Origins

[00:00:00] Speaker A: It. Joseph Bickney was scheduled to bat leadoff for New York, but the baseball game kept getting delayed. First pitch was scheduled for 230. But as fans kept making their way to the fashion race course, they just decided to wait until more people showed up before they could play. Of course, that would never happen today with tv and whatnot, but this was 1858, and it was kind of like an all star game between clubs from Brooklyn and New York. To this point, there really hadn't been anything like this ever before, so no one was really sure what to do. In fact, this was the first time that anyone had paid admission to watch a baseball game, so the players and spectators were all still trying to figure things out together. Leading up to the game, the newspapers had billed the event as the great baseball match and drummed up so much public interest that organizers opted for a last minute venue change from a legion fields in New Jersey to the fashioned race course in Queens, which could hold up to 50,000 people. And a lot of people turned up. They arrived on beer wagons, milk carts, private stages, and by train, where they were met by a carnival like atmosphere of games, gamblers, and scammers. Newspapers chronicled pickpockets getting arrested and a cop who, while he was on duty, started gambling and lost $30 while playing cards. He decided to arrest the guy who beat him, took his money back, and then bribed a newspaper reporter with a beer to keep his name out of the story. When the actual baseball game finally happened, New York beat Brooklyn 22 to 18. Nobody had gloves back then, so a score like this wasn't all that crazy. Anyway. This circus adjacent affair was a big moment for baseball. For a sport so obsessed with its own past, there's no real consensus about where it began and how or why. But what is clear is that in the mid 19th century, baseball was not the only bat and ball game being played. And if not for a less than random sequence of events, one of those other games might have become our national pastime. I'm Stuart Barefoot, and this is obscure ball, a sports storytelling podcast. That story is next. Hey. So it has been a while, almost a year, since my last episode. In that time, I've actually been really busy on some other stuff and chipping away at some good, obscure boss stories. But most of all, I've been working on a new series that I hope to launch sometime next year. And, like, with this, I could use some help. I actually had a company kind of back at it at one point, but that fell through, and I'm going to kind of soldier on with it. Anyway, there's a link in the show notes where you could make a donation to help support this work and for the new series called our Beloved Medium, a six part audio documentary about the history of radio. And stay tuned to this whole episode because I've got a snippet to share later. But for now, back to this episode of Obscure Ball. It's called Origins. [00:03:35] Speaker B: Well, Townball. The history of townball so far should probably be broken up into three parts, and the first part starts about ten years ago in 2012. [00:03:45] Speaker A: A few years ago, a guy named Grant Moore contacted me saying that he had an interesting story to tell me about townball. I didn't know who Grant was and had never heard of Townball, but he promised it was a good story, so I figured I'd talk to him and see what he had to say. [00:04:01] Speaker B: In the Central Valley of California, there was a friend of mine teaching math at the time at a high school called University High School, and the teacher, his name is Daniel Jones. At the time, in 2012, he was teaching math and leading a very successful cricket league at the school. And one day his boss was saying, hey, this is going great. Can you do another sport in the fall? With 20 minutes, Cheek had already come up with how he was going to run his course that would lead into a new sport. For the fall, he taught a two week elective called Origins of the american pastime, where he and his students looked at different bat and ball games and variants that didn't really make anything big of themselves. Around the end of the 19th century, the one that they got their needle stuck on was called the Massachusetts game. It's just been colloquially referred to as that. It's from a rule set in 1858 from Denham, Massachusetts. The field in that game is a perfect square. You have a batting point on the center of one side of the square, and then you run 30ft to the right, and then you run 60ft to the left, 60ft again and 60ft again. So it's a counterclockwise path in that game. You could peg the players, meaning in order to get them out, you could throw the ball at their body. The ball was light enough and soft enough that this actually didn't present a huge detriment when it came to injury and things like that. So those are just a couple differences. Know modern baseball, which is what most people would be familiar with. So the students loved the Massachusetts game a lot, but they learned that it was never fully completed as a game. They also wanted to tweak a couple of aspects where they thought it was lacking. So they put their heads together and they combined this Massachusetts game with other variants from the late 19th century, one of them called stoolball. And then they also borrowed some things from cricket, which, of course, is popular basically everywhere else in the world but the United States. So what they came up with was what they called 21st century townball. Townball being one word, because townball was synonymous with baseball. That saying in the late 19th century, and that was before baseball as one word, was codified into one particular sport, which happened closer to the beginning of the 20th century. From the New York style of play, the Massachusetts game was a runner up competitor to be the national pastime, actually. So these students, for Daniel Jones, they wanted to see, well, what would have happened if the Massachusetts game became the national pastime, and how would the game have changed as of the years went by in the 20th century? What would we have had today? [00:07:05] Speaker C: So, my name is Daniel Jones. I am the founder of 21st century Tambo. I'm a math teacher by trade. And while teaching in California, I was teaching a class called the origins of american pastime in 2012, January 2012. And in that class, we researched ten different baton ball games that were played around the world. I don't know if I remember all of them that we played, but we definitely looked at finnish baseball. But on the second day of that class, my students, two of my students, there are 20 kids in the class, ten sports, two students per sports. The second day of the class, two of my students taught us at the class how to play the Massachusetts version of baseball. And we were just absolutely floored. We fell in love with the game immediately. I don't know if your listeners have played the Massachusetts game baseball, but I highly recommend it. It is extremely fun and highly addictive. One of the most important factors of that is that the Massachusetts game doesn't have any foul balls, which makes the game so open and playable because the ball is virtually always live when you play it. We recognized early on that this game called the Massachusetts version of baseball, as it was handed down to us, there were only 21 rules handed down to us. If you look at the 1858 denim rules, 21 rules, we decided right away that the game was never completed. If you look at the history of baseball, baseball had so many iterative changes over time where they played the game for a while, changed rules, especially early on. There were many iterations of different versions of baseball. Many different rule sets were handed down to us. So the game of baseball now is different than how it was played in the 19th century. So we realized that the Massachusetts game didn't have that same opportunity to go through that iterative process. And so we took it upon ourselves to do that really fast. Just seeing where baseball had gone, we said, okay, if this game had survived, if the Massachusetts version had become the national pastime as opposed to the New York version, what would this game have become? That's what we asked ourselves. And within days, we had all kinds of ideas, and I think we settled on a version of townball that we now call 21st century townball. We had it done within a week. It was something I'd been thinking about already before I taught this class, but this class kind of pushed me to really get it down on paper and to experiment with the students to get a version of townball that was really playable. So we've played 21st century townball now, and we've been playing it for over ten years, and we're having a lot of fun. [00:09:44] Speaker A: And what Daniel did with his students building off an existing game and tweaking some rules is exactly how baseball as we know it was born. Slowly over time, almost painfully. [00:09:57] Speaker D: Basically, the way to think of it, the simple way, is that if we go back in time to the middle 1850s and earlier, the three major cities on the east coast have their own Baton ball games. And those are not all the Baton ball games, but those are the most important ones. And for reasons that I won't discuss now but are in my book, the time comes when people think we need to pick one of these as our national sport. [00:10:22] Speaker A: That's Tom Gilbert, the author of the book how Baseball happened. And for proper sourcing and credit, am I opening that baseball game that I described that comes from his book. [00:10:33] Speaker D: And the candidates were the Massachusetts game, which is played in the Boston area. Then you've got the New York game. It was literally called that. That's baseball. And then you've got town ball, which is centered around Philadelphia. And all those games are thriving as just folk games, right? And there's also cricket, which is played mostly by english immigrants. And there are quite a few of those. There's a few other games, but those are the pretzel ones. And this is a fun historical question, which is why the New York game weighs out over the other ones. Because between the mid 1850s and 1860, the New York game wins decisively in its competition, to the point where never does any New York or Brooklyn club take up the other versions. But the Philadelphia club starts switching from town ball to baseball, and so do the. And, you know, we have some information about how and why that happened. But what I argue in my book is that it really has nothing to do with the inherent entertainment value of the like. There's no reason to think some historians have said this, but I don't think there's any reason to believe that townball wasn't a lot of fun, or Massachusetts game was a lot of fun. It drew crowds. People love playing it. I think the reasons are kind of non sports reasons. [00:11:50] Speaker A: Most baseball fans, including me, have heard their whole lives that baseball was either created by Abner Doubleday or Alexander Cartwright. And while more and more people have rightfully been skeptical of that in recent years, Tom argues that it's all just a myth. And his book goes at theory. The pretty hard. [00:12:10] Speaker D: The weird thing about the double day story is that it's 100% false. So it's so wrong. It's so false that people have trouble wrapping their minds around it. And people will come up to me sometimes after I'll give a talk, and they'll go like, how could it be that wrong? It's like saying Mickey Mouse invented the nuclear bomb or something. It's just that, you know, why and how it happened has nothing to do with the beginning of baseball. But it is an interesting story because you can make sense out of it. It's just there's no historical content to it. And I try to explain in the book why it happened and how it happened. [00:12:51] Speaker A: This is important because baseball didn't have just one inventor. The true creators of the game, as Tom argues in his book, were thousands of amateurs who were playing way before 1876. So much like the Massachusetts game that was popular in Massachusetts, and the town ball game, which was popular in Philadelphia, the New York game was popular in New York. A typical club from the era might form from some kind of common interest, like a trade or political affiliation. [00:13:20] Speaker D: I mean, the basic fact that helps you understand these early clubs is that when we think of a baseball organization, we think of a guy saying, okay, what league are we going to play in, who's our competition? And where can we get a good shortstop? But these clubs weren't formed that way. They were actually people with preexisting relationships. And a lot of times, the early baseball clubs spun off other clubs that have nothing to do with sports. Like it was people who worked together, or it was people who knew each other from the neighborhood, or it was people in the same volunteer fire company or militia unit, things like that. [00:13:54] Speaker A: And it was rare that these clubs would play against each other. Take the knickerbockers for instance, it was a club with a bunch of guys from lower Manhattan who worked in finance. They'd all get together after work and play some sort of intramural game against each other, while the Eagles, a bunch of fellas from the publishing industry, would do the same. And if you didn't belong to one of these clubs, you probably didn't know or care what was even happening. But around the 1840s, two things started to happen. For one, the New York press began to write about baseball, and most of. [00:14:30] Speaker D: Our knowledge of popular culture comes from newspapers, not all of it, but most of it. And newspapers changed their character in the 1830s and explain how this resulted in a lot more attention being paid to sports. So they basically, to keep it long story short, they went from a subscription model that was expensive to circulation model, and it had to do with printing technology. They could suddenly print gazillions of papers in a day, and everything was circulation driven, and it was suddenly paid for by advertising. So you can probably relate to this. So that meant if you could sell 12,000 copies on Tuesday instead of 10,000, you made a lot of money. So how do you do that? Well, you market instead of on the subscription model. It was expensive, so only rich people bought it, and all they wanted was the shipping news and government policies that might affect the stock market, stock prices. So it was super boring is what the papers looked like in 1825. And as soon as it has to appeal to as many people as possible, it suddenly starts covering the theater and celebrities and gossip and crime and sports. So this creates this massive false idea that baseball suddenly started existing in the 1840s. And what I say in my book is, well, some things change, because a lot of things changed over the first half of the 19th century in baseball. But there's little bits of evidence that are 100% convincing that there were baseball clubs around of adults well before the 1840s. Sometimes they're mentioned, and we don't know anything about them. And it's very frustrating because the newspaper basically wasn't covering it. And one of the big clues, which is pretty hard to deny, is that when baseball. All right, so the official story is that it started in 1845 or in 1839, depending on which story you believe. But I can give you a whole file of newspaper clippings from the 1840s, where baseball is referred to as the good old fashioned american game of baseball. Right. And no one calls anything brand new that. [00:16:32] Speaker A: So that suggests that baseball had already been around for a while, chipping away at the double day myth. It also offers an explanation as to why the New York game began gaining a national following. While not everyone was super into baseball, people in New York did take a lot of pride in their burrows. [00:16:48] Speaker D: To me, one of the most fun topics to research and talk about in the book is the advent of fans, because nobody invited them. Literally, nobody thought there would be fans. No one could see any reason why anyone would watch a game. And I spend years, like, tracing any newspaper account of a crowd, like, who was in it, why they were there, what their reporters thought about it. And basically, until around 1857, a baseball attracted almost no spectator interest. And when people would show up at a game, a large crowd of people was 75 or 100. And the newspapers accounts would often mention that they were members of other baseball clubs. So it wasn't like a fan interest phenomenon. It was guys who were interested in baseball, watching their friends play, and there was a little bit of gambling. So there'd be mentioned, there would be bookies there and betters. And the main factor that stimulates public interest initially is the Brooklyn versus New York rivalry. Because they're across the river from each other. New York is this big, powerful city, and Brooklyn is catching up with it quick. It's sort of booming. And I actually feel like that was one of the things that the other versions of baseball didn't have. Like, if Philadelphia didn't have a rival city next to it, neither did Boston. And that suddenly, when it was like, brooklyn versus New York, people started turning out, wow, let's see if we can beat those guys. Right? [00:18:19] Speaker A: And that brings us to the second thing that happened in 1858. When the New York clubs and the Brooklyn clubs decided to play an all star series, the press took notice, and so did everyone else. [00:18:31] Speaker D: In 1858, baseball was really taking off. So they had good athletes. And the thing is, when baseball starts getting even more competitive, in 1859 60, and then after the Civil War, those kind of people drop out of the game because they can't keep up. And basically, the game started to become buzzy professional, and you're getting better athletes. [00:18:55] Speaker A: From there. The sport caught on after a few iterations of professional leagues. The National League was formed in 1876 and exists to this day. And that's how baseball won out Abner double day had nothing to do with it. [00:19:11] Speaker D: When you have to sort of deprogram people about it, I usually start out with this mind blowing fact. In 1893, double date dies. Okay? And he's a war hero. He had a pretty good military record in the Mexican War and in the Civil War. And there's a big public funeral for him in Manhattan. That is a parade down Fifth Avenue. And one of the main speakers at his funeral is ag Mills, who was a fellow soldier and friend of double days and also a baseball man. So guess what word he never says during this speech? Baseball. And no one mentions it. You know why? Because Abner Double A had no known interest in baseball. Zero. And b, he was a compulsive diarist, and he published these voluminous memoirs about his military career. And the word baseball never appears. So he's actually. If you had to pick someone who you were pretty sure had less interest in baseball than anyone you could find from his generation, it would probably be him. Okay, so why did this happen? Because 1893, he dies, and 14 years later, baseball appoints a commission, a blue ribbon commission. It was all sort of baloney to find out who invented baseball. And the chairman of the committee is. It's Ag Mills, double day's best friend, who spoke at his funeral. And that committee decides that double day invented baseball. Right. So there's something seriously wrong here, and it's a combination of two things. The stupid part is that baseball wasn't taking this whole mission seriously. It was basically kind of a phony baloney pr war. But what was it really about? What it was about was there were people, one of them, Henry Chadwick, who I talk about in my book a lot, who's a prominent baseball journalist, and people listened to know he would sort of fall in love with his own pet theories, and he was a brilliant guy, but not all his theories were right. He started saying that baseball developed from an english game called Rounders, which is sort of a primitive version of cricket. And I don't know if you ever heard of it, but you can read this idea that baseball developed from rounders all over the Internet today and in reference books and in history books, and it's really wrong, in my opinion. But Albert Spalding, who is the owner of the Cubs, one of the founders of the National League, Chadwick's employer, and the most powerful person in baseball. He's basically the de facto commissioner in the 19 oh, s. He's really annoyed by this, because one of the main marketing weapons of baseball is patriotism. It's an all american sport. It has nothing to do with anything foreign. And you have to understand America in the 19th, early 20th century, we have a little bit of a chip on our shoulder about England and about Europe, and we have the strong sense of exceptionalism. And the idea that our sport owes anything to the British was fighting words. And I explained this in detail in the book, because it seems crazy now, but it wasn't crazy then. And Spalding basically wants to niff this thing in the butt. And here's the really weird part, which is Spalding was right. Baseball didn't come for rounders. I believe he was 100% right. And his long argument that it had nothing to do with rounders is very sensible. But he wanted to nip the whole subject in the butt. He wanted to kill it. And that was the reason, the cynical reason they invented the double day story. And what it really boils down to is if we say that it was a war hero who everyone loved and respected, who's dead, who can't deny it a. It shuts off any discussion about whether the game comes from England. Right. If it was invented in 1839 in upstate New York, that subject is closed. That's one of the main points. So the other main point is he's safe. It's a revelation. You can't question revelation. You can't do it in church. You can't do it in a lot of places. So this is the word coming down from the people who should know this is what happened. And to question it if you work in baseball is a bad idea for your career. And if you're outside baseball, you're basically disrespecting a war hero and you're saying something unpatriotic. So it was actually brilliant because the story was probably, not only did it last a long time, but it's been taken more seriously than it was probably intended to be. [00:23:35] Speaker A: To learn even more about baseball's roots, I decided I needed to see a vintage baseball game firsthand. And with time travel not being possible, I had to wait for the opportune moment that's next. So, as promised, here's a bit from the series I'm working on. Be sure to stay tuned to this feed because I'll drop the pilot episode in its entirety in a couple of weeks, along with some backstory and why I think this is an important story to tell. Now. In the meantime, here's a teaser from our beloved medium, an unofficial and incomplete love letter to radio. [00:24:15] Speaker E: They were completely serious. The christian front was very seriously committed to trying to overthrow the US government and very seriously had connections to nazis. And Father Coughlin openly aided and supported this group, both in its rise and also in its continued really terroristic activities. Even as they were being put on trial for sedition and being tried with trying to overthrow the United States through a violent uprising, Father Coughlin continued to defend them and say that the media had them all wrong. So absolutely there were direct links to the most nefarious forces in society at that time. And if more people had listened, you know, we don't want to do hypotheticals, but certainly you don't want to give a figure like Father Coglan too much power and influence because you see what happens. [00:25:10] Speaker A: Coglin's vision never fully took root in America. The christian front plot fell through when the government infiltrated their ranks and 17 of their members were arrested and tried for sedition. They were never convicted, and the government eventually dropped its case. But that was the beginning of the end for Cogland's time in the limelight. Eventually, the catholic church gave him an ultimatum. Either he give up his radio show or lose his priesthood. Surprisingly, he chose the church and would eventually fade away from the national spotlight. But he laid the groundwork that many pundits and politicians use to this day. [00:25:49] Speaker E: There's a lot of power in radical populism, for sure. I think one of the lessons of Father Coughlin's story is that it wasn't just isolated to his time period and his particular moment in history, that the reason why he became so popular and why figures continue to become popular who remind us of him, is that these are sort of tried and true principles of demagoguery, that there is a formula to follow in order to win people to your side when you've been rejected by the mainstream. And it's good for us as viewers, as audiences, as consumers of content in this endless stream of content that we live in. It's good for us to be aware of how those tactics work so that we can better prepare ourselves to defend ourselves against them and use our critical thinking skills. [00:26:33] Speaker A: If nothing else, it illustrates that as a medium, radio was powerful. It could win the hearts and minds of millions of people and could be a springboard for direct action. Maybe it could even be used to start a war. Now back to origins. [00:27:03] Speaker F: Here we. Ladies and gentlemen, let me introduce the captains for today, Keith Manuel and Deb Coates. We will have a coin toss to. [00:27:15] Speaker A: Determine in November of 2023. I made my way to Durham Athletic park in North Carolina. It's an old baseball stadium where the Durham Bulls, the inspiration for Bull Durham, used to play. But today it's the host site for a vintage baseball game hosted by the Duke Homestead and historic site in North Carolina. One of the event organizers talks over the PA, explaining that the Durham station, Lucky Stripes and the Whiteville Statesman will be playing two games using Beatles rules that's B-E-A-D-L-E-S named after a guy who wrote an early rulebook. As best I can tell, Beatles rules evolved during the 1860s, and compared to baseball today, they're pretty wild. There's no gloves, no walks, no blunting, and a catch on a first bounce is an out. Players on both teams dressed in vintage uniforms and adopted 19th century style nicknames like Jeff Spider Web, Casey Hammerhead Harden, or my personal favorite, Richard Ripsnarder Harris. [00:28:16] Speaker G: Direct your attention to the feel, retirement. [00:28:19] Speaker F: And the national anthem. [00:28:29] Speaker A: After an authentic rendition of the Star Spangled Banner, the games began and it was quickly evident that there would be no shortage of offense without any gloves. A lot of wouldbe flyball outs were base hits, and the statesman won game 117 to ten. Between games, I met James Jim Dandy Harris, an outfielder for the lucky strikes. He played college ball at Howard University in DC and first got into vintage baseball when his adult league team was invited to play in a vintage game. [00:29:01] Speaker H: It wasn't that competitive. And then the next year they kind of brought a team, I think, from out of town. And it's like every year they bring different groups of folks and we get to tap into our competitive side and play a different form of baseball. [00:29:16] Speaker F: Two more questions for you. What was it like having played traditional baseball your whole life the first time you're out there? Because I saw you out there in let's build. What was it like trying to catch the ball without a glove? [00:29:26] Speaker H: So that was the biggest learning. So we did batting practice before the game, and the balls were almost like spongy, harder nerf ball. And then the game balls are like a soft, I mean, hard. So I learned it's almost like trying to catch a football. So I kind of squeeze my hands and try to soften my hands, and it makes it easier to catch it. That's about the best thing I can tell you because it is a lot different. You got to use two hands. [00:29:51] Speaker F: Yeah. And our final thing is what someone who's like, maybe listening to this doesn't know much about vintage baseball. What would you like them to know about it? [00:30:00] Speaker H: So it's really cool to connect to the history of baseball and understand the rules a little bit different, but it's a great way to continue the tradition of the game. And I'd say, yeah, that one bounce thing and the no gloves is a lot different. [00:30:16] Speaker A: One of his opponents is Josh, or Josh Doc Stevens, a doctor by day, but third baseman for the statesman in his spare time. He was showing me off some of the equipment that they use catcher first base. [00:30:30] Speaker F: All right. What's the bat like there? Someone told me they're a lot different. That looks like a fairly standard bat. [00:30:35] Speaker I: Yeah, it looks pretty similar to a modern Day bat. What it's made out of maple and ash is pretty typical of a standard bat. Now, there's a couple of other heavier bats, but it looks like a pretty typical bat for the most part. [00:30:45] Speaker D: Okay. [00:30:46] Speaker H: Yeah. [00:30:47] Speaker F: Is the ball different than. [00:30:48] Speaker I: Yeah, the ball is different. There's a couple. Two different balls that we typically play with. One is kind of a little bit of a mixture between a t ball and a baseball. So a little bit more of a softer outer coating where the other one's a little bit more similar to a true baseball. [00:31:00] Speaker F: A little harder. Wow. I can't imagine trying to catch that bare handed. [00:31:04] Speaker I: Yeah, it's pretty tough with no gloves, especially playing third base. [00:31:07] Speaker F: Oh, that's the. You play the hot corner with no gloves. Oh, man. What position did you. [00:31:12] Speaker A: After the statesman won game two, I met up with some of the event organizers, including Dell choir boy Coates, the manager for the lucky strikes. We sat in the dugout while he explained some of the Beatles rules. [00:31:29] Speaker F: All right, so game one was by the. You said Beatles. Beatles rules. B-E-A-B-L-E-S. What's Beatles like? What's the. That was the name of the rulebook at that time. Author, I think. Yeah. And I think it was the author's name, but that was the standard rule book at that time for baseball. Vintage, what we call vintage. And then game two, we did the earlier rules, the 1860s, that were also Beatles rules, but they, over time, evolved. All right, so this is an era of baseball I don't know a whole lot about, but my understanding was that prior to 1876 and the formation of the National League, you had several versions of baton ball games going around. Right. I'm still trying to kind of wrap my mind around it. I know you had, like, the Massachusetts game. You had town ball from Philadelphia, and you had the New York game. Which of those did what we see today most resemble? This would be more similar, I would think, and Eric would know for sure, but I think it's more of the New York game of what we're doing today. Yeah, this looked a lot other than some of the bounce on the first. Catching a ball on the first bounce and the no gloves. It looked pretty similar to the game I've grown up watching. No walks. No walks. That one, too. [00:32:52] Speaker D: Okay. [00:32:53] Speaker F: Yeah. Not in the 1860s. Not in the 1860 rules. But there are in the second set of 669 rules. There were walks, and that really hurt our team in the first game. It sure did. We walked their batter several times. Yeah. So something between in those years kind of made someone decide, and there were variations that continued up until later. As you were saying, we played by two sets of rules for two reasons. To give some variety to the fans, but also to the players. But by playing by the 1860 rules, it is a faster game. It's a much faster game with playing that one bounce or one bound out, it moves the game a lot faster. But typically, a vintage game normally runs about an hour and a half because of that. Real good. [00:33:41] Speaker A: Naturally, the topic of Abner double day came up. [00:33:45] Speaker G: Double day never saw a game in his life. [00:33:48] Speaker A: That's Eric Red Laudenbacher, the umpire for the games. And I actually found out later that he helped organize a vintage baseball camp that I went to when I was, like, six or seven. [00:34:00] Speaker G: Doc Adams from New York, he wrote some of the original rules for baseball in 1839 when he was with the New York Knickerbockers. And we're trying to get him into the hall of Fame. He wrote the roles. He's the one that came up with a shortstop position, and he also was the first one to make baseballs. [00:34:31] Speaker A: But why, then, does the myth live on, like, all these years later? Well, remember what Tom Gilbert said earlier about it just being a ruse for the sake of marketing. Matt, the MC of the event seems to agree. [00:34:46] Speaker F: He was a war hero. He was second in command at Fort Sumter. When Fort Sumter fell, he was a general at Gettysburg, and he was, I wouldn't say well known, but he was a known name. And they wanted to make America. They want to make baseball America's game. What better way to do it than to have America's game run by a known union general? And I think that's where the linkage comes from. They're trying to link it to make it America's game. [00:35:19] Speaker A: Of course, it did become America's game. By the turn of the century, Americans everywhere were obsessed. And even though enthusiasm has tapered off a little bit, these days, baseball is still a very american thing. And at the time of this recording, it's getting a facelift of sorts. All kinds of rule changes, like the universal dh, banning the shift, the pitch clock, and so on and so forth, have divided the baseball faithful. There seems to be this idea that baseball rules and traditions are like the sacred covenant between the baseball gods and the rest of us down here on earth. But this chapter of history tells us otherwise. Here's Daniel Jones again. [00:36:04] Speaker C: There's a lot of quotes in our history of writings about baseball, even though they're, they're kind of sparse. They, they all refer to the ridiculous nature of baseball. Our version of baseball isn't ridiculous, but the versions that were played in the 19th century, the reason people love them is because they're aloof. There are very few rules, and people love that about the game. People just went away laughing. It brought people together as opposed to baseball, where there's not a lot of action that takes place in the field. So I think if the Massachusetts game had won out and anything even remotely close to what we have as a version of baseball had been the national last time, I think there'd be a lot more fans than there are with baseball, for sure. [00:36:50] Speaker B: So it's raining in North Adams, Michigan, today. We're at the eats in the street food truck festival, fall edition. You can see the lovely trees out here. And, yeah, we got a crew playing right now. [00:37:02] Speaker A: Meanwhile, Grant Moore and everyone else at 21st century town ball are having a blast. They're giving the game the chance that it never got in the 19th century to evolve. [00:37:11] Speaker D: Hit the zone with the bet. [00:37:13] Speaker B: Yeah. [00:37:16] Speaker D: Steal. Steal the base. [00:37:17] Speaker F: Drop the bat. [00:37:18] Speaker D: Steal the base. Go. [00:37:19] Speaker A: A while back, he sent me a video where he's teaching some kids how to play town. [00:37:24] Speaker B: What do we want to do where it's top of the order? [00:37:27] Speaker D: Okay, we got fortune jag. You could go home. All right, now you can go to four. You can go to four. They're not going to get the ball there. Oh, no, he got him. He got him. No. [00:37:49] Speaker A: Special thanks to Grant Moore, Daniel Jones, Tom Gilbert, Del Coates, Eric Laudenbacher, Matt, and everyone at the Duke homestead for making this story possible. This episode was written, edited, narrated, and produced by me. I'm Stuart Barefoot. Music for this episode comes from Blue Dot Sessions and the storyblocks library. For more episodes, you can go to obscureballpod.com or just look for it anywhere you get your podcasts. Also, stay tuned to this feed because there will be a new episode eventually at some point.