Welcome to Protoball

Supporting Researchers and Writers on Baseball’s Origins.

Current Resources

The Protoball Chronologies will cover the evolution of ballgames from Ancient Times to 1870, just before the first professional baseball league began. At present, data are entered through 1862.

The Games Tabulation (version 1.0) is a record of over 1600 ballgames in various parts of the US from 1845 to 1860 compiled by the late Craig Waff᾿s extensive research.

1859 Base Ball Players’ Pocket Companion

The Glossary of Games provides a short description of 329 baseball-like games. The Glossary includes baseball's likely predecessor games and later games that derive from baseball.

The Bibliography is a list of publications you can use to explore the origins of ball games and baseball in depth. Some of these publications are available online. For sources that are in Protoball's Buzz McCray Collection, we can, via email and phone, help you determine what their content is.

A listing of fellow origins enthusiasts and contributors can be found in our Diggers section. You can read news about them and their work in the Next Destin'd Post. Some Diggers have contributed informal Essays relating to baseball's origins.

We offer an Enhanced Search for complex full-text searches on much of the information on the site. You can save your searches, pick out important articles, and share them with other researchers.

Articles

Here are 3 of our latest articles:

1. Protoball Interview With Richard Hershberger
2. Early Women's Baseball
3. Notes on the History and Evolution of Stoolball

Here are 3 randomly selected articles:

1. "A Good Many Different Kinds of Ball"
2. "A Plague Is Upon Us"
3. 1845 Knickerbocker Rules
4. 1854 Unified Kinickerbocker-Eagle-Gotham Rules
5. 1857 Rules
6. 1860 NABBP Rules
7. 19CBB Digest, April-May 2013
8. 19CBB Digest, March 2013
9. 19CBB Highlights, August September 2013
10. A New Find on Early Wicket and Old Fashioned Base Ball
11. A Place Leavel Enough to Play Ball
12. Accounts
13. An Interview with David Block
14. Ballplaying by Civil War Soldiers 1.0
15. Ballplaying in Civil War Camps
16. Base Ball Fever
17. Base Ball on the Field, 1858-1865
18. Baseball Making Notes
19. Beachville Deconstruction (The New York Game Comes to Canada)
20. Bob Tholkes Condenses Key 19CBB Postings in December 2012
21. Bruce Allardice Find Stories, October 2013
22. Called Pitches
23. Club Makeup
24. Competing Pastimes
25. Cricket and the Rise of Baseball
26. Dave's Tip No. 1 -- Using "Site Search" and "Enhanced Search"
27. Don't Forget the Girls
28. Early Championships
29. Early Evidence on Base Stealing
30. Early Women's Baseball
31. Emperics
32. Englische Base-ball
33. Ethnicity in 19C Base Ball -- A General Introduction
34. Feeder and Rounders, 1841
35. For Fun and Health -- That's Why She Played
36. Gambling's Role
37. Internet Search Tips
38. Interview With Author Tom Gilbert
39. Interview with 2013 SABR-Origins Chair Bill Johnson
40. Interview with Bill Ryczek
41. Interview with John Thorn, Official Historian of Major League Baseball
42. Interview with Peter Morris
43. Irish Rounders (Burman's Report)
44. Judgment!
45. La balle empoisonnée
46. Length of Games, 1860-1865 1.0
47. Linking Clubs to Ballgames
48. Lost for 200 Years: John Thorn Detects Base Ball in New York in 1821
49. McKinstry vs. Brooklyn Daily Times
50. Media Effects
51. Multi-word Searches on Protoball
52. NER Project Overview
53. New England Woman Observes Ball Play in Norfolk, Virginia in 1802
54. New Englander Confronts Impious Sunday Ball-playing in Virginia
55. Next Destin'd Post, April 2013
56. Next Destin'd Post, August 2013
57. Notes on the History and Evolution of Stoolball
58. Number of Known BB Clubs in 40 Largest US Cities, 1870 3.0
59. Number of Known BB Clubs in 40 Largest US Cities, 1870 5.0
60. Old Team Nicknames
61. Old old games
62. Origins Newsletter -- February 2021
63. Origins Newsletter -- May 2021
64. Origins Newsletter -- September 2021
65. Patterns of Spread
66. Peanuts, But No Cracker Jack
67. Performing Logic Searches on Protoball
68. Pitchers Covering First
69. Playing "Ball" In Canada In 1803
70. Playing to Win
71. Postings to 19CBB, Jan. - Feb. 2013
72. Predecessor Pastimes
73. Protoball Interview With Richard Hershberger
74. Protoball Search Aid
75. Randall Brown's Find of the Wheaton Account -- Before the Knickerbockers
76. Research Bibliography for Early Base Ball
77. Richard Hershberger Interview, October 2013
78. Rounders: A Game That "Gets No Respect"
79. Rounders: Baseball's True Origin?
80. Rules of the Massachusetts Association of Base Ball Players
81. Runs, Runs and More Runs: Baseball 1866-1870. By the Numbers
82. Sam Marchiano and the 1755 Bray Diary Find
83. Search Terms
84. Sliding
85. Sons of Liberty
86. Spirit Letters From X, 1857-8
87. Stoolball Today -- The Rejuvenation of an Ancient Pastime
88. Such Tumbles, Such Collisions
89. Ten-Position Base Ball
90. The 20 Rules of the Knickerbocker Base Ball Club
91. The Backstop
92. The Beneficiaries
93. The Big Tours
94. The Early Sporting Press in New England 1.0
95. The Evolution of the Baseball Up To 1872
96. The First Baseball Game In Mexico
97. The Grounds
98. The Massachusetts Game
99. The Next Destin'd Post, January 2013
100. The Next Destin'd Post, June 2013

Some Features in Development

Our planned "Pre-pro Baseball" feature will be a working database of clubs, games, fields, and players before 1871. We plan to include have interactive maps to help you visualize the spread of baseball over time.

We are now arranging to feature a data base on the Spread of Base Ball that will show when modern base ball came to hundreds of communities in North America and other countries across the globe.

We are evaluating a user Forum for site-user commentary, our listings of "Most Wanted" data, etc.

1867 Star Club tobacco card

Conditions of Use

Users are encouraged to freely use information on this web site. When that information is found to be useful in drafting published work, we ask that they acknowledge the Protoball Project in their writing, and supply the site's URL -- http://protoball.org -- when possible, in their citations.

Further Information

For more information about the evolution of Protoball Project, its policies, and resources, see our About page.

Contact Larry McCray of the Protoball Project at with any questions or contributions.