershberger
|Submitted by=Richard Hershberger
|Submission Note=FB posting, 2/17/2022
|Submission Note=FB posting, 3/9/2022
|Reviewed=Yes
|Reviewed=Yes
|Has Supplemental Text=No
|Has Supplemental Text=No
}}
}}

Latest revision as of 13:39, 10 March 2022

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Forest City Club Lists Player Duties, Role of Team Captain, Etc.

Salience Peripheral
Tags Base Ball Stratagems
City/State/Country: Cleveland, OH, United States
Game Base Ball
Immediacy of Report Contemporary
Age of Players Adult
Text

"1.  THE CAPTAIN.  The captain of the club shall be elected by the board of directors and shall serve at their pleasure. . . .

3. No member of the club will be excused from practice or play unless upon a written certificate from Dr. N. B. Prentice . . . 

6. No member of the club shall accept any gift of money to lose or assist in losing a game and violation of this rule and will subject the member to be expelled in disgrace. . . . 

8.  . . . No member will be allowed to use the uniform of another player without the permission of the owner.

  

Sources

Cleveland Plain Dealer, 3/9/1872.

Comment

 

Richard Hershberger posted the following, 3/10/2022:

150 years ago in baseball: the Rules and Regulations adopted by the Forest City Club of Cleveland for its players. It rather jumps out that they felt it necessary to specify that players weren't allowed to throw games for money, with the penalty of being "expelled in disgrace."

But the topic for today's sermon is the role of the captain. This touches on a persistent modern misunderstanding of the early professional era. Look at the list of the captain's responsibilities and this looks similar to the modern field manager. Look up the 1872 Forest City club and you will find two "managers" listed: Scott Hastings, going 6-14 and Deacon White going 0-2. (The team was, it turns out, not good, and won't last the season.) They actually were the captains. The "manager" in this era was a different role. The details varied, but the manager typically was in charge of the business side of things: supervised the gate on game day, made travel arrangements on the road, and so on. Sometimes the manager was in charge of hiring and firing players, making him more like the modern general manager.

The captain always was a player. The manager usually was not, but there were a few exceptions such as Harry Wright. Here in 1872 not all teams had a full time manager, the officers running things directly. Later this summer when the Forest City team goes on a trip, a report identifies the "manager" for that trip, meaning the guy who will corral the players get them from city to city. Within a few years the job will have grown to a full time position, nearly always held by someone hired specifically for that job.

The problem is that the modern listings of managers are a mess for the 19th century. We have this modern concept of what is a "manager"--Earl Weaver or Billy Martin and so on--and we try to impose this model on the past. So some researcher reads a report with the captain doing stuff we expect of a modern manager, and lists that guy as the manager. Or a researcher sees some other guy called the "manager" and lists him. This eventually got distilled down to a standard list, with the two roles jumbled together in an incoherent mess. The moral is that if we want to understand what was going on, we have to set aside modern understandings of how these things work.

Edit with form to add a comment
Query

Do we know if there are interesting variants in other clubs' rules? 

Edit with form to add a query
Source Image
Forest City Club Rules 1872.jpg
Submitted by Richard Hershberger
Submission Note FB posting, 3/9/2022


Comments

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