"Base ball"

[George Thompson]

JB asks:
>
> In the interests of full disclosure, which subgroup of SABR do you
> belong to?
>
You may have encountered the expression "a poet's poet"?  I have to admit to being a harmless crackpot's harmless crackpot.
(For those of you who were not English majors: "a poet's poet" was one whose excellence could only be perceived by another poet -- common mortals need not bother.)

An interesting point regarding the date of the publication of the OED's entry on baseball.  It was in print, with the Jane Austen quote, years before Major League Baseball perpetrated the Abner Doubleday hoax.

For JL:
 Cartwright and the Knickerbocker baseball club made several very important modifications to baseball as it had been played -- it seems agreed that their rules were the first to call for 3 outs to an inning (previously just 1) and for a distinction between fair and foul territory.  It seems that ur-baseball was played in the round, like cricket still is.

Ur-baseball was a folk pastime, and the rules were agreed upon locally.
In the 1820s it would have never happened that a baseball club from NYC would ever play a game against a club from central NYState -- Hamden is near Oneonta.  By the 1840s, travel around the northeast had become much easier and cheaper, Hudson river steamboats had become competitive and cheap, the Eire canal and other canals were open, and railroads were the big new thing.  By the 1850s, it didn't take nearly the sort of money or time to go from NYC to Poughkeepsie, or Boston, or Albany that it had 15 or 20 years before.    So it was practical for a baseball club from NYC to go to Albany, or New Haven, or Philly for a game, and uniform, agreed-upon rules became useful.

>From early on, as I have read early 19th C newspapers, I have been noting instances of travel by groups for recreational or social purposes -- from before the time I thought of it as having any relevance to the prehistory of baseball.  I haven't noted anything of the sort before the early 1820s.  The first groups to indulge in this sort of travel were militia companies -- a militia company of well-to-do young gentlemen could afford to go from NYC to Philly or Boston to parade & be entertained, and then receive the Philly or Boston militia company in turn.
Then came fire companies.  Like the militia companies, the fire companies were volunteers, and also affinity groups -- some made up of working men, others of gentlemen who could afford to treat themselves to an outing; and then the fire companies came to be sponsored by political factions, that might want to show off by footing the bill to send their fire company to Niagara Falls, by way of Albany -- with their fire engine. (This was done.) The company'd be entertained by local fire companies along the way, engage in squirting contests with them, and then, back in NYC, entertain the companies that had entertained them.  (The fire engines were hand-pumped, so a squirting contest would show the excellence of the engine, and also the strength, endurance and coordination of the members of the company.)
The first sports group I've noticed doing this sort of travel were rowing clubs -- also likely either to be composed of the best people, or perhaps subsidized by the boat builders -- Manhattan is an island, and row boats and small sailing boats were wanted for travel and transportation as well as for recreation, so making small boats was a profitable business and winning a boat race good publicity.  Boat races between local boats for $1000 stakes were happening even in the 1810s -- between 2 boats, made by competing builders who put up the stakes.

GAT

George A. Thompson
Author of A Documentary History of "The African Theatre", Northwestern Univ. Pr., 1998, but nothing much lately.

------------------------------------------------------------
The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org