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Showing 50 pages using this property.

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Greg Perkins, December 2008 +

Pre-Civil War town ball in Cincinnati is the subject of an article by Greg Perkins in the fall 2008 issue of Base Ball. The article, “The Cincinnati Game: Townball in Cincinnati, 1858-1866,” traces the rise of a distinctive form of town ball (with a hexagonal infield, and with bases 60 feet apart, and with an all-out-side-out rule) before the War. Covington KY fielded 10 townball clubs, and 28 Cincinnati games received newspaper coverage in summer 1858 alone (average score, 155 to 112, most games lasting four innings, average team size of over 12 players). Greg, who majored in history at the University of Cincinnati, is now collecting information on Henry M. Millar, a Cincinnati reporter who traveled with the 1869 Red Stockings and later wrote a memoir of the experience. +

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Priscilla Astifan, December 2008 +

Priscilla and a colleague discuss the predecessor game to Knicks-style base ball in upstate New York in “Old-Fashioned Base Ball” in Western New York, 1825-1860,” which appeared in the fall 2008 issue of Base Ball. The article notes that until 1860 the unusually unnamed earlier game was still played competitively in several places. About 20 news accounts from that time, and from later accounts of a number of “throwback” games, allow a partial picture of the nature of that earlier game. Strong similarity to the Massachusetts Game is found. +

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John Freyer, January 2008 +

Researcher and author John Freyer reports that his interest is still Chicago-area baseball from back before the National League. Among other feats, he has accumulated every Chicago box score between the years 1859 and the Chicago Fire in 1871. He also enjoys researching New York baseball before the Civil War. John has an ongoing project of bat and ball games over history, from Wicket to Wiffleball, but hasn't determined whether it amounts to a new book. Currently, John is working with others to establish a Chicago Baseball Museum, and serves as the project’s ad hoc historian. +

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Rob Loeffler, March 2007 +

Rob has assembled a chronology of the evolution of ballmaking. Rob has a collection of photos of well over 200 19th C baseballs and is analyzing them to estimate their size and weight. +

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Martin Hoerchner, March 2007 +

The UK Chapter of SABR is preparing to resume publication of The Examiner, which has given us several accounts of members’ research on English ballplaying (see <a href="http://www.sabruk.org/examiner/index.html">http://www.sabruk.org/examiner/index.html</a>). Martin, who has uncovered contemporary stoolball and trap ball in the olde country, is leading the renewed effort. +

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Glenn Drinkwater, January 2008 +

The Vintage Base Ball Association’s [VBBA] recently-installed Glenn as their president. One of Glenn’s objectives is to review the organization’s Rules and Customs program to reinforce historical accuracy. Glenn is in touch with [[Peter Morris]], [[Fred Ivor-Campbell]], and [[Tom Shieber]] as part of that initiative. +

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Tom Altherr, December 2008 +

Tom has brought to light another big slug of references to early ballplaying. His article in the spring 2008 issue of Base Ball, "Chucking the Old Apple; Recent Discoveries of Pre-1840 North American Ball Games," resulted in 33 new entries for the Protoball Chronology. Included are references to ballplaying by slaves between 1797 and the 1840s, soldierly play between 1775 and 1815, and numerous accounts of campus ballgames between 1813 and about 1840. +

Tom Altherr, January 2008 +

Tom has revised a paper he presented at NASSH in 2006 (“Chucking the Old Apple: Recent Discoveries in Pre-1839 North American Ball Games History”) for possible publication. His 2007 contribution at theCooperstown symposium is based on further research and more theoretical speculations why baseball emerged in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. It may appear in the next biennial anthology. After his week in Cooperstown, Tom spent a very solid week researching at the American Antiquarian Society in Worcester. This has all led him to see a possible book on all pre-1840 North American games – base ball and beyond -- played with a ball. +

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Craig Waff, January 2008 +

Trained in the history of science, Craig is focusing for now on early ball in New York and Brooklyn, and on games played on ice skates in the mid-1800s. He has been using the online databases of the New York Times and Brooklyn Daily Eagle to not only track the development of interest in astronomy in New York City and Brooklyn in the late 19th century, but also to collect systematically, for the PROTOBALL archives, copies of all baseball-related articles that appeared in these newspapers up to 1860. During that search he discovered what may be the first recorded triple play (occurring on 16 April 1859). He is also researching the winter baseball games played with skates on ice from 1860 to 1887. +

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Wayne McElreavy, January 2008 +

Wayne is trying to piece together the history of baseball in the Claremont area. +

Wendy Knickerbocker, January 2008 +

Wendy's main baseball research interest is Billy Sunday. However, she is also interested in American cultural history in general, and while doing research on a book about a contemporary of Ralph Waldo Emerson, she was delighted to find [and to submit for the Protoball chronology] an entry on baseball from Emerson's journals. It was while reading Emerson's journals to get a handle on Emerson’s friendship with (and admiration for) her current research subject, Edward T. Taylor, that she found the June 1840 baseball reference (see Protoball entry [[1840.20]]), which imagines that some young ballplayers feel “a faint sense of being a tyrannical Jupiter driving spheres madly from their orbits. +

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Mark Schoenberg, April 2013 +

Mark Schoenberg is a new Digger. We are looking for this street-wise New Yorker to curate Protoball’s prospective Schoenberg’s Stickball Collection. +

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Howard Burman, February 2013 +

[[Howard Burman]] has been trying to figure out the game of Irish Rounders. The game’s players see it as unrelated to English rounders, and possibly as a predecessor to American base ball. Having visited Ireland and gotten to know officials of the Gaelic Athletic Association, his report on the game is imminent, and will be posted to the Protoball site. +

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John Zinn, February 2013 +

[[John Zinn]] is working on a manuscript telling the early history of base ball in New Jersey. He has examined 47 newspapers’ coverage of base ball club activities from 1855 to 1860, a period when only five NJ cities had daily papers. John has made major contributions to the SABR “Spread of Base Ball” project and to MLB’s Thorn Committee on Origins, which has stimulated new digging on the early spread of the game. John reports that both Newark and Jersey City grew clubs that were mentioned at least once during this six-year span. The most active base ball counties in the state were Hudson County (which includes both Jersey City and Hoboken) and Essex County, the two counties closest to Hoboken's famous Elysian Fields. +

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Monica Nucciarone, February 2013 +

[[Monica Nucciarone]] is following up on her authoritative book on Alexander Cartwright, has contributed to a forthcoming documentary about 19C baseball in Hawaii, and is writing her second book, on Cartwright’s daughter-in-law, Princess Theresa. +

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Debbie Shattuck, February 2013 +

[[Debbie Shattuck]] is at work on her book-length dissertation, Bloomer Girls: Women Baseball Pioneers. She has upcoming talks on women and early base ball in Cleveland, in Madison County, New York, and in St. Louis this year. +

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Anita Broad, June 2013 +

Anita Broad is also now listed as a digger. Anita has recently written her Master’s thesis, “Stoolball Through the Seasons: It’s Just not Cricket,” and now serves as Research and Education Officer of Stoolball England. She has already helped Protoball sort out what the English safe-haven games Pentoss (a form of ladies’ cricket) and Target Ball were all about. She and her daughter play stoolball, as did her mother and grandmother. She is now working on a grant that funds a primary school education project on the history of stoolball. +

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Bill Humber, August 2013 +

Bill Humber is working on the story of Canada’s earliest base ball, focusing in partonWilliam Shuttleworth, a key person on an 1854 team. Bill is also continuing to identify the nature of the “Canadian game,” which preceded the arrival of the New York game in Canada. +

Bill Ryczek, June 2013 +

Bill Ryczek has 4 essays on early ballplaying posted at the National Pastime Museum site at <a href="http://www.thenationalpastimemuseum.com/author/william-ryczek/historians-corner">http://www.thenationalpastimemuseum.com/author/william-ryczek/historians-corner</a>. Included are an account of the Excelsiors’ 1860 tour of New York State and an account of the evolution of pitching from the 1850s onward. Access requires you to register for the site, which took just 3 or 4 hours in our recent experience. +

Bruce Allardice, June 2013 +

Bruce Allardice’s paper on the spread of modern base ball in the American south has won a 2013 McFarland Award for the best history or biography for 2012. The article, “The Inauguration of This Noble and Manly Game Among Us,” appeared in Base Ball’s Fall 2012 issue (volume 6, number 2, pages 51-69). Bruce uses extensive newly-found newspaper and other sources to dispel myths about the neglect of base ball by southerners and about the relative importance of northern influences in the spread of modern base ball in the South from 1859 on. One judge wrote: “Here's a very well researched piece that takes on the long-established ‘prison camp’ theory of dissemination. It represents exactly what we are looking for in an award winner; well written, thoughtful, convincing, and one that makes you wonder why this hadn't been proven before. It breaks new ground and should be cited for a long time to come.” +

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David Block, June 2013 +

David Block has found a new reference to English base ball dating to 1749. He notes that it is the first known base ball game involving mature adults. The only earlier references, believed to be printed in the 1744 first edition of the Little Pretty Pocketbook and a reported reference to play within the English royal family written by Lady Hervey in 1748, depicted juvenile play. We learn of this fresh find in the June 12 issue of the Daily Telegraph in Britain. +

Debbie Shattuck, June 2013 +

Debbie Shattuck’s initial NDPost offering on the distaff side of ballplaying appears in the June 2013 issue of the Next Destin'd Post. She is working to publish her forthcoming thesis on women baseball pioneers with the University of Illinois Press, with a target date of 2015. +

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Greg Perkins, August 2013 +

Greg Perkinshas written articles on base ball, town ball, and cricket for the Northern Kentucky Encyclopedia (University Press of Kentucky, 2009) and has helped organize a VBB club, the Ludlow Base Ball Club, which is named after an 1870s club. He continues to collect data on the Cincinnati Red Stockings. +

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Jeffrey Kittel, June 2013 +

Jeff Kittel has completely redesigned his “This Game of Games” website at <a href="http://www.thisgameofgames.com/">http://www.thisgameofgames.com/</a>. Its main focus is regional 19th Century ballplaying, but Jeff’s interests have expanded beyond St. Louis base ball to varieties of ballplaying in America’s trans-Appalachian West. Jeff plans to post his new finds on the site as they turn up. +

John Bowman, August 2013 +

John Bowman is taking a fresh look at the history of the 90-foot basepath in baseball, and is reflecting on how the choice of a different distance might have affected the game. +

John Zinn, June 2013 +

John Zinn has discovered an 1855 New Jersey game played among African American clubs, which is four years earlier than we had previously known for African American play of modern base ball. We are in contact with SABR’s Negro Leagues Committee to see if John’s find now stands as the first ever. Its PBall entry is at <a>http://protoball.org/1855.36</a>. +

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Mark Brunke, August 2013 +

Mark Brunke continues to collect information on very early ballplaying in Sacramento, Seattle, and Victoria British Columbia. He is finding that some early pioneers in that region played both base ball and cricket, at first. +

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Rich Arpi, August 2013 +

Rich Arpi reports that the Minnesota SABR chapter has discussed the idea of mapping the spread of base ball in Minnesota by locating the first known modern game in the larger MN towns. +

Richard Hershberger, June 2013 +

Richard Hershberger continues with his collection of data on as many early base ball clubs as he can find. At this point he has rounded up over 850 clubs that formed prior to the Civil War and that played by New York rules. Richard has generously shared his collection with Protoball, and all of the clubs are entered into the PBall Pre-Pro data base. Richard’s quest parallels the effort started in 2008 by Craig Waff to build a directory of early ball games before the War, and we are trying to systematically link clubs and games for PBall users. +

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Tom Heitz, August 2013 +

Tom Heitz participated in a large Cooperstown tour organized in part by filmmaker Ken Burns. Tom presented a lecture on base ball’s early rules and supervised a throwback Town Ball game for the tour on the lawn behind the Fenimore Art Museum. +

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David Block, October 2013 +

Article Lauds David Block, Our Own "Karate-Chopper" of Base Ball Lore A long, wry, and fairly reverent article on the amazing David Block can be found at http://www.grantland.com/story/_/id/9681627/baseball-archaeologist-david-block. Bryan Curtis’ "In Search of Baseball’s Holy Grail: How One Man is Rewriting the History of the Game – One Diary at a Time," was posted at the Grantland site on September 18, 2013. Protoball’s favorite nuggets from the Curtis article: [] "In a just world, Block would be an archeological hero. What Bill James did for 20th -century baseball, Block is doing for 18th-century baseball." [] "Said Tom Shieber . . . [David’s book] ‘Baseball Before We Knew It and its aftermath is to me probably the single most important baseball research of the last 50 years, if not more.’" [] "’When David started his work and I started my work, this [topic of origins] was the dark side of the moon,’ said [John] Thorn." [] "Block had confirmed that the Doubleday theory was bunk. But he had also discovered that the rounders theory was bunk. Everything we knew about baseball’s parentage was wrong." [] "Block is being painfully modest. Let me be immodest on his behalf. Block is a scholar on a lonely frontier. He is karate-chopping the wisdom of the ages. " Protoball later asked the author about the response to the article. Bryan Curtis’ reply: "The Block article attracted a very large amount of attention--larger, in fact, than my typical articles about star players. Which was wonderful, because David's more interesting than most of them." +

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Bob Tholkes, October 2013 +

Bob Tholkes to Address Local SABR Chapters Bob Tholkes will be a presenter at the November meetings of the SABR chapters in Pittsburgh and Providence. The Pittsburgh meeting is focusing on baseball statistics, and Bob will discuss the birth of base ball stats. Last year, Bob made presentations at the Chicago and San Antonio-Austin SABR chapters. +

Brian Sheehy, April 2013 +

Brian Sheehy is planning a meeting in mid-April for VBB players to discuss themes in the evolution of base ball in the pre-professional era. For details on the Newbury MA mini-conference, contact Brian at <a href="mailto:historyball@yahoo.com">historyball@yahoo.com</a>. +

Brian Turner, April 2013 +

Brian Turner reports that his recent research has remained focused on bat-ball and bat-and-ball, but has also focused on settlement patterns in western Massachusetts, to tease out whether that tells us something about why ball games were apparently named one thing (bat-ball) in one town (Northampton) in 1791 and another thing in other towns (such as the names ball games were known by Pittsfield). +

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Debbie Shattuck, October 2013 +

Deb Shattuck’s Online Talk about Women and Base Ball Deb Shattuck’s thesis work on the history of women’s base ball continues, and you can see a lot of it at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pVdQvArqScs.. This 80-minute talk includes much new information on female play prior to 1870, some of it altogether new to Protoball. Deb writes: "my talk was a compilation of the work done by those before me (David Block, Dorothy Mills, John Thorn, and the many contributors to the Protoball and 19cBB group) who have generously shared their research findings with me and other researchers. When I finally finish my book (later this year, fingers crossed) I hope to make my research available to as wide an audience as possible. I will begin by filling in the blanks on the Protoball site; after that I hope to work with SABR and the Women in BB Committee to create a searchable database of every female player and team we can find." Deb’s talk, "Bloomer Girls," was delivered on July 19 at the Yachats Academy of Arts and Sciences on the Oregon Coast. Her forthcoming PhD dissertation at the U of Iowa covers women base ball pioneers. +

Dorothy Seymour Mills, October 2013 +

Dorothy Mills’ Recent Contributions Dorothy Seymour Mills is publishing "Who Ever Heard of a Girls’ Baseball Club?" She writes: "Everyone needs to know that women and girls have been part of the baseball culture as long as men and boys – and not just as fans, but as players, umpires, and even club owners." The electronic book’s title is taken from a writer who "didn’t realize that girls and women have been playing baseball since at least the 1860s – in long skirts, of course." Dorothy has been asked to submit four articles on baseball history to the National Pastime Museum’s website at http://www.thenationalpastimemuseum.com/article-category/historians-corner. The first one, "Those Nimble American Girls," should appear shortly. +

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Frank Ceresi, April 2013 +

Frank Ceresi’snew e-book <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Washington-Nationals-Their-Grand-ebook/dp/B00BH16SO8/ref=sr_1_2?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1364866051&sr=1-2">The Washington Nationals and Their Grand Tour of 1867</a> (Search <nationals ceresi ebook>) follows the National Club, and others, from 1859 through the following decade. He remains on the hunt for a photograph of the Nationals at the time of their tour, and is about to sift through the Matthew Brady collections in hopes of spotting one. Frank also serves as Executive Director of a new online baseball museum at <a href="http://thenationalpastime.com/">http://thenationalpastime.com/</a>, which will show up to 25,000 artifacts, including many from the origins era. +

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Richard Hershberger, October 2013 +

Introducing . . . Hershie's Nuggets! Richard Hershberger has offered to supply short pieces on assorted sweet subtopics in early base ball history. The first of these, Sliding in the Amateur Era, is a 3-page summary of contemporary news accounts' evidence on sliding. It begins: "Did base runners slide in the amateur era, and if so, how frequently? Looking at period reports, the most striking feature is that the evidence is thin. There are undoubted reports of runners sliding, but they are few and far between. The problem then is to determine if reports of sliding are rare because sliding was rare, or because it was commonplace and therefore unremarkable: are they man bites dog reports, or dog bites man? Or something in between?" Nugget #1 is found at http://protoball.org/Sliding. +

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John Zinn, October 2013 +

John Zinn Digs into Early New Jersey Ballplaying John Zinn’s objective is to understand how the New York game came to New Jersey and then developed and expanded throughout the entire state. He has been examining close to 50 contemporary newspapers that survive as well as national publications. In the pre-war period (1855-1860) there were organized base ball clubs in only about a third of New Jersey’s 21 counties. He plans to look at other information such as the reach of the railroad to try to understand why the game did and didn’t reach the different parts of the state. He is now shifting to the 1861-1870 period. John wrote the New Jersey section Baseball Founders. He is on the planning committee for the November 2014 SABR symposium on 19th century base ball in the greater New York area, including New Jersey. +

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Bruce Allardice, October 2013 +

New Charting of Base Ball’s Spread, 1859-1870 Bruce Allardice has traced and charted the growth of base ball in the US from 1859 to 1870 as it is presently captured on the PBall site. See http://protoball.org/The_Spread_of_Base_Ball,_1859_-_1870. These data clearly show the moderating effect of the Civil War on (non-soldierly) ballplaying, and the dramatic "Base Ball Fever" spread of the game to new areas right after the war. Note: A few Protoballers are venturing to chart the modern game’s earliest growth, from 1843 to 1859. Wish us luck as we try to determine which ones of the reported games were really played by modern rules. +

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Tom Altherr, April 2013 +

A monograph on pre-1845 North American games played with a ball or some other projectile is a goal for [[Tom Altherr]]. The work would include, but not be limited to, safe haven games, and would include indoor a well as outdoor games. He notes that some of this work has appeared in the journal Base Ball, the SABR Originals newsletter, and Protoball’s online chronology and its Next Destin’d Post newsletter. Tom is also interested in ball-playing among slave and free African Americans before 1865 and in the possible contributions of German schlagball, and perhaps other mid-European games, to the evolution of base ball. He remains convinced that ball-playing was more common in North America than most sports historians allow . . . and he continues to confirm that view with fresh finds most every month. +

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Jeffrey Kittel, August 2013 +

A new version of the “This Game of Games” website was launched in June by Jeff Kittel. The site, which traces early ballplaying in Greater St. Louis and the Trans-Appalachian West, is at <a href="http://www.thisgameofgames.com/">http://www.thisgameofgames.com/</a> +

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Mark Brunke, February 2013 +

A new voice in Origins research, [[Mark Brunke]] last year volunteered to coordinate an effort within SABR’s Pacific Northwest chapter to fill in an almost completely blank map of the first modern games in that area. “What I like about baseball history is how it fits into American history, and how it illuminates and questions the past,” he explains. Mark, who works in Human Resources and has pursued painting, music, and filmmaking as well as baseball, is presently putting together a history of pre-professional base ball in the Seattle area. Mark’s January comprehensive presentation to the Pac Northwest chapter on findings to date is found at: <a>http://protoball.org/The_Spread_of_Base_Ball_in_the_Pacific_Northwest</a>. +

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Brian Sheehy, February 2013 +

An April conference in Newbury MA on early base ball is being organized by Digger [[Brian Sheehy]]. Players from the expanding number of VBB clubs in eastern New England will comprise a good share of conference attendees. +

Bill Ryczek, March 2013 +

Bill made enormous contributions in bringing to print Base Ball Founders this spring. This solid new reference work contains about 40 essays on th4e earliest base ball clubs in the New York metropolitan area, Philadelphia, and Massachusetts. +

Bob Tholkes, January 2013 +

Bob published “’We Hope They Will Not be Disappoint,’” A Survey of the New York Rules Base Ball Season of 1861,” in Base Ball: A Journal of the Early Game, volume 5, number 2 (Fall 2011), pp 5- 12. +

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Joe Gray, August 2013 +

British-born Joe Gray is collecting information on the play of modern base ball in Britain, and has recently turned up games played as early as 1870 in Dingwall, Scotland. Joe reports that his personal interest is expanding to include earlier British baserunning games. His very comprehensive web page is found at <a href="http://www.projectcobb.org.uk/">http://www.projectcobb.org.uk/</a>. +

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Bruce Allardice June 2022 +

Bruce Allardice's article on baseball statistics 1866-70, "Runs, Runs, and More Runs" (SABR Baseball Research Journal, Fall 2021) won the SABR McFarland Award for Best Baseball History article of 2021. The article analyzed every game reported in the New York Clipper for those 5 years, almost 5000 games. For a link to the raw data, visit http://civilwarbruce.com/Baseball1866-70.html +

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César Gonzalez, January 2013 +

César introduced several new finds in his “March, Conquest, and Play Ball: The Game in the Mexican-American War, 1846-1848,” Base Ball: A Journal of the Early Game, volume 5, number 1 (Fall 2011), pp 13 – 22. +

Craig Waff, December 2008 +

Craig has compiled an initial table of known “base ball” games – including those played by New York and Massachusetts rules and town ball games in Philadelphia and Cincinnati – played in the 1845 to 1860 period. The table includes about 1000 games, about three times the number to be found in Peverelly (1866) and in Wright [2000], and incorporates generous samplings of text from newspaper accounts for many of them. See his [[Games Tabulation]], which has links to lists for the greater New York area and 18 other regions. For each game Craig supplies the date, location, source, and any significant game account excerpts. In the process of amassing the mega-table, Craig has found newspaper accounts of three early triple plays and what may be the first “over-the-fence” home run. Craig is now researching the 1860 tours of the Brooklyn Excelsiors and is preparing essays on the Atlantic, Star, and Enterprise teams of Brooklyn for the Pioneer Project. +

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