Baseball! It’s the great American game! Everybody knows how to play it. Everybody does play it, from a backyard pitch to a ground ball in Candlestick Park. Everybody knows about someone who did play it, from Joltin’ Joe DiMaggio to Shoeless Joe Jackson of the scandal-ridden Chicago White Sox … and what about Abner Doubleday? Everybody knows he invented the game. Actually, that’s where fiction steps in. Doubleday was a northern general in the Civil War. He never claimed to have invented the game, he never even played it, and he was already dead when he was chosen as America’s new sports hero. He did, however, grow up in Cooperstown, New York, eventual home of baseball’s hall of fame. That was enough for the experts, who decided the emerging game needed a proper hero. Abner was it.
The Start of It All
If we take the first set of rules that resemble modern baseball, then the men who invented America’s game belonged to the New York Knickerbocker Base Ball Club. Some of their rules are still followed, such as using a diamond-shaped field and three strikes and you’re out. They played their first official game in Hoboken, New Jersey, on June 19, 1846, against the New York Base Ball Club. Unfortunately for the Knickerbockers, they didn’t take their founders role seriously enough and lost the game, 23-1.
Let the Baseball Game Begin
When the Civil War ended, young men had time to be boys again, and the game became more and more popular. That is largely because it was true then and it’s true now; you can play baseball just about anywhere. However, it didn’t stay in the backyard very long. The first “sort of” all-pro team emerged in 1869 with the help of some investors from Ohio. The Cincinnati Red Stockings were actually paid a salary. The next year, the Red Stockings moved to Boston and were joined by eight other teams as far west as Chicago. The National Association of Professional Ball Players was born.
It seemed like a good start, but there were bumps along the way. In 1877, for instance, four players on the Louisville Grays were charged with throwing games. It was obvious; baseball had to clean up or die. Then, A.G. Spalding took over the White Stockings, insisted that players be paid as the entertainers they were, and created the business of and the game of baseball that we know today. The Spalding brand of uniforms and equipment is still in use.
The Modern Era
The National League stayed in charge of baseball until 1900 with the formation of the American League. Three years later, a National Baseball Commission took over the rules of the game. This was baseball as we now know it. In 1903 came the first World’s Series game; Boston of the American League beat Pittsburgh in the best of nine series.
More than a century has passed since the first World’s Series. There was the shame of the “Black Sox” gambling scandal in 1919 and the joy of such stars as the great Cy Young, who is remembered in an award that goes to the year’s best pitcher in each league. There is a fun look back at perhaps the greatest team in all baseball history – the 1927 New York Yankees when Babe Ruth hit 60 home runs, a record that would stand for 34 years.
The names change, but America’s game goes on. As they say each time the first hint of spring hits the small town backyards and the big time stadiums – batters up!
And so, through triumphs and scandals, heroes and records broken, baseball endures as America’s beloved pastime. From its humble origins on makeshift fields to the grandeur of modern stadiums, the spirit of the game lives on with each crack of the bat and roar of the crowd. As spring returns each year, so does the timeless call: “Batter up!”
