October 5-6, 2024: My New Podcast!

[200 years ago this week, “Father of Baseball” Henry Chadwick was born. So this week I’ve AmericanStudied Chadwick and other 19^th century baseball histories, leading up to this special weekend post on my new podcast on 19^th century baseball and much more!]

This Sunday I’ll drop the sixth Inning (episode, but y’know) of my weekly narrative history podcast, The Celestials’ Last Game: Baseball, Bigotry, and the Battle for America. If you haven’t had a chance to listen yet, you can catch up on all the prior Innings at that hyperlink! Here I wanted to reflect on a few quick takeaways from my first experience with podcasting:

1)      Brevity: When I was initially planning the podcast, I anticipated something like 45 minutes for each Inning, and honestly was expecting that they might end up more like an hour long (as y’all know I’ve got a lot to say, and this is a story I really want to tell in full). But in writing and especially in recording them, I found that about 25 minutes was much more of a sweet spot, not only for me but also for my ideal audience experience. There’s always more to say, and I very much hope listeners will continue to research and read and learn about all the histories and issues that I’m highlighting. But I also believe it’s far better to leave them wanting a bit more than to overstay my welcome, and I hope I can keep applying that lesson to all my public scholarly work, where I’d say it’s a universally good goal. Soul of wit and all!

2)      Honesty: There are various reasons why the book project that was my longstanding expectation of how I’d tell this story never quite came together, some of them entirely outside of my own control. But one significant factor is that there’s a dearth of information on some of its core histories, including the details of the Celestials themselves (both in their New England semi-pro league and in their 1881 final game in San Francisco). I couldn’t quite figure out how to frame that in a book manuscript, at least not without creating overtly fictionalized sections which just wasn’t how I wanted to approach it. But in a podcast, I could simply talk about those limitations, share how I was hoping to fill in some gaps with educated speculation, and hope that listeners would appreciate my honesty and be willing to go on this journey with me.

3)      Storytelling: That ability to share honest reflections was one nice effect of creating my first oral scholarly work, but even more exciting was the way in which it felt like I could lean into storytelling as a central goal. I’ve long argued that stories, narratives, offer us ways to learn about our histories, our communities, our identities that at the very least complement, and in many ways transcend, more informational or pedantic modes of communication. That’s why I wanted to create a narrative history project for my 7^th book—and when that book transformed into a podcast, I was able to lean into that emphasis on stories and storytelling even more fully and happily. I hope the results speak to you as much as the process has to me!

Next series starts Monday,

Ben

PS. Hope you’ll check out the podcast!

October 4, 2024: 19th Century Baseball: The Celestials

[200 years ago this week, “Father of Baseball” Henry Chadwick was born. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy Chadwick and other 19^th century baseball histories, leading up to a special weekend post on my new podcast on 19^th century baseball and much more!]

On two 19^th century baseball contexts for an inspiring 1870s team.

I first developed the ideas that are at the heart of my new podcast in this 2020 Saturday Evening Post Considering History column. That column provides a lot of contexts for the Celestials semi-pro baseball team, a team formed by students at the 1870s Chinese Educational Mission in Hartford, so I’d ask you to check it out and then come on back for a couple ways to link that inspiring squad to 19^th century baseball histories.

Welcome back! In the 20^th and 21^st centuries, we’ve become used to professional athletes being quite thoroughly distinct from amateur ones (especially in the major sports leagues—obviously things get a little trickier when it comes to the Olympics and the like). But in the 19^th century, there was far more overlap between the two categories, and that’s succinctly illustrated by the fact that members of the Celestials were continuing to play for both high school and college teams while they were also part of this successful semi-pro squad. One of their founding members and best players, Liang Pi Yuk (also known as Liang Cheng), was still in high school at the Philips Andover Academy when the Celestials began in 1878, and famously led that team to a victory over its rival Philips Exeter Academy during the same period when he was playing for the Celestials. Most of the other founding members were playing baseball for Yale University in that period, and likewise continued to impress on the collegiate diamond while they were achieving their semi-pro victories. That’s an important and easily forgotten layer to late 19^th century baseball, professional and otherwise.

Playing amateur baseball might have been sufficient on its own to inspire the students to form their semi-pro team, but it just so happens that one of the most successful early major league teams was for a brief moment also located in their Connecticut hometown of Hartford. Known officially as the Hartfords and generally called the Dark Blues, this team was originally founded in 1874 and played for three very successful seasons at the Hartford Ball Club Grounds, widely considered one of the premiere stadiums in this early era of professional baseball. Ahead of the 1877 season the team was poached by Brooklyn and became the Brooklyn Hartfords, and was disbanded after just season there; but the legacy in Hartford remained, exemplified by the team’s most famous fan, Mark Twain. Twain also befriended and supported the Chinese Educational Mission students, and it seems undeniable to me that when they started their own semi-professional baseball team in Hartford in 1878, it was likewise part of the legacy of this prominent and popular ball club in the city.

Special post this weekend,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Baseball or sports histories you’d highlight?

October 3, 2024: 19th Century Baseball: The First Professionals

[200 years ago this week, “Father of Baseball” Henry Chadwick was born. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy Chadwick and other 19^th century baseball histories, leading up to a special weekend post on my new podcast on 19^th century baseball and much more!]

Four figures who together help us chart the evolution of professional baseball.

1)      Jim Creighton: I really don’t know that I can do justice to the genuinely legendary (in both positive and tragic senses) career of the first player to be paid to play baseball; you’ve really got to check out that hyperlinked Baseball Reference page, but before you do prepare yourself for the shocking and horrific (and entirely baseball-related) reason Creighton died before his 22^nd birthday. Obviously those specific details are quite unique to Creighton—but as that first superstar and thus first player to be paid, receiving some form of compensation (probably a percentage of the gate) from the Brooklyn Excelsiors after they recruited him away from his prior Brooklyn teams in 1859 (long before there were official professional leagues), Creighton nonetheless foreshadows this next stage in the sport’s evolution.

2)      Davy Force: In 1869, a decade after Creighton’s signing, the National Association of Base Ball Players (NABBP) created a new professional category into which teams could opt if they wanted to pay some or all of their players. Led by the dominant Cincinnati Red Stockings, twelve clubs declared themselves professional for that season, and two years later the first fully professional league, also known as the NABBP, was created. But for the first few years multiple teams could sign the same player and then compete for his services, producing a hugely chaotic situation that must have been very confusing for spectators season to season (or even game to game). When shortstop Davy Force tried to play for the Chicago White Stockings but was forced to return to his prior club, the Philadelphia Athletics, because the league’s president was associated with them, league administrators decided more structure was needed. The result was the 1874 establishment of the National League, the first real forebear of the modern major leagues.  

3)      Moses Fleetwood Walker and Weldy Walker: Once again I’ll recommend that you check out that hyperlinked article, a wonderful piece on the lives and careers—before and after as well as during their time in professional baseball—of these two pioneering brothers who helped integrate baseball in the 1880s, some 60 years before Jackie Robinson (and faced the same horrific racial hate and threats of violence he did). The Walkers were eventually forced out of white major league baseball, although Moses would continue to play in both the minor leagues and the short-lived National Colored Base Ball League before his 1891 retirement. Those latter leagues reflect a central premise of my podcast: that the range of semi-pro and local leagues meant that late 19^th century baseball featured the possibility (and the reality, if a fraught and fragile one) of multi-racial teams far more than did much of 20^th century baseball. I’ll write about one of those teams in tomorrow’s post!

Last baseball history tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Baseball or sports histories you’d highlight?

October 2, 2024: 19th Century Baseball: The Massachusetts Game

[200 years ago this week, “Father of Baseball” Henry Chadwick was born. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy Chadwick and other 19^th century baseball histories, leading up to a special weekend post on my new podcast on 19^th century baseball and much more!]

On three places that can help us better remember an alternative form of baseball that eventually lost out to the New York Game and its “Knickerbocker Rules.”

1)      Dedham in 1858: Local teams had been playing baseball in Massachusetts since at least 1854, but it was at Dedham’s Phoenix Hotel on May 13^th, 1858 that the Massachusetts Association of Base Ball Players met to formally establish the shared set of rules which would become known as the Massachusetts Game. Those rules were designed to create a faster-paced and higher-scoring game than their New York counterparts, including such details as closer bases (60 rather than 90 feet apart), batters starting between home and first bases (only 30 feet away from first, and thus giving them a distinctly better chance to reach base safely), and no foul territory or baselines (giving batters the ability to use any part of the field for both hitting and running). And the results reflected those differences, as exemplified by the July 1859 game in which the Medway Unions beat the Upton Excelsiors 100 to 78 (although Upton got its revenge by beating Medway 100 to 56 for the state championship later that Fall).

2)      Pittsfield in 1859: Unlike football, which as I detailed in this Saturday Evening Post Considering History column began at the collegiate level before gradually evolving into a professional sport as well, baseball was much more fully semi-professional and professional in its early days. But there were collegiate teams as well, and just a year after the formalization of the Massachusetts rules, the first intercollegiate game took place in the state and following those rules. On July 1^st, 1859, in the Western Massachusetts town of Pittsfield, Amherst College defeated Williams College 73-32 (Amherst would likewise defeat Williams in a chess match the following day, as the contest was two-part). Like most of their semi-professional peers, the Chinese American baseball players on whom my new podcast focuses played the sport in college (and did so in New England as well), and thus were direct descendants of these earliest collegiate baseballers.  

3)      Civil War diamonds: As the dates in this post, and I hope throughout this week’s series, have made clear, the popular mythology of the Civil War as the period during which baseball originated (or even was popularized) is entirely inaccurate. But the fact that the opposite is true—that baseball was well-established by the 1860s—only amplifies the role that the sport played for Civil War soldiers during their many downtimes between marches and battles. And since a good number of those soldiers came from New England, the Massachusetts Game was an integral part of those Civil War contests, even when New England teams played those from elsewhere—as with an 1863 game between the 11^th Massachusetts and 26^th Pennsylvania Regiments that was played using the Massachusetts rules. Although the New York rules had become dominant by the decade’s end, and would be featured in the new professional leagues I’ll write about tomorrow, at this foundational moment in American history the Massachusetts Game was an important presence.

Next baseball history tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Baseball or sports histories you’d highlight?

October 1, 2024: 19th Century Baseball: Henry Chadwick

[200 years ago this week, “Father of Baseball” Henry Chadwick was born. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy Chadwick and other 19^th century baseball histories, leading up to a special weekend post on my new podcast on 19^th century baseball and much more!]

For his bicentennial, on three ways the groundbreaking journalist Henry Chadwick (1824-1908) helped shape both the sport and its stories.

1)      Rules: As yesterday’s post indicated, and as I’ll get into even more fully in tomorrow’s post, in its early decades baseball featured a number of different and even contrasting rules. But it’s fair to say that the game wouldn’t have become a truly national sport without a more uniform and consistent set of rules, and despite spending most of his career as a sportswriter (rather than a league official, although he did briefly perform that role as well), Henry Chadwick contributed meaningfully to that evolution. To cite only the most prominent example, for its first couple decades baseball included a “bound rule,” meaning if a fielder caught a batted ball after one bounce it was still ruled an out; Chadwick was the most vocal opponent of this rule, seeing it as an unnecessary protection of fielders, and in the 1860s succeeded in getting it eliminated (by the National Association of Base-Ball Players at their December 1863 convention), an innovation without which modern baseball would look entirely different.

2)      Box scores: As any baseball fan will tell you, one of the greatest joys of following the sport is the box score—ideally keeping score at a game oneself, but in any case reading box scores in the paper (or, yes, on the intertubes) the following day. And while the origins of baseball are hotly contested as I discussed in yesterday’s post, there’s no doubt to whom we can trace the origins of the box score: Henry Chadwick. In his role as the baseball writer for the New York Clipper, Chadwick created the first box score for a game in 1859, including a number of specific details that remain part of box scores and baseball scoring to this day: “K” as the simple for strikeout; the numbers assigned to each of the nine fielders; and more. As I’ve argued many times in this space, the essence of baseball is that it is both itself a story and profoundly connected to many other American stories, and Chadwick’s creation of the box score both reflected and helped amplify that sports storytelling.

3)      Writing: As the many baseball books I’ve highlighted in this space make clear, that storytelling doesn’t just happen through the immediacy of scoring and box scores—it also can be found in the centuries of writing that have accompanied the sport’s development and enduring presence in American culture and society. Henry Chadwick was one of the first to create such baseball books, on two distinct but complementary levels: as the editor of annual guides such as Beadle’s Dime Base Ball Player (which launched with that 1860 edition); and as the author of the first hardcover baseball book, The Game of Base Ball: How to Learn It, How to Play It, and How to Teach It, with Sketches of Noted Players (1868). As someone who has needed to research 19^th century baseball for the podcast I’ll share in the weekend post, I’m eternally indebted to Chadwick’s writing—as are all of us who love the game.

Next baseball history tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Baseball or sports histories you’d highlight?