Everything Everywhere Daily: History, Science, Geography & More - The Origins of Baseball

Episode Date: March 22, 2023

In the 19th century, the first real American sport took off in popularity: baseball.  It went from a children's game to one of the most popular and lucrative professional sports in the world.  Yes, its origins have been shrouded in mystery, in no small part because of all the legends and myths surrounding it.  Learn more about baseball, how it really came to be and grew into the global sport it is today on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily. Subscribe to the podcast!  https://link.chtbl.com/EverythingEverywhere?sid=ShowNotes -------------------------------- Executive Producer: Charles Daniel Associate Producers: Peter Bennett & Thor Thomsen   Become a supporter on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/everythingeverywhere Update your podcast app at newpodcastapps.com Discord Server: https://discord.gg/UkRUJFh Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/everythingeverywhere/ Facebook Group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/everythingeverywheredaily Twitter: https://twitter.com/everywheretrip Website: https://everything-everywhere.com/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In the 19th century, the first real American sport took off in popularity, baseball. It went from being a children's game to one of the most popular and lucrative professional sports in the world. Yet, its origins have been shrouded in mystery, in no small part because of all the legends and myths surrounding it. Learn more about baseball, how it really came to be and grew into the sport it is today, on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily. Do you ever climb into bed ready to sleep, only to have your mind start racing the moment your head hits the pillow? bouncing around, replaying the day, or jumping ahead to tomorrow? That is exactly why Catherine Nikolai created Nothing Much Happens. Each episode is a gentle, cozy bedtime story where, well, nothing much happens. No drama, no tension, nothing you need to follow closely.

Just soft narration, calming repetition, and soothing sensory details designed to help your mind slow down and your body relax. It's not about entertainment, it's about rest. And millions of listeners around the world use it every night to quiet their thoughts and finally fall asleep. If you've ever struggled to shut your brain off at night, this might be exactly what you've been missing. You can listen to Nothing Much Happens wherever you get your podcasts. Episodes are every Monday and Thursday. I've done several episodes now on the origin of popular sports.

Many of them have rather straightforward origin stories. In the case of baseball, however, its origin is not so straightforward. Not only was much of the early history never recorded, but it was also shrouded for decades in a legend that didn't have any basis in historical fact. I might as well start with The Legend, which many of you, if you grew up in the United States or Canada, might be familiar with. The myth states that the game of baseball was invented by one man, Abner Doubleday of Coopers Town, New York. Double Day supposedly invented the game in 1839 as a modification of an 18th century game called Town Ball. In Doubleday's version of baseball, there were four bases, a pitcher, a batter, and 11 players on each team. The first game

supposedly took place between the Otsego Academy and Green Select School. This version of the origins of baseball held such sway for so long that the Baseball Hall of Fame was established in Cooperstown, New York, in honor of Abner Doubleday. I was a huge, huge baseball fan growing up, and I learned the story of Abner Doubleday and never had any reason to question it. So why do I now insist that it's just a myth? The origins of the story date back to the first years of the 20th century, when baseball was becoming big business. There were historians who wrote about the history of baseball originating in British bat and ball games before being imported to the United States. Albert Spalding, the then owner of the Chicago White Sox and founder of the Spalding Sporting Goods

Company, believed that baseball was an all-American activity and wanted to prove it. In 1905, he organized the Mills Commission, headed by Abraham Mills, the former president of the National League, to determine the origins of baseball. The other members of the Mills Commission were two United States Senators, another former league president, a team owner, and some former players. There were no historians. The entire Abner Doubleday story came from the testimony of a single individual, a mining engineer by the name of Abner Graves. He testified that as children, he saw Doubleday draw a diagram of the field and come up with the rules for the first game. There was no other corroborating evidence or testimony.

Abner Doubleday himself became a general in the Civil War and died in 1893. At no point in his life did he ever claim to have invented baseball, nor did anyone else ever give him attribution for having invented baseball. The story was simply designed to credit the invention of the sport to an American hero. The location of the Baseball Hall of Fame and the name of the stadium in Cooperstown, Doubles Day Field, are still a legacy of the legend, which started in 1905. So if Abner Doubleday had nothing to do with the invention of baseball, where did it come from? The origins of baseball are very murky. There have been various bat and ball games played in Europe for centuries. They were always played by children, went by many different names, and had rules which changed by location.

The problem is, other than sometimes noting the name of a game being played, almost nothing else was ever documented about these games. The immediate origins of baseball appear to have come from two English games, rounders and cricket. Late 18th and early 19th century America saw a host of different games which were documented. Town ball, cat ball, basin ball, round ball, rounders, and baseball. In 1833, the Olympic ball club of Philadelphia was founded, and in 1837, the Gotham Baseball Club was established in New York. And if you're wondering why I'm putting an awkward poll. in baseball, it's because back then it was spelled as two words, not one. These early clubs were playing games only vaguely resembling modern baseball.

The first thing we can point to that we can call something akin to modern baseball were the rules established in 1845 by the Nickenbacher Baseball Club of New York. The man behind the codification of the rules was Alexander Joy Cartwright. The Nickenbacher rules were almost certainly established several years before 1845. but even so, the rules still bear some resemblance to the game of today. The bases were in the shape of a diamond, with home and second base 42 paces apart, and first and third base 42 bases apart. The game was played to 21 aces.

An ace is what they called a run. The two teams would take turns very similar to how cricket works. The ball had to be pitched like a horseshoe, not thrown. And this is where the term pitch comes from for throwing a baseball. If you caught a ball, the batter was out, and if a runner was tagged with a ball, they were out. The rules were certainly different, but if you saw people playing this game, you would think that they were playing baseball, or at least slow-pitched softball. The Knickerbockers published their rules in 1848, and another New York club called the Eagles

published their own rules in 1852. In 1854, the Nickenbockers, Eagles, and Gotham's all agreed to a uniform set of rules that they would use when playing each other. In 1857, 16 teams from the New York area came together and modified a new set of rules, this time establishing nine innings and removing the cricket style of one inning for each side. They also created teams of nine players, established bases as being 90 feet apart, and allowed forceouts at any base. The game became very popular in New York.

In 1858, an all-star team of Manhattan and New Jersey players played an all-star team from Brooklyn. 4,000 people were in attendance, and it was the first baseball game ever where people paid money to attend. The Manhattan team won 22 to 18, ticket prices were 10 cents, and the proceeds were donated to charity. Just before the outbreak of the Civil War, some teams actually began playing in enclosed fields and regularly charged admission. The Civil War spread the game as soldiers from around the country would play together during downtime, and Prisoners of War even taught the game to soldiers in the South. It was the Nickenbocker rules which became the popular version of the game. After the war, the game kept growing in popularity all over the country.

While teams organized under the National Association of Baseball players were ostensibly amateurs, as more money came in, players were paid under the table. In 1869, the National Association finally agreed to allow openly professional teams. The first professional team that formed soon after this rule change was the Cincinnati Redstockings, or, as they're known today, the Cincinnati Reds. They were a national touring team who played local clubs. Because they paid for talent, no one was able to beat them for over a year. In 1871, the National Association of Professional Baseball Players was established with 23 teams,

including several teams which still exist today. The Chicago White Stockings, the Philadelphia, now Oakland Athletics, the Cincinnati Reds, and the Boston Red Stockings. Oddly enough, the Boston and Chicago teams are not the teams by those names today. The Chicago white stockings became the Chicago Cubs. The Boston Red Stockings became the Boston Braves, which were then the Milwaukee Braves and are now the Atlanta Braves. The Atlanta Braves are actually the longest continually existing baseball club, as the

Chicago Cubs didn't play for a season after the Chicago Fire, and the Cincinnati Reds actually dissolve for one season in 1870. The National Association of Professional Baseball players was short-lived and replaced in 1876 by the National League of Professional Baseball Clubs. This is the same National League that exists today and is the oldest professional sports league in the world. The next 30 years saw I host of professional teams and leagues come and go. The only other league which was able to compete with the National League was the American League, which was established in 1901. The American League was well-funded and started. a bidding war for talent with the National League and other minor leagues who joined up to form

the National Association. In 1902, the leagues came together to hammer out a deal that mostly honored the reserve clause in the contracts of each league, which prevented players from becoming free agents. The National Association teams were also set up in a formal minor league system with different levels. They also agreed to a championship series the next year between the American and National League champions, which was dubbed the World Series. Baseball grew rapidly and became big business over the next two decades. However, things fell apart rapidly after the 1919 World Series, where members of the Chicago White Sox were convicted of purposely throwing the series for gamblers,

of which I have done a previous episode. The game had become tainted, so the league hired an impartial person to oversee the rules. The man they hired was a federal judge by the name of Kennesaw, Mountain Landis. Landis controlled baseball with an almost dictatorial control for 24 years. Baseball up to this point had enforced an informal color barrier preventing black players from playing. There had been a few black players in the very first days of professional baseball, but

other than that, they had been kept out. Landis was an opponent of integration and made sure that no black players were allowed in the major leagues during his tenure. This, in no small part, led to the creation of the Negro League. in 1920. There was no single Negro League. It was a collection of leagues and teams with black baseball players who played over a 30-year period. The number of games and teams were always in flux and accurate statistics weren't always kept. However, the Negro League saw some of the greatest players ever to play the game, including Satchel Page, Josh Gibson, Roob Foster,

and many others. The Negro leagues will be the subject of its own episode in the future. It wasn't until the death of Kennesaw Mountain Landis in 1944 that the Brooklyn Dodgers were able to sign Jackie Robinson in 1946, finally breaking down the color barrier in baseball. Kids had played baseball informally for years, but in 1939, the Little League was established in William's Port, Pennsylvania. In 1947, the first Little League World Series was played, a tradition that continues to this day. The game spread beyond the United States in the first half of the 20th century, becoming popular in Cuba, Canada and other Latin American countries. Baseball had been played in Japan before the Second World War.

There were club teams in the 1930s mirroring the clubs in New York in the 1850s. In 1950, the Nippon Professional Baseball League was established. Baseball in Japan is basically the same as baseball in other countries, but a completely different culture developed around the sport, both in terms of how it's played and its fans. The Japanese Championship is known as the Japan Series, which is played between the winners of the Central and Pacific leagues. For decades, Japanese baseball remained its own thing, with strong cultural norms keeping the very best players in Japan, even though they were more than good enough to play in the major leagues. The Japanese home run king, Saduara-O, hit 868 home runs, over

a hundred more than Hank Aaron. This taboo was broken in 1995 when Hideo Nomo signed with the Los Angeles Dodgers. Professional quality baseball players began coming from all over the world. including the Dominican Republic, Cuba, Panama, Venezuela, Mexico, South Korea, the Netherlands, by way of Aruba and Kurosau, Taiwan, and even the cricket bastion of Australia. In 2006, the Baseball World Classic was established, which was to be the baseball version of the World Cup. You might be wondering why they just didn't call it the World Cup, which would have had far better name recognition. That's because there was a thing called the Baseball World Cup from 1938 until 2011. even though nobody in the world really knew about it.

And this might shock people, but the very first winner of the Baseball World Cup in 1938 was Great Britain. And the real shocking thing isn't that they won, but that they had a British team instead of four different national teams. The 2023 Baseball Classic just ended as I was preparing this episode. Japan beat the United States three to two to win their third championship. Baseball remains a very big business. Given the 162 games played by each major league team each season,

Major League Baseball is the second largest professional sports league in the world in terms of revenue, behind only the National Football League. The game has come a long way from being called America's National Pastime. From its humble roots of hitting a ball with a stick in a field, it has developed into a truly international game. The executive producer of Everything Everywhere Daily is Charles Daniel. The associate producers are Thor Thompson and Peter Bennett. it is something I try to avoid at all costs. Occasionally, I do make a mistake. When that happens,

I have to make a correction. I made a pretty dumb mistake in the last episode. Anchorage is not the capital of Alaska. The capital is Juno. I am actually well aware of this. I've been to both Anchorage and Juno, and I've even stood across the street from the Alaskan State House. It was one of those things that when someone pointed it out, I had to slap my forehead. Now, that being said, Anchorage probably makes a ton more sense as a capital city than Juno does for Alaska, but that's neither here nor there. I offer my apologies to all Alaskans. Also, the latest episode of Everything Everywhere Weekly

is now available to all my supporters over on Patreon. I recapped all the week's episodes with my friend, the professional hobo Nora Dunn. Remember, if you leave a review or send me a boostagram, you two can have it read on the show.