Q: "Earliest written reference to baseball"

Wed Mar 16 15:49:16 UTC 2011

Was Jon referring to early 19th-century vs. the 1798 and earlier "base ball"?

Joel

At 3/16/2011 11:14 AM, Dave Wilton wrote:
>But the bat was a standard feature of townball and other bat and ball games
>by 1839, so this wouldn't have raised eyebrows in Cooperstown at that time.
>
>
>
>-----Original Message-----
>From: American Dialect Society [mailto:ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU] On Behalf Of
>Jonathan Lighter
>Sent: Wednesday, March 16, 2011 10:11 AM
>To: ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU
>Subject: Re: Q: "Earliest written reference to baseball"
>
>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:
>
> > ---------------------- Information from the mail header
> > -----------------------
> > 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"
> >
> >
>----------------------------------------------------------------------------
>---
> >
> > 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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> >
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>
>
>--
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