Baseball: "Invention"
and Early Growth (1845-1869)
In 1842, a group of young professionals began meeting regularly to play baseball on a field at 4th Avenue and 27th Street in Manhattan. Three years later, they formed the Knickerbocker Base Ball Club, evidently at the suggestion of Alexander Cartwright, the owner of a book and stationery store who had once been a volunteer fireman with the Knickerbocker Engine Company.
A four-man committee was appointed to draft a constitution and by-laws. Cartwright and the committee's president, Daniel L. "Doc" Adams, did most of the work on the by-laws, which became baseball's first formal rules.
The rules called for four bases in a square, 42 paces (about 126 feet) on each diagonal. The batter was placed at the fourth base, which was renamed "home." "Soaking" was eliminated; a runner had to be tagged or forced out. The batter was out if his batted ball was caught on the fly or on first bounce.
The new rules also established three strikes for an out and three outs in a half-inning. A game lasted until one team scored twenty-one runs, or "aces" as they were then called.
In most histories, Cartwright has replaced Doubleday as the inventor of baseball, but it's impossible to know how much he actually contributed to the rules. However, he did draw the diagram of the new diamond.
The first recorded game under these rules, between teams made up of Knickerbocker members, was played on October 7 at the Elysian Fields in Hoboken, NJ, a short ferry ride from Manhattan. On June 19, 1846, the Knickerbockers lost 23-1 to a team known as the New York Club in what is considered the first real baseball game. (Not as bad as it sounds; most of the players on the New York Club were actually members of the Knickerbocker Club.)
Inspired by the Knickerbockers, other baseball clubs were formed in and around New York City. More than a dozen of them sent delegates to an 1857 convention, presided over by Doc Adams of the Knickerbockers. Adams was chiefly responsible for three important rules changes: The length of the game was set at nine innings, the baselines were set at 90 feet, and the distance from home plate to the pitcher's base, which hadn't been specified in the Knickerbocker rules, was set at 45 feet.
On March 10, 1858, twenty-two clubs from the New York area formed the National Association of Base Ball Players (NABBP). Within two years, more than sixty teams belonged to the association.
Although the Massachusetts game hung on for years in many parts of New England, the New York version spread rapidly across the country. The Civil War helped speed the growth. Thousands of young men from the Midwest learned the sport while training with Easterners. Union soldiers even played baseball in prison camps while their Confederate captors watched and learned.
The NABBP grew to more than 300 clubs from all over the country by 1867, when membership was limited to state associations except in those states that had fewer than ten clubs.
The rapid growth was a sign that the nature of baseball was changing. It was no longer merely an amusement for exclusive, socially-oriented clubs of young professional men. Workingmen were discovering the sport, and they didn't necessarily subscribe to the "it's only a game" attitude that had been adopted from the British sporting class.
The first such team, the Brooklyn Eckford club, was organized as early as 1854. Others followed slowly until after the Civil War, when many veterans brought the sport back to their home towns in the Midwest, where class distinctions weren't so sharply drawn.
The fact that baseball became the first really popular spectator sport also created problems, at least from the strict amateur point of view. Not only did fans cheer for their teams, they often bet on them. And so did some of the players.
Even some of the social baseball clubs began charging admission by the late 1850s, if only to help pay for the after-game banquet. The first person to see the commercial possibilities of baseball was probably William H. Cammeyer, who built the first enclosed field in Brooklyn in 1862. Cammeyer let teams use the field, free of charge, but he collected a 10-cent admission fee from each spectator.
By 1864, though, Cammeyer had to share gate receipts with the better teams from New York and Brooklyn. With teams collecting money, many players began to feel that they should get a share, too. Professionalism was at hand, though it didn't come out into the open until 1869.