William Shuttleworth

Abstract

By rights we should be cautious of titles such as the above. They imply the creation of something out of very little and, in this case, a paternity that might be more aptly described as the status of a near relation. In William Shuttleworth's case, however, the designation seems appropriate. For this is Canadian baseball we are talking about-not the game's ultimate origins.Baseball has roots in old European customs surrounding the arrival of spring and a more or less direct heritage from bat-and-ball with a multitude of names includ- ing the two-worded base ball. They arrived in North America in the 18th century (pos- sibly even earlier) as the less successful bat-and-ball variations from the United Kingdom where cricket had attained the place of prominence.While some English to this day dismiss baseball as little more than a game of rounders played by young girls at the beach on bank holidays, there was less turning up of one's nose in North America accompanying the playing of bat-and-ball other than cricket. Those whose bat-and-ball skills were too primitive for cricket could partake of the then easier play of resembling baseball. In many versions runners could be retired if plunked with the thrown while off a base.The game grew in American soil and appears to have been a widely popular recre- ation, given the past decade's almost daily discovery of new accounts. It was not, however, what we think of as a formal, organized game until well into the 19th century; reporting of the game in its own right, rather than as the accidental accompaniment to some other news event, does not occur until the 1840s.Early and in Canada is less an example of Americans commanding the playing of north of the border and more reflects their disorganized, carefree char- acter, and a passage directly, in some cases, from the United Kingdom. In other cases it arrived as a barely digested regurgitation of something that had passed from the United Kingdom through the United States to Canada, much like a letter sent from Liverpool and arriving in New York on its eventual journey to York (today's Toronto). Finally, in some cases it was a Canadian reinterpretation of what had been modified and refined in the United States.In Canada we have multiple references with varying degrees of validity to early and play. These include ball in an early 1 9th century diary account from York (Toronto); some form of being played in Man- itoba in the 1830s; playing in Quebec in the late 1830s; a news ref- erence to games of and bat in Dartmouth, Nova Scotia in 1 841; restrictions on ball in legislated encumbrances in 1 845 preventing the disturbance of the Sabbath in Upper Canada (today's Ontario); and rounders in British Columbia by the 1850s.There is a famous account almost fifty years after the fact of a game played in Beachville, Ontario, on June 4, 1838, which some have questioned as willful fiction on the part of its teller, and others have argued is a commingling of things seen and played from several differ- ent times. I support the latter opinion and suggest that while the surrounding details of the Beachville story ring true in terms of its date, surrounding events, and the soldiers in attendance, its rules look a lot like something played in Ontario in the 1850s with four bases and a home plate.However, we do know a distinct Canadian game was being played throughout the 1850s and here our story begins.Formal teams with rules, club organization, and intentional news accounts, as noted, began to appear in the United States in the 1840s and such momentum carried into the 1850s with increased regularity and geographic spread; always, however, against the apparent rising tide of cricket whose English immigrant-playing partisans were often superior players to their American and Canadian brethren. Whether this drove those with weaker bat-and-ball skills to baseball is open to speculation, but it should be stressed that such choice owed very little to considerations of national origin, as much because baseball-type had come, like cricket, from the same country. …