....Alexander Cartwright did not invent the rules of baseball from nothing; bat-and-ball games are as old as Anglo-Saxon culture, if not older. Forerunners of baseball, with names like old cat, stoolball and goalball, were played in Great Britain and its empire hundreds of years before 1846. These games were broadly similar to modern baseball; they featured pitching, hitting, and rounding a certain number of bases in order to score runs. Like modern baseball, they were structured to outs and innings.
In goalball and stoolball, which originated in the Easter festivities of medieval England and parts of the European continent, stools (or equivalent objects) were used as bases. In old cats, the number of bases depended on the number of players on a side: in one old cat there is one base; in two old cats there are two, and so on. The old English game of rounders, which is played mainly by children throughout Great Britain and her former colonies, is closely akin to these primitive games.
The word "baseball" itself has a long history. In memoirs published in England in 1700, a certain Reverend Wilson protested the widespread playing of "baseball" on Sundays. Written accounts mention games of "base" being enjoyed by General George Washington's Revolutionary War soldiers at Valley Forge.
Of course, not all games called baseball were the same. Baseball before Cartwright was not one game, but a family of related games, with each locality practicing its own particular variety. In the mid-19th century, some of these games developed formal rules and were played by adults in organized clubs. One example is Philadelphia's town ball, which employed a very dead ball and stakes arranged in a square configuration instead of bases in a diamond. Town balls clubs formed in Philadelphia and nearby Camden, New Jersey, as early as 1831.
The Massachusetts, or New England, game, which was closely related to town ball, featured 60-foot basepaths and used wooden stakes for bases. It was obviously a high-scoring affair: one out constituted a half-inning, and the game ended when one side scored 75 "tallies" or runs. In 1858 there were enough clubs competing in the Boston area to form a league, the Massachusetts Association of Base Ball Players, with a constitution and a common code of rules.
For a time, town ball and the Massachusetts game threatened to rival Cartwright's New York game for national supremacy. But by the end of the Civil War, just as Philadelphia and Boston were outstripped economically by New York City's commercial power, town ball and its Massachusetts cousin were abandoned in favor of the rapidly expanding New York game.
Today, variant forms of baseball have not disappeared. Softball, stickball, and a myriad of baseball-type playground games remain extremely popular. Some of these retain archaic elements, such as throwing the ball at a baserunner in order to put him out. This practice (which was specifically prohibited by Cartwright's original rules) is known today among the children of New England as "Indian Rubber"; it was known in town ball as "soaking."
Ever since the 1840s, however, these games have been outside the mainstream of organized baseball. The history of baseball as a sport in the modern sense -- with organized leagues playing under standardized rules, schedules, and record-keeping procedures -- begins with Alexander Cartwright.
*This game, played on June 19, 1846, was presided over by Alexander Cartwright as umpire. The New York Nine thrashed the Knickerbockers by a score of 23-1.
IMAGE: The game at Elysian Fields
Baseball: More Than 150 Years, David Nemec & Saul Wisnia
copyright 1997, Publications International, Ltd.
Publications International, Ltd., Lincolnwood, IL
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