1791.1 The Pittsfield "Baseball" Bylaw

Abstract

In Pittsfield, Massachusetts, to promote the safety of the exterior of the newly built meeting house, particularly the windows, a by-law is enacted to bar game of wicket, cricket, baseball, batball, football, cats, fives, or any other game played with ball, within eighty yards of the structure. However, the letter of the law did not exclude the city's lovers of muscular sport from the tempting lawn of Meeting-House Common.1Thanks to the astonishingly preserved minutes of a Pittsfield town meeting in 1791, we know that in this locality a game called baseball, if played too close to a newly built meeting house, was a violation of the law-at a time when the United States of America was a teenager and the Constitution a mere toddler, four years old.I'm the fellow who won fleeting fame in the spring of 2004 for finding what was not truly lost, except for its significance. While prowling the internet late at night, I came upon a mention of the now celebrated bylaw in a book entitled The History of Pittsfield, (Berkshire County,) Massachusetts, From the Year 1734 to the Year 1800.2 The bylaw, intended to protect the exterior of the newly built meeting house, particularly its windows, barred game of wicket, cricket, baseball, batball, football, cats, fives, or any other game played with ball, within 80 yards of the structure. Because the book was published in 1869 under the authority of the town, I had no doubts about the authenticity of the reference. The next morning, I called folks at the Pittsfield City Hall to see if they retained minute books all the way back to the 18th century, and was informed that indeed they did.Still a puzzle, however, is what the Pittsfield game of those days looked like, or what its rules may have been-no 18th century box score or game account survives, or is likely to have existed. We may reasonably assume that the Pittsfield game was different from the other ball games proscribed in the ordinance: For the Preservation of the Windows in the New Meeting House ... no Person or Inhabitant of said town, shall be permitted to play at any game called Wicket, Cricket, Baseball, Football, Cat, Fives or any other game or games with balls, within the Distance of Eighty Yards from said Meeting House. This new meeting house doubled a church, designed by Charles Bulfinch, the young nation's most distinguished architect, who had already designed Faneuil Hall in Boston and would later design the Capitol in Washington, D.C. As it turned out, it was fickle tastes in style that doomed the building rather than flying baseballs. Deemed old-fashioned within decades of its construction, it was soon moved to a new location where it somehow survived until 1936, when it was demolished at last.Because the old game of baseball may have originated, or at least flourished, in the Berkshires and the Housatonic Valley, this region might not unreasonably be termed Baseball's Garden of Eden, a term that Pittsfield's civic boosters have been quick to adopt; for many this coinage has come to signify, in shorthand, that the national pastime was invented here. It was not, of course. If pressed to create a date for baseball's taking root in America, I'd have to say, about 1735, because old-timer Henry Sargent stated to the Mills Commission of 1905-07 that his contemporary George H. Stoddard-an 1850s roundball player with the Upton Excelsiors whose grandfather and great grandfather had both played the game-believed that roundball surely dated back to just after the Revolution and was not a novelty then. It had been played, Stoddard said, as long ago Upton became a little village.3 Upton was settled in 1735. Roundball was the name favored in New England for a game that was also called baseball, indeed the one that came to be termed the Massachusetts Game.Admittedly, we are not likely to find hard evidence for that date good what now resides in the Berkshire Athenaeum in support of 1791. …