1829.2 The Rise and Fall of New England-Style Ballplaying

Abstract

Mr. Lawrence says, as boy [h]e played Round Ball in 1829. So far as [his] argument goes for Round Ball being father of Base Ball, it is all well enough, but there are two things that cannot be accounted for; conception of foul and abolishment of rule that player could be put out by being hit with thrown ball.... Mr. Lawrence considers Round Ball and Four Old Cat one and same game; Old Cat merely being what they would do when there were not more than dozen players, all told.1If one is inclined to trust reliability senior citizen's memories from his boyhood seven decades earlier, this 1905 testimony describes long and simple arc for New England-style ballplaying. The ancient games, including perhaps hornebillets as described in 1670s in England (see Item 1672.1), are linked to as played in Massachusetts in 1820s, which is itself linked, via formalized Massachusetts Game of 1850s, to modern baseball.This essay reviews current evidence on evolution of New England ballplaying up to 1860s.Beginnings and Folk Play to 1854Excluding references to English of cricket and American of wicket, we find that scholars have, to this point, unearthed about seven dozen references to ballplaying in six New England states before club play began in Boston in mid-1850s. Can we discern roots of Massachusetts Game, as finally codified in Dedham MA in 1858, in these spare and disparate clues?The short answer: Well, maybe, but only when we accept general assurances of men like Mr. Lawrence, cited above, who assert strong resemblances between early and later forms of play.The problem is that most of these earliest references give no details on actual nature of games they cite. The vast majority are of quality of Bowdoin student and future poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's letter to his father in 1824:This has been very sickly term in college. However, within last week, [school's] government seeing that something must be done to induce students to exercise, recommended of now and then, which communicated such an impulse to our limbs and joints, that there is now nothing heard of, in our leisure hours, but ball.2From our vantage point, this is an especially sweet morsel, but is still, effectively, sweet nothing; it gives us no glimpse of actual played, or its rules, or even name for that was played-just a of ball.And in fact, about two-thirds of our references fail to name played, using terms like game of ball, at ball, and like. The games that are specifically named, in order of their relative frequency of appearance, are (1) found mostly in Eastern Massachusetts, (2) bat-and-ball, mostly to north and east of Boston, including Maine, (3) one of old cat versions, (4) or base and (5) goal, or goal ball.3 But we are given very few clues whether these labels attached to identical, similar, or dissimilar games, let alone what their playing rules were.We do get glimpses of isolated aspects of games: there are scattered references to use of bats, or bat-sticks, or ball-clubs, and one Vermont account of playing goal in about 1828 mentions that the elm trees by our yard were goals (bases).4 An account of ballplaying in Western Massachusetts in about 1850 mentions games of round two and four old cat, with soft yarn balls thrown at runner, rare evidence of practice of plugging in those pastimes.5 Ours is not rich feast of anecdotes.There is one New England source that does lay out several features that were later formalized as Massachusetts rules. This book, published in 1834,6 lays out rules for base, or goal ball (also identifying it with round ball), including two teams, four bases, soft tosses to batters, three strike rule, fly rule, plugging, all-out-side-out innings, and backward hitting. …