1872.1
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Prince Bismarck Takes in a Ball Game in Berlin
| Salience | Peripheral |
|---|---|
| Tags | FamousFamous |
| Location | |
| City/State/Country: | Berlin, Germany |
| Modern Address | |
| Game | BaseballBaseball |
| Immediacy of Report | Contemporary |
| Age of Players | AdultAdult |
| Holiday | |
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| Text | From John Thorn's Our Game, forwarded 11/17/20: When Bismarck Went to the Ball GameThis story comes to me via Paul H.D. Kaplan, Professor of Art History, State University of New York, Purchase, and author of a great new article on the subject of baseball sculpture, which fascinates me; I encourage you to read it (http://journalpanorama.org/marmorean-ballplayer-sheriff-john-mcnamee-of-brooklyn-and-his-sculptural-career-in-florence/).
While poking around in a now forgotten (and not yet digitized) American weekly newspaper published in Paris and London, The American Register, beginning in the 1860s, Kaplan found “another interesting piece about early transatlantic baseball, that as far as I can tell hasn’t appeared in modern scholarship.” The American Register, April 13, 1872, p. 3: “Base Ball in Berlin” from our own correspondent. Berlin April 7. “With the return of spring and sunshine has come a revival of the interest so universally manifested by Americans, whether at home or abroad, in their great national game — base ball. An occasional game at the Hippodrome — a large field, situated between Berlin and Charlottenburg, which his Imperial Highness, the Crown Prince of Prussia, has kindly accorded as a ball ground — finally resulted in a match, which was played on Tuesday afternoon last, in the presence of a large throng of spectators. Prince Bismarck and son, Gen. Vogel von Falkenstein, and many officers of the staff attended.” The piece then goes on to describe one ball hit so well it went 300–400 meters [!] and hit the horse of an officer; the horse is said to have thought it was a French bullet and reared. There is also a lot about organizing other games in Germany. (Josh Chetwynd, in his Baseball in Europe, dates the earliest game in Germany to 1909.) I just love the idea of Bismarck showing up at this game. [Note: Bruce Allardice cites, at Protoball.org, a game played in Dresden on July 14, 1869, between two clubs composed of Americans, mostly students. — jt] --- Schlagball, a primordial form of long ball, may date to the middle ages, yet a national schlagball championship was played as recently as 1954. For more, see: http://protoball.org/Schlagball. But the game that Otto von Bismarck viewed was neither schlagball nor das Englische Base-ball; it was good old (really, not so old) American baseball.
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| Sources | Our Game, John Thorn, November 2017. |
| Warning | |
| Comment | For more on Bruce Allardice's find on the 1869 game, see Union_v_American_in_Dresden_on_14_July_1869 For more on the earliest base ball in Germany, see Germany. Edit with form to add a comment |
| Query | Edit with form to add a query |
| Source Image | [[Image:|left|thumb]] |
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1872.1 Prince Bismarck Takes in a Ball Game in Berlin"
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