Chronology:NYC
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1811.7 Cause of Death: "Surfeit of Playing Ball"
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"DIED. Last Evening of surfeit, playing ball, M[r] John McKibben, merchant of this city."
Sources:
New York Spectator, September 11, 1811, page 2.
Comment:
John Thorn adds: "It is surely a coincidence that John McKibbin, Jr. was president of the Magnolia Ball Club of 1843, about which I have written. The Magnolias' McKibbin and his father were born in Ireland.
Year
1811
1821.5 NY Mansion Converted to Venue Suitable for Base, Cricket, Trap-Ball
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In May and June 1821, an ad ran in some NY papers announcing that the Mount Vernon mansion was now open as Kensington House. It could accommodate dinners and tea parties and clubs. What's more, later versions of the ad said: "The grounds of Kensington House are spacious and well adapted to the playing of the noble game of cricket, base, trap-ball, quoits and other amusements; and all the apparatus necessary for the above games will be furnished to clubs and parties."
Richard Hershberger posted to 19CBB on Kensington House on 10/7/2007, having seen the ad in the June 9, 1821 New YorkGazette and General Advertiser. Richard suggested that "in this context "base is almost certainly baseball, not prisoner's base." John Thorn [email of 3/1/2008] later found a May 22, 1821 Kensington ad in the Evening Post that did not mention sports, and ads starting on June 2 that did.
Richard points out that the ad's solicitation to "clubs and parties" may indicate that some local groups were forming to play the mentioned games long before the first base ball clubs are known to have played.
Sources:
June 9, 1821 New York Gazette and General Advertiser
See also Richard Hershberger, "New York Mansion Converted -- An Early Sighting of Base Ball Clubs?," Base Ball Journal, Volume 5, number 1 (Special Issue on Origins), pages 58-60.
Query:
Have we found any further indications that 1820-era establishments may have served to host regular base ball clubs?
Year
1821
1823.1 National Advocate Reports "Base Ball" Game in NYC
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The National Advocate of April 25, 1823, page 2, column 4, states: "I was last Saturday much pleased in witnessing a company of active young men playing the manly and athletic game of 'base ball' at the (Jones') Retreat in Broadway [on the west side of Broadway between what now is Washington Place and Eighth Street]. I am informed they are an organized association, and that a very interesting game will be played on Saturday next at the above place, to commence at half past 3 o'clock, P.M. Any person fond of witnessing this game may avail himself of seeing it played with consummate skill and wonderful dexterity.... It is surprising, and to be regretted that the young men of our city do not engage more in this manual sport; it is innocent amusement, and healthy exercise, attended with but little expense, and has no demoralizing tendency."
(Full text.)
Sources:
National Advocate, April 25, 1823, page 2, column 4. This find is discussed by its modern discoverer George Thompson, in George A. Thompson, Jr., "New York Baseball, 1823," The National Pastime 2001], pp 6 - 8.
Year
1823
1837.1 A Founder of the Gothams Remembers "First Ball Organization in the US"
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William R. Wheaton, who would several years later help found the Knickerbockers [and write their playing rules], described how the Gothams were formed and the changes they introduced. "We had to have a good outdoor game, and as the games then in vogue didn't suit us we decided to remodel three-cornered cat and make a new game. We first organized what we called the Gotham Baseball Club. This was the first ball organization in the United States, and it was completed in 1837.
"The first step we took in making baseball was to abolish the rule of throwing the ball at the runner and ordered instead that it should be thrown to the baseman instead, who had to touch the runner before he reached the base. During the [earlier] regime of three-cornered cat there were no regular bases, but only such permanent objects as a bedded boulder or and old stump, and often the diamond looked strangely like an irregular polygon. We laid out the ground at Madison Square in the form of an accurate diamond, with home-plate and sand bags for bases."
" . . . it was found necessary to reduce the new rules to writing. This work fell to my hands, and the code I them formulated is substantially that in use today. We abandoned the old rule of putting out on the first bound and confined it to fly catching."
"The new game quickly became very popular with New Yorkers, and the numbers of clubs 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."
See Full Text Below
Sources:
Brown, Randall, "How Baseball Began, National Pastime, 24 [2004], pp 51-54. Brown's article is based on the newly-discovered "How Baseball Began - A Member of the Gotham Club of Fifty Years Ago Tells About It, San Francisco Daily Examiner, November 27, 1887, page 14.
See also: Randall Brown, "The Evolution of the New York Game," Base Ball Journal, Volume 5, number 1 (Special Issue on Origins), pages 81-84.
Warning:
Note that while Wheaton calls his group the "first ball organization," in fact the Philadelphia club that played Philadelphia town ball had formed several years earlier.
Comment:
"Wheaton's 1837 Gotham rules may have resembled the Knickerbocker rules forged 8 years later. He said, in 1887, that "the code I then formulated is substantially that in use today" -- after a span of 5 decades. (In the meantime, however, the Knicks went back to using the bound rule.)"
Note: Brown knows that the unsigned article was written by Wheaton from internal evidence, such as the opening of the article, in the voice of an unnamed reporter: “An old pioneer, formerly a well-known lawyer and politician, now living in Oakland, related the following interesting history of how it originated to an EXAMINER reporter: ‘In the thirties I lived at the corner of Rutgers street and East Broadway in New York. I was admitted to the bar in ’36, and was very fond of physical exercise….’”
Wheaton wrote that the Gotham Club abandoned the bound rule . . . but if so, the Knickerbockers later re-instituted it, and it remained in effect until the 1860s.
Wheaton also recalled that the Knickerbockers at some point changed the base-running rule, which had dictated that whenever a batter "struck out" [made an out, we assume, as strikeouts came later], base-runners left the field. Under a new interpretation, runners only came in after the third out was recorded.
Year
1837
1847.20 In Harlem, Men Play 330- Minute Game of Single Wicket for $100 Stake
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"CRICKET. A match of single wicket was yesterday played at the Red House, Harlem,
between Messrs. Sams and Conroy, for $100. The game lasted five hours and a half. . . ."
Sources:
New York Herald, October 16, 1847, p. 2, col. 3.
Comment:
In 2022, Bruce Allardice is collecting single wicket games in the US for the PrePro data base.
Query:
[] Do we know of SWC was played for stakes in England?\
Yes. See http://www.cricketweb.net/the-single-wicket-game/
[] Do we have any notion of the rules governing two-player cricket?
Yes. See the glossary of games entry for SWC. [ba]
Year
1847
1871.14 Rival Assn of Amateur Players Forms: Includes Clubs from NY, Philly, Baltimore, Boston.
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"THE CONVENTION OF AMATEUR CLUBS IN BROOKLYN
A NATIONAL SSSOCIATION OF AMATEUR BASE BALL PLAYERS IS ESTABLISHED
CLUBS FROM NEW YORK, PHILADELPHIA, BALTIMORE AND BOSTON REPRESENTED
"Thursday, March 18, 1871 was an eventful day in the brief annals of the National game . . . there was a re-union of the amateur class of the fraternity . . ."
Participating clubs included Knickerbocker, Eagle, Gotham. Excelsior, Star, Olympic, Equity, Pastime and Harvard clubs."
Sources:
New York Clipper, March 25, 1871
Comment:
from Richard Hershberger, "150 Years Ago Today", 3/18/2021:
"[T]he formation of the National Association of Amateur Base Ball Players. This is the long-talked-about splinter organization, spinning off from the old National Association, which is deemed to be thoroughly infested with professionalism cooties.
Spoiler alert: We won't be talking about the new NAABBP very much down the road. It will stumble along for several years, but will be essentially irrelevant the whole while. Why not? It isn't as if amateur baseball will ever go away. Professional baseball has never accounted for more than a tiny fraction of all baseball played. It just attracts nearly all the attention."
Note: for Richard's full commentary, see Supplemental Text, below.
Query:
Was this new NAABP destined to tinker with the rules of play?
Year
1871
1872.11 In Rare Extramural Game, Knickerbockers Fade, Lose 26-17 in Base Ball Game with Cricketers
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"AMATEUR GAMES -- The Manhattan Cricket Club played baseball with the Knickerbockers on the 28th [August 1872] . . . . The game was close till the eight inning, when the cricketers got in a streak of batting and the Knicks had to field one short . . . "
Sources:
New York Sunday Mercury, September 1, 1872.
Comment:
Richard Hershberger, 150 years ago today in baseball:
The Manhattan Cricket Club beats the Knickerbocker Base Ball Club 26-17. To be absolutely clear, they were playing baseball. Cricket and baseball clubs playing one another in one or both games was an established practice in this era. Generally the baseball team won at baseball and the cricket team won at cricket. When a team won at the other's game it usually was a case of ridiculously great disparity of athleticism. Imagine a modern MLB team, given a reasonable time to learn the rudiments, playing a rec league amateur cricket team. Or, taking it the other direction, an India Premier League team playing an American rec league baseball team.
This provides the explanation for the Knickerbockers' loss: They were really, really Not Good. Indeed, they never had been, except for a few years in the mid-1850s when their greater experience sufficed to make them respectable. In their defense, they weren't trying to be good. They were trying to combine exercise and socializing. They were generally successful at this. But on the rare occasions they played an outside game, the results could be ugly.
Query:
[] Do we recognize any Knickerbocker players in this 1872 line-up?
[] Was it common to call the club "The Knicks" in 1872?
Year
1872