Q: "Earliest written reference to baseball"

[Dave Wilton]

Block's _Baseball Before We Knew It_ is the best account I know of the early
history of the game. It's thorough and very readable.

The Doubleday myth may not have been a hoax. There was an Abner Doubleday
who lived in Cooperstown in 1839, a cousin of the famed Civil War general.
What Abner Graves witnessed as a young boy may have been a barnstorming team
playing a version of townball that was sufficiently different from the game
the town knew that it was remarked upon. The memories of the young Graves
may have become muddled over the years, producing the belief that this was a
brand new game instead of a variant of a familiar one and conflating the two
Abner Doubledays.


-----Original Message-----
From: American Dialect Society [mailto:ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU] On Behalf Of
George Thompson
Sent: Tuesday, March 15, 2011 11:11 PM
To: ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU
Subject: Re: Q: "Earliest written reference to baseball"

I was internationally famous for about 72 hours in July, 2001, when the
NYTimes reported that I had found a newspaper story alluding to a base ball
game in NYC in 1823 on a rich guy's country estate, on the west side of
Broadway, between Washington Place and 8th street.  A few years later, John
Thorn found a village ordinance from the late 1790s forbidding boys from
playing base ball too near the village hall, in Pittsfield -- it seems that
they were breaking windows with home runs.
My game remains the earliest mention of baseball as a game played by adults
-- manly and athletic young men, to be exact.

Jane Austen's reference to baseball in a manuscript written in the 1790s,
though not published until the 1810s, if I recall, was in the original OED,
and appeared in a fascicle that was published well before the Abner
Doubleday hoax was perpetrated. Since then, a few other mentions of base
ball in 18th C England have turned up.

The question of whether these were the same game as the baseball played in
the mid and late 19th C has come to be a matter of considerable research
these last 10 years.
There is a description of the Englsh game of baseball in an encyclopedia of
the sports and games of the world compiled by a learned German in the 1790s.
Other than this, I'm not hopeful of finding detailed descriptions of the
games to offer definitive proof.
However . . . . .
First, I am an evolutionist, and suppose that just as the modern passenger
jet evolved from the Wright Bros. biplane, however little they resemble one
another, and the modern horse evolved from eohippus, and modern folks
evolved from knuckle-draggers, so modern baseball evolved from earlier
sports.
Second, I am fond of the "Sherlock's dog" style of reasoning, as I
demonstrated here recently by arguing that the earliest meaning of "jazz"
couldn't be obscene, because if it were, newspapers wouldn't have printed it
without blushes as the name of a musical fad.  You will recall the Holmes
story about a horrible murder in the dark of night.  Holmes refers
trenchantly to the curious behavior of the dog that night.  Watson, the
dunderhead, says, but Holmes, the dog did nothing that night.  Ah, says
Holmes, that is what is so curious.  Just as I noted trenchantly the curious
behavior of the newspaper editors confronted with the word "jazz", so I note
the fact that the mid-19th C newspapers, when reporting on the new sporting
fad, baseball, didn't say, "don't mistake this game for the game that
Grandad used to play".  They did not recognize it as an essentially
different game from the one played in 1823.

GAT

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