Away Flies Boy1We know, beyond a reasonable doubt, that American baseball derived from an earlier 18th century English that was also called baseball. True, we don't have any smoking-gun proof of this; no diary entry from, say, 1750s, detailing how little Johnny settler brought baseball over here from England and introduced it to his chums on village green. Such a discovery would be lovely to find, and I'm still on hunt for it, but even without it we have a strong case based upon circumstantial evidence alone. The England was called baseball and here it is called same.2 In both countries, a pitcher serves a to a batter, baserunners circle bases, and fielders do what they can to catch and get runners out. In my view, inherent similarities between American baseball and its earlier English namesake negate possibility that our could have somehow sprung up all on its own.Once implanted North America, we pretty much know how things turned out. Baseball eventually evolved from being a rustic folk to becoming fullblown American national pastime. But story of English baseball is another matter. Its history was never carefully recorded, and to this day remains largely elusive. Yet, recent years, researchers including myself have uncovered a modest number of new references that have added to our pool of knowledge about English baseball. These findings have prompted me to reappraise some of my previous assumptions about game.Our earliest evidence for English base-ball dates from 1744, when iconic children's book A Little Pretty Pocket-Book was first issued. Publisher John Newbery devoted a full page of his pioneering juvenile work to game, giving us our first clues of how it looked and how it was played. Newbery's page includes a simple engraving of pastime that depicts three young gents at play, one holding a his hand and another waiting to strike it with his bare hand. The bases, three of them, are shown as posts ground. An accompanying snippet of verse reads as follows:The Ball once struck off,Away flies BoyTo next destin'd Post,And then Home with Joy.3Three other references to English baseball from 1740s and '50s add texture to Newbery's introductory lesson on game. The first of these, Lady Hervey's letter of 1748, describes family of Prince of Wales enjoying pastime. She wrote that they played it in a large room, and that the ladies, as well as gentlemen, join this amusement.4 Another work from Newbery's press, The Card, published early 1755, refers to the younger of a family retiring to play base-ball, an activity that author described as an infant game when compared to either fives (a form of handball) or tennis.5 Also from 1755, an entry diary of 19-year-old William Bray notes he played base ball at a friend's home as part of a mixed party of young men and women.6These four sources give us a glimpse of what English baseball was like mid- 18th century, a time, presumably, not many decades removed from when pastime first came into being.7 Baseball of that era appears to have been more of a social diversion than an athletic sport, and quite clearly an appropriate activity for both sexes. As to what looked like, we don't really know for sure. But it is difficult to deny that those four little lines of verse A Little Pretty Pocket-Book conjure a mental image that is uncannily familiar. Even now, 250 years later, one would be hard pressed to come up with a more charming and economical allusion to baseball, save for fact, of course, that there's no indication of a bat.Following 1755 we enter dark ages of English baseball history. No further references to can be found English writings until late 1780s, and thus we lack any evidence telling us of progress of pastime, who was playing it, or what changes it might have been undergoing during those decades. …
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Jul 31, 2013
Christian Duffin 
Open Access