Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 858: John Thorn on the New Details About Baseball’s Origin Story

Episode Date: April 8, 2016

Ben and Sam talk to MLB’s Official Historian, John Thorn, about a trio of founding documents now up for auction that casts light on the truth behind baseball’s long-disputed origin story.

I am the past, you'll never forget me I'd probably come back and stay if you'd let me I am the past and you cannot ignore me You've got no idea what happened before me I'm your first time, I'm the worst I'm the best time you ever rehearsed I'm the ghost of ex-girlfriends But mostly I'm me. I'm the past to infinity. Hello and welcome to episode 858 of Effectively Wild, the daily podcast from Baseball Perspectives,

presented by our Patreon supporters and the Play Index at BaseballReference.com. I'm Ben Lindberg of FiveThirtyEight, joined by Sam Miller of Baseball Prospectus. Hello, Sam. Howdy. And we have a guest today. Whether or not you've heard of him, you have certainly heard of and benefited from his work. He has written or co-written with Pete Palmer, The Hidden Game of Baseball, a foundational sabermetric book. He served as the senior creative consultant for Ken Burns' baseball, and he was named the official historian of Major League Baseball in 2011 when he also published his book on baseball's origin story, Baseball in the Garden of Eden, the Secret History of the Early Game. His name is John Thorne. He's

a great writer and a great resource for other writers, and we're happy to have him on. Hey, John. My pleasure to be with you. So we wanted to have you on to tell us about a trio of documents that are collectively being described as baseball's birth certificate or baseball's Magna Carta. They came to light or their true value was recognized not long ago, and they are up for auction right now. So can you summarize for people who haven't read about this, what this collection includes? Well, I think first you have to take a couple of steps back to prior origin theories. Now, after Doubleday, we keep killing the corpse every year, but I still think 80% of all American baseball fans think Doubleday invented baseball. And those who think themselves smarty pants say the Doubleday story is hooey. It's instead Alexander Cartwright. It turns out that story is

hooey of the first magnitude as well. So baseball wasn't invented. It evolved. And the question is, when did it become a game that we would recognize as the game that's being played today? The Knickerbocker Club formed in 1845, and they had 20 rules in their opening foray, only 14 of them related to the play of the game. There were many things that were either supposed and not written or still undetermined. Henry Chadwick, the only sports writer who has a plaque in the Hall of Fame,

although Bill James may one day join him, would like to say that baseball started in the 1840s, but it wasn't really created. It wasn't baseball until 1857. And what he meant by that was that the rule changes at the convention of that year brought us for the first time a game of nine men, nine innings, 90-foot base pads. Those three accomplishments are credited to Alexander Cartwright on his plaque in the Baseball Hall of Fame, but he had skedaddled for Hawaii eight years before that, before any of those things happened. Until 1857, a ballgame would end when one team or the other

scored 21 runs in even innings. That could be in a single inning. It could be in 16. There was no neat way to end the game, which meant that there was ample incentive to play for a draw, as we see in soccer. So the innovations of 1857 are recorded in these documents. Now, they were recorded in the newspapers in their final form or an interim form. But what's great about these documents is that they're annotated and there are scribbles and there are reversals of thinking.

Should we have seven innings? Should we have 12? Should we have nine? So the eternal verities of baseball, the things that God would have handed down had he been a baseball fan, 90 feet between bases, this was somebody's doing. And that's what these documents reveal, that there is a human side to the way history lurches forward. That's quite a soapbox piece. You'll forgive me for the length. So before this, was it that instead of 90 feet, nine innings and nine men, it was, you know, 65 feet, eight and seven? Or was it just completely variable and it depended on how many people showed up at the park and how big the field of play was? It was the Wild West. And it depends upon the quality of play of the two contending teams.

Most baseball games prior to 1857 were not match games between distinct cause, but rather were intramural practices, at which the number per side might be 7 or 8 or 9 or 10 or 11, and the distance between the bases was never set out precisely, except to say the distance between home and second base and between first and third base should be 42 paces, which, of course, makes the investigative mind say, well, what does a pace mean in 1845? We know that the Romans thought it was 2.5 feet. It was 29 inches or 30. Is that what it meant then?

Or was the pace an indeterminate measure where somebody actually had to walk the distance from home to second before any game was played? So a tall man might walk off at greater distance than a shorter man. Kids might play on a shorter field. We don't know the answer to that. But we suspect that when baseball first started, players weren't very good. So 2.5 feet would have given you 75 foot base pass approximately. And so is it kind of fair to say that the significance of this as, you know, sort of comparing it to the Magna Carta is not necessarily that 99 and 9 are what we know today, but that

somebody finally laid down a law, that there was a sense of codifying a specific, you know, language and set of standards for the sport, and it kind of shifted it from ragtag, you know, get-together to actual litigated sport. Yeah, it's the first time you got the rules specifying what the ball looks like, what the bat looks like. The Knickerbockers, as I said, had 20 rules, only 14 of them playing rules. The rules of 1857 have 35. So how did these documents survive for 160 years in obscurity? It doesn't sound as if they were discovered, you know, inside a picture frame that was bought at a yard sale or in a deceased ancestor's attic. How did that happen? William Henry Grinnell, who was one of the three Knickerbocker delegates to the 1857 convention.

Doc Adams was one, Louis F. Wadsworth was the other. Grinnell and Adams worked together to prepare these documents prior to the opening of the convention, which would have been January 22, 1857. So they were readying a document that the other clubs might view and vote upon in order to get a standardized set of rules rather than having clubs make it up each time two clubs got together. Connecticut. And one of his granddaughters, perhaps his lone surviving granddaughter, whose name was Princess Pignatelli, because she married an Italian prince who subsequently divorced her, but she insisted on keeping the name. And she was hard pressed for money. So she tried to sell these documents to the Baseball Hall of Fame in the mid-1960s. And the Baseball Hall of Fame, as far as we can tell, did not act on that request.

Now, the Hall of Fame's policy, of course, is they don't buy things. They only take donations. But that is something of a sham because they do a lot of three-legged deals whereby if they want to acquire something that's expensive, they find a wealthy individual who will purchase it on their behalf and then donate it to them and get the tax break. That policy may not have been enforced in the 1960s. So the documents went back into the Grinnell-Pignatelli drawer. When she died and the estate started to be dispersed, the three documents came up at a Sotheby's historical manuscripts auction in 1999, not at a baseball auction. They were described dimly. They were not illustrated. And some man with moxie and a fat wallet paid 12,000 bucks for them sight unseen. And when he received them, he put them in his desk drawer where they languished for 15 more years.

Well, that seems like a wise investment, at least. And so you were involved in authenticating these documents and you've said that they are improbable survivors and that you couldn't have imagined that they existed before you found out that they did. So how did you... They weren't missing. It's just that no one imagined that a rough draft of baseball's primal rules existed anywhere. Yeah. So how did you determine that they were the real thing? We have testimony from Grinnell's daughter, granddaughter from the 60s, saying that it was in her grandfather's hand and that other family members who were elderly could attest to that. So two of the documents are in Grinnell's hand and one

is in Adams' hand. At the of the documents are in Grinnell's hand, and one is in Adams' hand. At the time the documents went up at auction in 1999, nobody knew that one of the documents was purely in Adams' hand. In fact, there were very few people at all who knew who Adams was. I wrote my first story about him in 1992 for the late lament that Elysian feels quarterly. So I became the world's expert on Doc Adams. And I was really stunned at how this man had achieved celebrity in his own day, lived a long life, and faded entirely as the debate over who invented baseball became a binary one. And the only choices presented were Cartwright or Doubleday. And you called him first among the fathers of baseball when you wrote that article almost

25 years ago. So how does a founding father or the primary founding father get forgotten? I think we, as a culture, tend to look for shorthand stories. We like the idea of a Newton with an apple dropping on his head. We like the idea of Washington tossing a silver dollar across the Rappahannock or cutting down a cherry tree. We like the idea of an Edison of baseball. So we think baseball is such a great thing. Somebody must have dreamed it up someday. But that's not the way it happened. integration era committee Hall of Fame ballot just this past induction cycle, and he came two votes short of induction. So are these documents sort of the smoking gun that's going to get him in, do you think? Oh, I don't speculate on such things. I was pleasantly surprised to see that he was on the ballot at all after all these years. And then for him to receive more votes than

anybody else in a year in which no veteran got the 12 necessary, was pleasing because it's a steep climb for the guys who are voting on this. They never heard of the guy, and they're quickly doing studies in large measure on stuff I've written. And if they're close to thinking that the story of baseball, as conventionally told, has been largely wrong and that Cartwright's plaque is a matter of hilarity, then maybe the door opens a little wider for Adams. So one of the rules or standards or whatever that was laid down in these was that the pitcher would

be 45 feet away from the batter. And as you note, that was expanded twice and then has been unchanged for about 125 years since. But it was expanded. It did change. And so I think it's fair to say that that was not something that is non-negotiable about the game. It would still be baseball if the pitcher was 61 feet or 59 feet. And so one of the things that I kept thinking about as I was reading about these documents

is what is permanent? What kind of was laid down at that moment or in that era that is fundamentally non-negotiable about baseball to the extent that everything else is negotiable in order to preserve the permanence of those non-negotiable things? When you read these, do you take away anything about what is fundamentally unchangeable that just has to be for it to be baseball? I don't think in those terms. I have not to this point. But certainly, the base pads could be 93 feet. The pitching distance could be 67 feet. These kinds of changes, while they would seem dramatic, are perhaps less dramatic than the introduction of the designated hitter in 1973 in terms of a fundamentally different way to

play the game. There are some things that the Knickerbocker rules of 1845 set out that are probably unchangeable, and that's that there is such a concept as foul territory, which did not exist in the Massachusetts game of baseball. It's rival at that time. And cricket, of course, has no foul territory. So there's an artful style of batting called hitting behind or slip hitting. And that has never been present in the New York game. The New York game is more of a sluggers game and a place hitters game. So foul territory.

And then there's the idea that you retire a batter by, or you retire a runner by getting the ball to the base before he reaches it, whether via a force play or a tag play. In the Massachusetts game, you could not retire a man at the base or the stake or the post, as it was called. You had to plunk him between the bases. I don't think we're going back to plunking. You know, it's sometimes noted the perfect precision of 90 feet. People will, you know, talk about, oh, if it was 91 feet, the game would be so different. Yeah, yeah, but that's philosophy 101 stuff. Yeah.

If you've taken that, you know it's nonsense. Right, exactly. And it seems, though, that what's sort of interesting about this, about seeing this founding document, is just sort of being made aware that it's not as though somebody came up with these rules without having ever played the game. I mean, every rule that was laid down was informed by experience with the game and kind of knowing, well, 90 feet is roughly right. It's not like they just blindly landed on 90 feet. They'd been playing baseball and they thought, well, okay,

what makes the most sense here? Yeah, they had models from cricket. And, you know, in 1857, there were very few third basemen who could reliably throw the ball across the diamond first. There are very few outfielders who could throw the ball 400 or 350 feet from the farthest reaches. The quality of play wasn't great. So 90 feet was something of a stretch. At this 1857 convention, the Knickerbockers and Adams in particular, tried to get the other teams to permit a ball to permit an out only on a ball caught on the fly, not on the bounce, to make it more manly like cricket. But the other clubs were newer and they figured that their younger members would protest because

they would hurt their hands. So this is the primitive state of the game. You know, everything is interesting in its earliest state if the institution goes on to be great. So I like the earliest years of rock and roll. I like the earliest years of automobiles. I like the earliest years of film. I like the earliest years of baseball. Yeah. I like one of the quotes from a contemporary newspaper account that you've reproduced on your site about the catching on the fly or catching on a bounce issue that the newspaper said, and above all, let not Americans reject a manly point in the game merely because

it is English and hurts the hands, which it does not if played in a scientific manner. For surely what an Englishman can do, an American is as capable of improving upon. Oh, that's lovely because the phrase the national pastime was already in use for baseball, which was distinctly a Northeastern game and probably a metropolitan New York and New Jersey game. So to call it a national pastime was either delusional or aspirational. Yeah. And some people still make the case for a seven inning game. And as you point out, these documents make it clear that we came very, very close to having a seven inning game. Well, there was a thought that there ought to be some congruence between the number of men on the side and the number of innings.

So the Knickerbockers sent the three delegates to the convention to back a game that could be played by seven men and could be played in seven innings. Sort of a strange equivalence, right? There's no reason for those to be the same. It's like on baseball slugging, you know, mathematically it makes no sense, but it works. After this convention, after these rules were kind of laid down, how much controversy was there? Were there splinter? I mean, I know there were splinter leagues, but were there splinter kind of movements

over the rules? Were there people who were playing in a completely different way five years later and saying they're going down with the seven inning shift? I think that because clubs had the option of preserving their prior practices for intramural play, some practices such as a different number of men to the side, where you would position them. Even the Knickerbockers in 1856 played a match contest against the empires, I believe. I may have the club wrong. In which they adopted the already conventional number of men to the side as nine.

But the empires decided not to have a shortstop. Instead, they had two catchers. And do you think that, you know, throughout this evolutionary process and all these mutations that were going on, do you think that we ended up with the best version of baseball? I mean, was there a... Not necessarily. You know, it could be argued that we used to have hundreds of species of horses and now we've got one, right? Is that a triumph of evolution, or do we miss what's lost? I have written about the Massachusetts game, which I have both played and umpired. And while the New Yorkers derided it as a sissy game and said it wasn't as manly as theirs, it's a very tough game to play.

Tricky. A lot of relays were a lot of teamwork in the field. And it could be argued, and I have, that it was the game that got away, that the New Yorkers had a better PR machine behind their game. This is somewhat beyond the scope of these documents, but baseball in its first few decades had very rapid rules change and adjustments and different styles of play. And then it sort of settled into what it saw as a very traditional game. That was part of its understanding of itself, or as the fans and participants saw it, as the tradition was sort of ingrained in it. Do you feel like the kind of flexibility of rules, the willingness to change, the willingness

to re-envision baseball in some ways? Is it accelerating again in the last few decades, or are the rules makers as tradition bound as they ever were? I think the rules makers are tradition bound because baseball is a conservative institution. It doesn't like rapid change. It's not that it's resistance change if people like to think of it as the unchanging game that if you and great-grandpa saw a game together in the bleachers of the

McKinley era, it would be very much the game you saw today. But you guys know that baseball changes in the slightest incremental ways, which have massive results in the numbers, in the way the game is recorded, and in the way eventually the game is played.

Look at the defensive shift revolution within the last five years. It's amazing. Custom and practice rule in baseball as much as the official rules, and just as in the 1850s, and you commented on this, rules derive from custom and practice, not the other way around. Yeah. So there have been some rules changes in recent years, probably most notably bringing a replay review in. Would it have seemed like a lot of changes to a person in the 1950s? I mean, obviously, it would have been weird for them to think about replay itself. But the amount of

changes that we've seen in the last decade or so, would it have seemed radical? Would it have seemed excessively liberal, do you think, to somebody in the 30s or 40s or 60s? I think it would have because a part of the appeal of baseball in, say, the 1950s was that it was a post-war period and it reeked of normalcy, right? And it reeked of normalcy, right? It was a return to normalcy that you came back from having fought in foreign lands, and baseball was just as you had left it. You were just plugged right back in. And integration proceeded with, not without incident, but retrospectively, perhaps more smoothly than might have been anticipated. retrospectively, perhaps more smoothly than might have been anticipated.

So integration was a great change in baseball, which was not a matter of a rule change, but rather a custom in practice. I think that baseball in the 1950s and the 1960s saw tradition and resistance to change as essential to its enduring charm. I think current management sees responsiveness to the market trends as being more important for the game. Nobody thought in those terms in the 50s and 60s. And is there any archaic, either discarded or never officially adopted rule that you are personally still carrying a torch for

that you would like to see become part of the game someday? Well, Chadwick certainly wants a 10-man game. still carrying a torch for that you would like to see become part of the game someday? Well, Chadwick certainly wanted a 10-man game. He wanted a right shortstop because originally the three basemen, first, second, and third, played very close to their base, and that left a tremendous gap on the right side, which the first basemen started moving off first, trying to contain that a little bit. But the 10-man game, though it was tried by major league clubs in exhibitions, never was used in a single major league game. It was, however, the rule in the Cuban major league as they began

in 1878. And I guess lastly, this is some decades later, but I am curious, and I've seen so many conflicting explanations. Where did the six inches, the extra six inches on top of the 60 feet between home plate and the pitcher's mound come from? Yeah, the bubblegum card explanation is that it's a surveyor's error that it was supposed to be 60 feet, zero inches. zero inches above the... It's that people don't understand that the pitching distance, when it changed from 50 feet, which it was from 1880 to 18... through 1892 to 60 feet, 6 inches,

did not increase by 10 feet, 6 inches, because with that change also came a new way of measuring the pitching distance. It was now to be measured from the back foot, i.e. the slab, where previously it had been measured from the front foot of a pitcher's box. And the pitcher's box was five and a half feet long. So when you moved that box back by five feet, you got the back line to the point which is 60 feet, six inches.

Does the 60 feet, six inches include the mount? Does the 60 feet, six inches include the mount? I don't know exactly how to put this, but is it from the area of earth directly below the pitcher if you were to draw a flat line, you know, straight out? Because it goes up, you know, it's not really measured to the front of home plate. It's not measured to the back of home plate. It's measured to the middle of it. So it's not really 60 feet, six inches at all. But this is for the rabbinical division of baseball, I think. Okay. All right. Well, if you want to own these foundational documents, you have until April 23rd to place a bid and bring them to your own desk drawer or

donate them to John. I'm sure he'd be happy to have them. Yes. Brother, can you spare a million dons? The bidding actually increased by $20,000 as we were speaking. Someone upped the max bid, but it is still at what seems like a steal, currently $161,051, which seems like- I think that figures to be disregarded. I think all the action will take place in the last 24 hours. Yes, I'm sure that would be quite a bargain, but you have 15 days as we speak to place your bid. I will link to that website if you'd like to check it out.

So move your investments out of Panama. if you'd like to check it out. So move your investments out of Panama. Right. That's good advice regardless. All right. Well, John, thank you. This was enlightening as always.

People can find John on Twitter at thorn underscore John and you can find his writing at his site Our Game, which is at ourgame.mlblogs.com. John, thank you. My pleasure. Good talking to you guys. All right. That is it for today and for this week. Thankblogs.com. John, thank you. My pleasure. Good talking to you guys. All right. That is it for today and for this week. Thank you for listening. You can support the podcast on Patreon by going to patreon.com slash effectively wild. Today's Patreon contributor shout outs go to Drew Broadfoot, Joel Berger, Andrew Phillips, Adam Yarkovsky, and Dan Roberts.

Thank you. Our book, The Only Rule Is It Has To Work, comes out on May 3rd. It's the story of phillips adam yarkovsky and dan roberts thank you our book the only rule is it has to work comes out on may 3rd it's the story of how sam and i became the doc adamses of the sonoma stompers baseball operations department we took over an independent league team last summer and we tried to run it according to our own ideas of how baseball should be played you can pre-order it now at amazon or barnes & Noble or your local bookstore. You can join our Facebook group at facebook.com slash groups slash effectively wild, rate and review and subscribe to the podcast on iTunes

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How completely wrong you can be. Hope that doesn't become the sure cure for insomnia for your audience. No, not at all. I know you have described yourself as the most boring man in the world, right? But I don't think anyone else agrees. I take pride in it, yes.