1853.5 The Baseball Press Emerges

Abstract

BASE BALL AT HOBOKEN: The first friendly game of the season, between the Gotham Knickerbocker Base Ball Clubs was played on the grounds of the latter on the 5th inst. The game was commenced on Friday the 1st, but owing to the storm had to be postponed, the Knickerbockers making nine aces to two of the Gothams, the following is the score for both days. The Knicks won, 21-12, according to an abbreviated box score, which uses of Outs not Hands Lost in the left-hand column, Runs, not Aces, in the right-hand column. Paul Wendt estimates that this is the first certain Knick-rules box score known, the first since the October 1845 games.1Henry Chadwick may have been baseball's most important writer in its early days, but he was not its first. That honor would go to William Cauldwell, who, like Chadwick, was born in 1824. can speak as a New York boy from away back, Cauldwell told the Mills Commission in 1905, and in an all my experiences I had no knowledge of the prominence of a ball game called 'rounders.' I played ball in my native city from the time I was (to use an old time phrase) 'knee high to a mosquito' dating back to a period when Fourteenth Street was considered out of town.2Cauldwell would have played ball in lower Manhattan, near Crosby Street, for he went to primary school at the High School for Males, at No. 36 Crosby near Broome Street. As editor of the weekly Sunday Mercury, Cauldwell made mention of baseball on May 1, 1853, later that year devoted space to the Knickerbocker-Gotham match of July 5. These were the first press accounts of baseball games since various newspapers covered the three October 1845 contests between clubs from Brooklyn New York.As Chadwick was not the first to cover baseball, neither was the New York Clipper. For decades after its debut number of April 30, 1853, the Clipper was never all about baseball, or even primarily so.3 Yet more than any other publication, it may be said to have transformed a boys' game into the national pastime. To place in context how the Clipper advanced the status of baseball, let's look at the sporting papers that paved its way.I suggest that three essential ingredients facilitate the growth of any localized game to national sport. First, gambling. Adults must care about the outcome, their willingness to place a wager is a reasonable measure of their interest. As a game matures, investors civic boosters may pool their interests in order to absorb a greater risk, placing their bets on the protracted success of a club or a ball grounds. Second, statistics. Whether merely game scores or primitive box scores, these numerical attachments to prose accounts accord a mantle of importance to the matches-an importance like that of trade or transport or government; in addition, quantifying the game's constituent parts further fuels the first mover of sport, gambling. Third, publicity. Regular press coverage is a necessary development to waftthe enthusiasm exhibited at a single contest, however it may have been fueled, to those only reading about it afterward, often at great distance from the event.Before baseball came to dominate the sporting scene in the last quarter of the 19th century, these three elements had previously advanced the popularity of other sports: the turf, the ring, sculling, cricket, the pit (blood sports such as ratting, baiting, cockfighting, dog-fighting). Whether the crowd drawn by the activity was low or genteel, the ingredients the progression were similar. American sporting papers, beginning in the 1820s, paved the way for each sport to mature by providing records prognostications related to events of interest to the sporting set and-underlying it all- the basis of a potential wager.Despite the nationwide surge of interest during the Jacksonian era in newspapers magazines touching upon all topics-from politics to religion, from literature to commerce-sporting coverage lagged. …