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. Soon you can read news about them and their work in the Next Destin'd Post. Some have contributed informal Essays relating to baseball’ 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.
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 hundreads 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.
Contributions
We invite you to add your own research, insights, and queries to the Protoball site.
Register to add an early Ballgame, Club, or Field from your own town or region. Have your say in the Forum.
Many pages have a Comments section; we invite you to add your comments.
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.
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