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For
a city that doesn't have a team of its own, it's hard to believe
there was a time when baseball held sway in the District of
Columbia, played regularly on the lawn right in front of the
President's House. Of
course, the story of baseball didn't start here, but it was
the soldiers stationed in Washington DC during the Civil War
that propelled the sport into the National Pastime we know today.
The
game originated, or evolved, from common street games in the
larger cities of England and the US. Before the modern version, there were many variations and a
variety of names for the sport, including town ball, baste ball,
pick-up, and goal ball.
As the country urbanized and industrialized, people had
more free time and needed outdoor recreation.
Unlike its predecessors, baseball started not as a game
reserved for city street urchins, but as a gentleman's sport.
One
afternoon in 1842, a group of well to do young men in New York
City met in a vacant lot to play "baseball."
The event was so popular that they were playing groups
from as far away as Hoboken.
Before long, there were organized leagues and written
rules for the game. This
was done not by General Abner Doubleday, but Alexander Cartwright,
bank clerk and member of the first organized team, the Knickerbocker
Ball Club of New York City.
It
was Alexander Cartwright who wrote out the first rules of baseball.
His rules instituted foul lines, limited teams to nine
players, games to nine innings, fields shaped in a "diamond,"
determined that three strikes made an out, with three outs per
inning. The few
differences from today's game are mostly in the language.
Outfielders were called scouts; the pitcher's mound was
the pitcher's point; runs were called aces; batters were called
strikers. Fans
were called cranks (some still are); players were fined for
disrespect or using profanity (rarely today); the first team
reaching 21 "aces" won; and, bunting the ball was held in low
esteem. The
ball clubs originally voted against uniforms because they didn't
want to look like a "flock of birds" on the field.
Team
membership was by election to the club, which limited membership
to the upper social classes.
Even attendance at games was by invitation only.
(This didn't stop free African Americans in the city
from starting their own clubs).
By 1860 there were 50 established baseball teams.
But baseball wasn't America's pastime quite yet.
It wasn't until some of these New Yorkers came to Washington
to play-not baseball, but war; not in striped flannel shirts
and straw hats but kepis and blue uniforms of shoddy wool-that
baseball became democratized.
The
newly arrived New York soldiers found that the clerks in the
Treasury Department already had formed the Washington Base Ball
Club with a winning team, the Washington Nationals. It didn't take long to organize games between the Washington
teams and the New York regiments.
The New Yorkers usually won, with scores like 62 to 22,
and 41 to 13. (They
didn't always use the New York rules.)
The
game's growing popularity alarmed the owners of Washington's
famous Willard's and Ebbitt's taverns, who feared losing good-paying
customers and the soldier trade to this more wholesome endeavor.
Throughout the war, baseball was played on the President's
Park (Ellipse), at the grounds of the Capitol, in the forts
surrounding the outskirts of Washington, and wherever troops
were encamped.
It
wasn't the rules, but the soldiers themselves that made baseball
the all-American team sport we know today.
Players were chosen for their athletic ability, not their
social standing. Officers
joined the soldiers and competed as equals on the field. Although the wartime game required using poles or fence rails
instead of regulation bats, and balls made of tied rags, the
games went on and the fans roared with every hit.
Baseball
enhanced camaraderie, sustained the soldiers' morale, helped
pass the time, and united the soldiers to their cause like nothing
else could. When
the war ended, the soldiers returned home bringing the game
to every corner of the country, along with a new sense of democracy
and union.
Why
do they say Abner Doubleday invented baseball?
The answer-marketing! Albert G. Spaulding was a former
pitcher who later started a company to manufacture baseball
equipment. It was
long after the Civil War, and nearing baseball's 50th
anniversary, when Spaulding searched for documentary evidence
that baseball was invented in America.
His goal was to establish a patriotic theme for the 50th
celebration, and to increase his bottom line.
Eventually, a letter came to him with unverified statements
that it was Abner Doubleday, the famous Civil War general from
Cooperstown, New York, who invented the game.
By
this time, every young boy had memories of seeing aging veterans
march or hobble in their town's Fourth of July or "Decoration"
Day parades. The
Civil War was now idealized and romanticized, with very few
people left who remembered the agony and horror of it.
For Spaulding, it was a natural!
Doubleday and the Civil War, combined with New York,
home of the first ball club, was enough for Spaulding to promulgate
the myth while he promoted baseball and potential sales of his
company's regulation balls, bats, and uniforms. Luckily for Spaulding, neither Doubleday nor Alexander Cartwright,
the real "inventor" of baseball, was available to correct the
record.
Baseball
and marketing, two of America's favorite pastimes, and both
invented in America! It
was a natural!
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