If you were strolling across the Elysian Fields in Hoboken, New Jersey, on June 19, 1846, you would have found a group of men playing a new ballgame. The bases were arranged in a diamond, the pitcher tossed the ball underhand, a batted ball caught on a bounce counted as an out, and the game lasted until one of the teams scored 21 “aces.” This game was being played with the Knickerbocker Rules that would evolve into the modern game of baseball.
Because baseball emerged and developed concurrent to the rise of cheap, mass-produced reading material, the Library has a variety of printed artifacts that document the rise and popularization of America’s favorite pastime.
Baseball, an untimed game played on expansive grass fields, provided a pastoral retreat from the industrialized, scheduled, congested urban environment that was beginning to dominate American life. More than 80% of Americans lived in rural areas prior to 1860, but the ensuing decades saw millions of people flock to the cities. The era of baseball’s emergence coincided with a U.S. population explosion from 17 million people in 1840 to over 76 million by the turn of the century, and many of these people crowded into American cities. When these urban workers had leisure time, many of them sought outdoor recreation in the fresh air.
In this same era, the Common School Movement prompted the growth of public education, creating an increasingly literate population eager for accessible reading material. Mass-produced books and newspapers served the demands of a reading public at the same time as baseball’s rise in popularity, so the game’s evolution was documented and promoted in print. In previous eras, localized rules for “town ball” and other games were taught from one generation to the next, but the game of baseball was codified, printed, and shared in mass-media nationwide. A standardized version of baseball spread in part because its rules were published in cheap, pocket-sized baseball guidebooks sold across the country by enthusiasts such as the sporting goods magnate Albert Spalding. Further promoting the game’s popularity, journalistic accounts of exciting games filled the columns of weekly entertainment newspapers such as the New York Clipper, written by journalists such as Henry Chadwick. The game spread in print as much as it did in the fields.
Within the Library’s collections, we have a few 19th century baseball books that offer tips to players and publish official changes to the game’s rules. The first set of rules were compiled in 1845 by the New York Knickerbocker Base Ball Club, led by Alexander Cartwright, and were first printed for the public in 1848; the Library’s earliest book containing the Knickerbocker Rules is from 1858. Most of these rules resemble those followed today: three swinging strikes makes an out, three outs end an inning, the field is divided into fair and foul territory, and pegging runners with the ball is not allowed.
However, there are a few key differences between this early form of baseball and the game we play today, the most notable of which is the rule that “the ball must be pitched, not thrown, for the bat,” meaning that the pitcher’s job was essentially to facilitate the batter putting the ball in play. Up until 1884, pitchers had to toss the ball underhand (like slow pitch softball), and the batter even specified whether he wanted the ball to be delivered high or low (like little league coach-pitch).
These rules meant that the early game’s central matchup was not hitter vs. pitcher; rather, the contest pitted the batter against a team of fielders. In this way, the game might reflect the societal transitions of the mid-1800s. The lone batter may be a vestige of agrarian America’s rugged individualism, while the team of fielders in defined positions (short stop, 1st base, right field, etc.) reflect the cooperation and specialized labor of modern industry and commerce. As America’s first standardized team sport, baseball encouraged the kind of teamwork necessary for factories and densely populated cities to function effectively. Plus, every player had the opportunity both to field alongside his teammates and bat as an individual in each inning. This two-tiered system created baseball’s unusual focus on both collective and individual success; a team’s wins and losses are recorded, but so is each player’s batting average. The game suited the dual interests of this transitional era in American history.
The Knickerbocker Rules were not the only version of the game codified and promoted in print. In New England, “The Massachusetts Game” was another popular early form of baseball. In this game, fielders could peg a runner with the ball to get him out, the infield was a smaller square (not a diamond), the bases were four wooden stakes (not square white bags), a single out ended the inning, overhand pitching was allowed, and there was no foul territory, so batters could smack the ball in all directions. It was an athletic, high-scoring game with 100 runs required to win a match. Before the Red Sox-Yankees rivalry, the Massachusetts Game vied against the New York Knickerbocker’s style of baseball until the mid-1860s, when the New York game won out and became the version adopted nationwide.
Whereas the Massachusetts Game was played on a field that extends 360° in all directions around the batsman, the Knickerbocker Rules of baseball focused its action on a diamond infield with a foul line that extends down the first and third base lines into the outfield, creating a wide-open outfield space while still establishing a boundary between fair and foul territory. This design had a few important benefits. First, an enclosed area of play required less field space to play the game within tightening urban environments. Second, by restricting the playing space, baseball required fewer players to cover the field, making it easier for clubs to field smaller teams of nine players vs. the 15-20 fielders needed to cover the 360° playing spaces of other contemporary bat games.
Another crucial benefit of the foul line was the creation of “out of bounds” space that was safe for the thousands of spectators and journalists who soon crowded into foul territory behind home plate and all down the foul line. As early as 1862, Brooklyn was home to a defined baseball facility with a capacity of roughly 6,500 spectators. In 1866, an astounding 40,000 people watched a game between the Philadelphia Athletics and the Brooklyn Atlantics.
The game’s dissemination in print gave Americans a common recreational vocabulary … literally. An alphabet primer titled Base Ball ABC from 1885 uses terms and images from baseball to teach the ABCs to children, which reminds us that baseball is essentially a children’s game. The Library has an array of children’s books from the 19th century that tell stories about youngsters playing the game with their friends and against their rivals.
In addition to promoting humility and resilience, these children’s baseball books often contain conflicts over sportsmanship and proper following of the rules. In The Winning Run by Captain Ralph Bonehill, the climax involves a controversy over a catcher’s illegal blocking of home plate. In a major scene of an 1868 novel by William Everett titled Changing Base, “the umpire now announced that, in accordance with the new rule, he should begin to call strikes on the player.” Up until the 1860s, batters did not have to swing at pitches they didn’t like, and at-bats could take fifty pitches or more; the batter in this scene of the novel was trying to exhaust the pitcher’s arm (and his patience) by making him throw pitch after pitch without swinging the bat.
Of course, we also have a 1901 edition of Casey at the Bat. Spoiler alert: Casey strikes out.
Sources & Further Reading
Armenti, P. (2021) Baseball Resources at the Library of Congress. Research Guides.
Gelber, S. M. (1983). “Working at Playing: The Culture of the Workplace and the Rise of Baseball.” Journal of Social History, Oxford University Press.
LinWeber, R. E. (1982). “Baseball Guides Galore.” Baseball Research Journal.
Morris, P. (2010). A Game of Inches: The Stories Behind the Innovations That Shaped Baseball. Ivan R. Dee.
Nemec, D. (1994). The Rules of Baseball. Lyons & Burford.
Seifried, C. and Pastore, D. (2010). “The Temporary Homes: Analyzing Baseball Facilities in the United States Pre-1903.” Journal of Sport History, University of Illinois Press.
Society for American Baseball Research. The Research Collection.
Vaught, D. (2011). “Abner Doubleday, Marc Bloch, and the Cultural Significance of Baseball in Rural America.” Agricultural History, Agricultural History Society.
Voigt, D. Q. (1974). “Reflections on Diamonds: American Baseball and American Culture.” Journal of Sporting History, University of Illinois Press.
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