Q: "Earliest written reference to baseball"

[Jonathan Lighter]

The introduction of the bat as a standard feature might be one
paradigm-blasting  difference between old and new baseball.

JL



On Wed, Mar 16, 2011 at 7:31 AM, Dave Wilton <dave at wilton.net> wrote:

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> Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> Poster:       Dave Wilton <dave at WILTON.NET>
> Subject:      Re: Q: "Earliest written reference to baseball"
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>
> 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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