Ken Burns' Baseball, 1st Inning: 1840s-1900

In our sundown perambulations of late, through the outer parts of Brooklyn, we have observed several parties of youngsters playing 'base', a certain game of ball. Let us go forth a while and get better air in our lungs. Let us leave our close rooms. A game of ball is glorious.

— Walt Whitman, 1846

"The first thing about it — and this seems so obvious that maybe we overlook it — baseball is a beautiful thing. It's more beautiful in an old park that's asymmetrical and quirky, but even, and I hate to say this because it might encourage them, but even in a dome with artificial turf it's beautiful; the way the field fans out, the choreography of the sport, the pace and rhythm of it, the fact that that pace and rhythm allows for conversation and reflection and opinion and comparison..." — Bob Costas

"It follows the seasons, beginning each year with the fond expectancy of springtime and ending with the hard facts of autumn." — KB

"There's so much about the game that appeals to the intellectual and to the psyche; the symmetry of it, the orderliness of it, the justice of it...the fact that it throws off other controls. It's greater than time strictures. In the other sports you have time — you have to play against the clock, and when the clock runs out your chance is over. No clock in baseball. You play until you lose, and if you can keep that rally alive, if you can keep going, if you can keep getting hits you can play until a week from now. Nothing stops you. There is no parameter that makes it impossible for you to perform still more excellently." — Mario Cuomo

"Baseball has nearly all the qualities and the narrative that the country has. It's competitive, it's spirited, it's got the joshing and it's got the intellectual side; the great students of it. But it's also got labor unions and management and gimmicks and promotion and venality...great public fools in baseball and great public heroes...self-serving people and generous people. And it has pride and unity of town and of country and it'll do for a figure for the American system."
— Charley McDowell


It's our game. That's the chief fact in connection with it. America's game has the snap, go, fling of the American atmosphere. It belongs as much to our institutions, fits into them as significantly, as our Constitution's laws; is just as important in the sum total of our American life.

— Walt Whitman, 1889

Origins of the game:

Abner Doubleday, according to the myth constructed by a National League commission in 1905, invented baseball in Cooperstown, New York, in 1839.

"Abner Doubleday never claimed to have anything to do with baseball, may never have even seen a professional game." — KB

From cricket and rounders to townball:

The ball once struck off
Away flies the boy
To the next destined post
And then home, with joy
— 1744

A fine day. Play ball in the campus. But am beaten, for I miss catching and striking the ball.
— Princeton College, 1786

"By 1800 townball and its many variations were played nearly everywhere. On their way back from the Pacific Ocean Lewis and Clark played a game of 'base' with the Nez Perce Indians as they prepared to cross the Bitterroot Mountains." — KB

Ball playing communicated such an impulse to our limbs and joints, that there is nothing now heard of, in our leisure hours, but ball, ball, ball. I cannot prophesy with any degree of accuracy concerning the continuance of this rage for play, but the effect is good, since there's been a thorough-going reformation from inactivity and torpitude.

— Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, 1824

"In the 1830s, on the western frontier of Missouri, ball was the favorite sport of Joseph Smith, founder of a new religious sect called the Mormons." — KB

The amateur era:

Sept 1845; The New York Knickerbocker Base Ball Club is formed, "the nucleus of the great American game of baseball" (Seymour Church).

Alexander Joy Cartwright, of the Knickerbockers, invented baseball and spread the game west, during the California gold rush, and all the way to Hawaii.

June 19, 1846; First real baseball game in history is held by the Knickerbockers at Elysian Fields in Hoboken, New Jersey. "By the 1850s New York was baseball mad."

Henry Chadwick, as a sportswriter and statistician, is credited with making 1856 "the birth year of the evolution of baseball" by popularizing the game in the New York press. Remembered as the "father of baseball".

Americans do not care to dawdle over a sleep-inspiring game, all through the heat of a June or July day. What they do they want to do in a hurry. In baseball all is lightning. Thus the reason for the American antipathy to cricket can readily be understood. — Henry Chadwick

Dec 5, 1856; The Sunday New York Mercury refers to baseball as "the national pastime".

1857; National Association of Base Ball Players established. Promotes the amateur game.

The Civil War:

"If there was any transforming incident in the history of baseball, as in the history of this country, it was the Civil War. Play in the 1840s and '50s was not for the middle class, it was not for the working class, it was reserved for so-called gentlemen. Play became democratic when it became portable. It became a people's game." — John Thorn

We were playing ball between the lines near Alexandria, Texas, when suddenly there came a scattering fire of which the three outfielders caught the brunt. The center field was hit and was captured. The left and right field managed to get back into our lines. The rebel attack was repelled without serious difficulty, but we had lost not only our center field but the only baseball in Alexandria, Texas.

Oct 1867; The African American Pythian Base Ball Club of Philadelphia is denied membership in the Pennsylvania Association of Base Ball Players.

Dec 1867; The NABBP bans blacks.

William "Candy" Cummings discovers the curveball while pitching for the Brooklyn Excelsiors in April, 1867.

I began to watch the flight of the ball through the air and distinctly saw it curve. A surge of joy flooded over me that I shall never forget. I said not a word, saw many a batter at that game throw down his stick in disgust. Every time I was successful I could scarcely keep from dancing for pure joy. The secret was mine. — Candy Cummings

I heard that this year we at Harvard won the base ball championship because we have a pitcher who has a fine curve ball. I am further instructed that the purpose of the curve ball is to deliberately deceive the batter. Harvard is not in the business of teaching deception. — Charles Eliot, President of Harvard College

The professional era:

1869; Harry Wright assembles and manages the first professional team, the Cincinnati Red Stockings. Relocates his Red Stockings to Boston in 1871.

Every magnate in the country is indebted to this man, Harry Wright, for the establishment of baseball as a business, and every patron for furnishing him with a systematic recreation. Every player is indebted to him for inaugurating an occupation by which he gains a livelihood, and the country at large for adding one more industry to furnish employment. — Sporting Life, 1894

Baseball is business now, and I'm trying to arrange our games to make them successful and make them pay.
— Harry Wright

1871; National Association of Professional Base Ball Players established. The Chicago White Stockings* are charter members.

Baseball has fallen. Yes, the national game has become degraded. At certain match games large amounts of money changed hands among the spectatory. A noted New York club is said to have sold the results of a match. Barred chins and broken fingers may be easily mended, but a disfigured reputation may never be entirely repaired. Once more, abandon the bat, boys, if you cannot keep the game pure. — Henry Chadwick

The aim of baseball is to employ professional players to perspire in public for the benefit of gamblers. — The New York Times

Feb 2, 1876; William Hulbert, backer of the Chicago White Stockings, organizes the foundation of the National League of Professional Base Ball Clubs. Game hereafter is controlled by the club owners.

Adrian "Cap" Anson, captain of the Chicago White Stockings, "the greatest player of his century". Batted over .300 for 20 consecutive seasons, drove in 1700 runs and was the first player to accumulate 3000 hits.

1877; Scandal! Four players on the Louisville Grays, including Jim Devlin, "one of the National League's greatest pitchers", throw the season. Hulbert bans Devlin for life, and the Grays fold.

Mike "King" Kelly, catcher for the Chicago White Stockings, later Boston, was "the most popular and most notorious star of the 19th century" and "the trickiest player who ever handled a baseball". His aggressive baserunning inspired the hit song, Slide, Kelly, Slide.

"He sometimes cut across the diamond, skipping second altogether when the umpire was not looking. [...] Kelly drank as hard as he competed. Once A.G. Spalding put Pinkerton detectives on his trail and accused him of having been in a saloon at 3AM drinking lemonade. Kelly was indignant. 'It was straight whiskey,' he said, 'I never drank a lemonade at that hour in my life.'" — KB

"One of the great stories — my favorite — is the day when he was sitting on the bench, and the rule at the time was that if you wanted to substitute for a player all you had to do was announce yourself. So a foul ball comes in the direction of the bench, Kelly stands up and yells out, 'Kelly now catching for Boston!', catches the ball, and it's recorded as an out. This is the trickster, this is the villain, this is the fool. He is also a great great player. He is all the wonderful archetypes of baseball wrapped into one, and he also managed to drink himself to death before he hit the age of forty, so that's also an archetype, alas, in baseball." — John Thorn

1882; Midwestern club owners left out of the National League establish the American Base Ball Association (AA). "Its games cost just a quarter, its teams played on Sundays, and its ballparks sold liquor. The new Beer & Whiskey League drew bigger, rowdier crowds. The stands filled with working men and immigrants, not the middle class native-born fans who followed the National League."

1882; Albert Goodwill Spalding, "the finest pitcher of the 1870s", assumes control of the National League and the Chicago White Stockings after the death of William Hulbert. His Chicago-based sporting goods company supplies all the baseballs used in the NL.

"The railroads had Commodore Vanderbilt. Big Steel had Andrew Carnegie. Big Oil: John D. Rockefeller. Baseball had Albert Goodwill Spalding." — KB

A magnate must be a strong man among strong men. Everything is possible to him who dares. — A.G. Spalding

"Like other captains of industry, Spalding crushed or bought out his competitors, becoming the largest sporting goods manufacturer in the country. Newspapers called him the Baseball Messiah." — KB

Roger Connor of the NL New York Giants was "the era's greatest home run hitter", whose career record 138 would stand until Babe Ruth.

1884; Pete "The Gladiator" Browning of the AA Louisville Eclipse (lifetime BA .343), breaks his favorite bat. Apprentice woodworker Bud Hillerich offers to craft Browning a new custom bat: the first Louisville Slugger.

1884; Moses Fleetwood Walker is the first African American in the majors, catching for the AA Toledo Blue Stockings. "More than 50 blacks played professional baseball alongside whites during the 1870s and '80s, but it was never easy."

"Cap Anson himself tried to have Walker ejected from an exhibition game, threatening not to play if they didn't get that nigger off the field." — KB

Ball players do not burn with a desire to have colored men on the team. It is in fact the deep-seated objection to Afro-Americans that gave rise to the feet-first slide. The Buffalos had a Negro for second base (Frank Grant). He was a few shades blacker than a raven but was one of the best players in the Eastern League. The players of the opposing team made it a point to spike this brunette Buffalo. They would tarry at second when they might easily make third, just to toy with the sensitive shins of the second baseman. The poor man played only two games out of five. The rest of the time he was on crutches.
— Sporting Life

1887; "When it seemed likely that the New York Giants would hire the black pitcher, George Stovey, Cap Anson made it clear that neither he nor any of his White Stockings would ever play a team on which blacks were welcome." Shortly thereafter the NL and AA adopt the unwritten Gentlemen's Agreement, drawing the color line in professional baseball.

If anywhere in this world the social barriers are broken down it is on the ball field. There many men of low birth and poor breeding are the idols of the rich and cultured. The best man is he who plays best. In view of these facts the objection to colored men is ridiculous. If social distinctions are to be made, half the players in the country will be shut out. Better make character and personal habits the test. — The Newark Sunday Call, 1887

Just why Adrian C. Hanson was so strongly opposed to colored players on white teams cannot be explained. His repugnant feeling toward colored ball players, and his opposition, with his great power and popularity in baseball circles, hastened the exclusion of the black man from the white leagues. — Sol White

1888; Spalding takes his White Stockings and a pickup team of all-stars on a much-publicized world tour to spread the gospel of Spalding sporting goods and the great American game. Upon return the reception is attended by Theodore Roosevelt and Mark Twain.

We are up at breakfast early as we are to start at ten o'clock for the pyramids. Camels and donkeys have been secured for the party, the ball players in uniform as for the first time the Sphinx is to witness a game of baseball. After lunch we have photos taken at the Sphinx, and then proceed to play our historical game of ball with about 200 Arabs for an audience. They took more interest in the game than the average Englishman, and did not once refer to it as "the old game of rounders, you know".

1888; Casey at the Bat composed by Ernest Thayer. Popularized by vaudevillian De Wolf Hopper.

1889; John Montgomery Ward, second baseman for the New York Giants, who had founded in 1885 the Brotherhood of Professional Base-Ball Players, the first players' union, organizes the splinter Players' League in opposition to the management of the NL.

There was a time when the National League stood for integrity and fair dealing. Today it stands for dollars and cents. Once it looked to the elevation of the game and an honest exhibition of the sport. Today its eyes are on the turnstile. Players have been bought, sold, and exchanged as though they were sheep instead of American citizens. [...] There is now no escape for the player. If he attempts to elude the operation of the rule he becomes at once a professional outlaw, and the hand of every club is against him. Like a fugitive slave law, the Reserve Clause denies him a harbor or a livelihood, and carries him back bound and shackled to the club from which he attempted to escape. We have, then, the curious result of a contract, which on its face is for seven months, being binding for life.
— John Montgomery Ward**.

I am for war without quarter. I want to fight until one of us drops dead. From this point on it will simply be a case of dog eat dog, and the dog with the bulldog tendencies will live the longest. — A.G. Spalding

1890; The Brotherhood is crushed and the National League swallows both the Players' League and the Beer & Whiskey League, securing a monopoly on major league baseball. The Reserve Clause remains intact.

The Players' League is deader than the proverbial doornail. When the spring comes and the grass is green upon the last resting place of anarchy, the national agreement will rise again in all its weight and restore to America in all its purity its national pastime: the great game of baseball. — A.G. Spalding

The inside game era:

Denton True "Cy" Young, of the Cleveland Spiders, later Boston, is credited with 511 career wins between 1890 and 1911, "a record never even approached by any other pitcher".

1890s; "Two teams dominated the '90s: the Boston Beaneaters and the Baltimore Orioles. Boston, led by Billy Hamilton and Hugh Duffy, pioneered what would be called the Inside Game, but the Orioles perfected it; sacrifice bunts, squeeze plays, double steals. They fought and struggled for every run. [...] In an era of dirty baseball the Orioles delighted in being the dirtiest. Managed by the outfielder, Ned Hanlon, known as Foxy Ned, the Orioles were one of the greatest teams ever assembled."

Baseball was mighty glamorous and exciting to me, but there's no use in blinking at the fact that at that time the game was thought by solid, respectable people to be only one degree above grand larceny, arson and mayhem, and those who engaged in it were beneath the notice of decent society. — Connie Mack

"The ball players, they were from the fringes of society. These were not educated men. These were not men who knew how to hold a cup of tea with just two fingers and stick out three. And the kind of game they played suited the kind of people that they were. [...] They were the ones who devised the famous Baltimore Chop. They would intentionally hit down on the ball, hoping to get a large bounce which would give the runner time to make it all the way to first base before the shortstop or second baseman could even field it. Opposing teams to combat this would flood the area in front of home plate..." — Daniel Okrent

Dan Brouthers, Orioles' first baseman, "the greatest power hitter of the 1880s, bettering .300 in 14 seasons".

"Wee Willie" Keeler, Orioles' right field, was "the game's preeminent place hitter. Asked for the secret of his success, he answered, 'Keep your eye clear and hit 'em where they ain't.' He once managed at least one hit in 44 consecutive games."

Hughie "Ee-Yah" Jennings, Orioles' shortstop, "in 1896 hit .401, stole 70 bases, and set a record in his specialty: He managed to get hit by pitched balls 49 times. Between seasons he practiced law."

John McGraw, Orioles' third baseman, "the most pugnacious Oriole of them all":

The toughest of the toughs, and an abomination of the diamond; a rough, unruly man, he uses every low and contemptible method that his erratic brain can conceive to win a play by a dirty trick.

"He was a man who controlled his own destiny and attempted to control the destiny of anybody who came near him." — Daniel Okrent

The one true American.
— George Bernard Shaw

"Mayhem seemed to follow John McGraw wherever he went. When he got into a fistfight with the opposing third baseman in Boston in 1894, both benches emptied, fans began brawling, someone set the stands on fire, and the entire wooden ballpark and 170 neighborhood buildings went up in flames.
[...]
John McGraw would stay in baseball for more than 40 years, and become one of the game's greatest managers."
— KB

"Baltimore and Boston were wildly successful, but the two teams so overwhelmed their competition that baseball crowds dwindled dangerously for those clubs in other cities... Then a national depression cut further into profits, and the owners slashed players' salaries. Clergymen and the newspapers denounced the rowdyism and scandal that followed the game everywhere, and the owners seemed incapable of doing anything. By the end of the 19th century the professional game was in trouble. It would take a new generation of baseball players, stars who would come to represent the best and the worst of the new 20th century, to rescue the national pastime. By 1900 Walt Whitman and Alexander Joy Cartwright and Harry Wright had died; Ty Cobb and Casey Stengel and George Herman Ruth had been born." (KB)

"The great lesson in sports is supposed to be that you not only learn the elation of winning, but you learn how to lose. There's a lot of emphasis on that in the British attitude toward sports, and Americans have it, too. But there's something very American about being a poor loser, refusing to shake the other fella's hand. He says, 'He's a scoundrel, he always was a scoundrel, and he's even more of a scoundrel now that he's beat me.' There's something likable about that in people...it's bad sportsmanship."
— Shelby Foote


Baseball is the very symbol, the outward and visible expression of the drive and push and rush and struggle of the raging, tearing, booming nineteenth century.

— Mark Twain

* Predecessor to the Cubs, not the White Sox.
** No relation to Chicago business giant Aaron Montgomery Ward.