The Ball (21 page)

The commission issued its conclusions at the end of 1907. Baseball, they declared, was of American origin and “the first scheme for playing it, according to the best evidence obtainable to date, was devised by Abner Doubleday at Cooperstown, N.Y., in 1839.”

The decision was made and the story of Doubleday was folded neatly into the official lore and history of the game. Chadwick continued to protest, but no one was interested in his messy English version of events. Americans hailed the decision and textbook writers and historians happily turned it into another fact for schoolchildren to memorize. The Baseball Hall of Fame was built in Cooperstown in 1939 on the centennial of the game's mythological founding, and a U.S. Postal Service commemorative stamp followed soon after.

Aside from all the evidence presented earlier for baseball's steady evolution from English children's games, there are just a few other problems with the Doubleday tale. In 1839, when Doubleday was supposed to be scratching double plays into the dirt at Cooperstown, he was actually a cadet attending West Point 100 miles away. Doubleday left 67 diaries and wrote numerous magazine and newspaper articles in his later years, but only once, in passing, did he even mention the game of baseball.

So what about that other Abner—Mr. Graves? Who was this guy who claimed to be there at the moment of the game's immaculate conception? Well, according to his own colorful accounts over the years, he led an exciting life. At the age of 14 he sailed around Cape Horn. In 1852 he was one of the first riders on the pony express—inconveniently before the service actually started. And what he didn't share was just as interesting. He'd been hospitalized in insane asylums twice in his earlier years. In his coup de grâce, at the ripe old age of 90, Abner—described by Spalding's commission as a “reputable gentleman”—shot and killed his wife Minnie in an argument over the sale of their house. He was committed to a Colorado state asylum, where he died two years later.

Today, no historian or scholar of any repute subscribes to the Doubleday version of baseball's origins. And yet the myth persists. As recently as 2010, Major League Baseball commissioner Bud Selig confessed in an Internet posting, “From all of the historians which I have spoken with, I really believe that Abner Doubleday is the ‘Father of Baseball.' ” (One might wonder which historians the commissioner has been speaking with: is he conferring in the off-season with Byzantine scholars . . . or historians of the Norman invasion?)

Selig's a smart guy, so I'm guessing he knows the history of his sport better than he lets on. So why does he make statements like this, and why would he lay a wreath on Doubleday's grave in Arlington Cemetery as he did ten years ago? Why, for that matter, do millions of people still go on pilgrimage to remote, rural New York State to perpetuate a fraud that was exposed more than 60 years ago?

The exhibit panels on Abner Doubleday in the Hall of Fame answer these lingering questions as well as anything I've read: “In the hearts of those who love baseball, he is remembered as the lad in the pasture where the game was invented. Only cynics would need to know more.” As the baseball-loving evolutionary biologist Stephen Jay Gould once pointed out, most people, given the choice, will choose creation myths over history every time. “For creation myths . . . identify heroes and sacred places, while evolutionary stories provide no palpable, particular thing as a symbol for reverence, worship, or patriotism.”

One of the many wonders of baseball is that after being tested and tried in every possible way—the scandals, the drug tests, the player strikes, the multimillion-dollar contracts—we still believe deeply in the myths and the rites of the game. We still sing “Take Me Out to the Ballgame” in the seventh-inning stretch with sincerity. We still believe the curse of the Bambino was real (it had to be something!). We still never, ever talk about a “no-hitter” or a “perfect game” in progress. We still recite the ERAs and RBIs and OBPs of players long dead like numerological incantations. And, despite our more rational selves, we still keep a special place in our hearts for Abner Doubleday, a man who was far more expert with a rifle than a bat.

O
n the playing field in Newbury, I was finally hitting my stride and warming to 1860s rules. I scored a single and drove in a run with a line drive to right center field, my legs suppressing muscle memory itself so as not to overrun first base. I cleverly bunted the ball backward behind the catcher, exploiting that quirky loophole in the rules while it still lasted. Playing outfield in the hot afternoon sun, I resisted the urge to chase a pop ball, walking up leisurely instead to scoop it off the bounce for the out.

When the game ended, no one was certain of the score and no one really cared—we were gentlemen at play, after all. A truck pulled up from a local microbrewery that fielded their own vintage club (yep, “The Brewers”), just in time to reinvigorate our feeling of social fraternity. The takeout pizza arrived next in a beat-up sedan bouncing over the lumpy pasture. It wasn't quite a Knickerbockers feast, but it would serve just as well.

Just then, my cell phone rang.

“It's your wife calling from the distant future,” warned one of my teammates. “Don't answer it!”

For vintage ballplayers, as for Yogi Berra, “the future ain't what it used to be,” and its nagging call is usually best ignored, especially on a hot Saturday in summer. That's certainly how Scott Westgate feels. Scott, whom I spoke with by phone (being a weekday, he answered), is a Michigan mortgage broker and the current president of the Vintage Base Ball Association (VBBA), the organizing body for creatively anachronistic ballplayers. Much as he loves modern baseball, having played all through high school, he feels the game lost its soul somewhere in its journey to the present.

“Baseball was once a celebration of life. Two towns would have a summer get-together and it would culminate with a game in an open field—not for competition but for exercise, for friendship, to have an entertaining event. That's all changed.”

The VBBA, Scott said, came together several years ago as a brotherhood of guys who wanted to promote, perpetuate, and re-create the game of baseball “as it was meant to be played.” But all is not well in Scott's version of the past.

“More and more we're facing pitchers who are supposed to be playing by 1860 rules, but they're putting spin on the ball, or have a special hurl to deceive the hitter, which is not how it was supposed to be played. Now we're trying to hold on to the bound rule as it makes for a more gentlemanly game. But you've got guys out there diving for fly balls and barehanding it like they're Dwight Evans or something.”

Picking up on the desire for a more competitive vintage game, Jim Bouton, former major-league pitcher and tell-all author of
Ball Four
, a few years ago started a rival league—the Vintage Base Ball
Federation
—that plays by 1880s rather than 1860s rules. That means overhand pitching, padded gloves, and called balls and strikes.

Scott's not a fan and seems genuinely alarmed at the prospect of newfangled 1880s competitiveness creeping into and corrupting his beloved old game. “We need to keep ingraining in our members that this is not meant to be a competition. It's just supposed to be a game.”

Chapter Seven

Played in America

Football combines the two worst elements of American life. Violence and committee meetings.

George Will

“B
aseball,” said former tight end Jamie Williams, “is what America aspires to be. Football is what this country is.” If baseball is by nature nostalgic, pastoral, playful, and free, American football is progressive, industrial, aggressive, and regimented. In baseball, players round a circuit of bases, oblivious to time, with the goal of getting everyone safely home, right where they started. In football, players advance their forces along the gridiron, battling through opponents and against the clock to gain yards and touch the ball down in enemy terrain.

These two great American sporting traditions couldn't be more different. In a sense, they've come to reflect competing visions of American life—one drawn to the past and to the idea of simpler times, the other hurling brashly toward the future. By every reasonable measure football, and the future, are winning out.

Half of the U.S. population watched the Green Bay Packers defeat the Pittsburgh Steelers in Super Bowl XLV, setting a new record for American television viewership. Throw in the millions who watched from bar stools or paid $200 to stand in the parking lot of Cowboy Stadium, and we're talking more than 163 million people.

When these numbers were announced, the annual debate arose once again in the media and in online discussion boards: which of our two national sports deserves the much-coveted title of “America's game”?

The issue's been settled for years, if not decades. The 2010 Major League Baseball World Series averaged just 14 million viewers a game, the second lowest turnout ever for a broadcasted series. According to the 2010 Harris Poll, just shy of one-third of Americans identified professional football as their favorite sport, compared to just 17 percent for baseball. The last time baseball and pro football were tied in the poll was 1985. Football, the NFL boasted in a 2009 PR campaign, backed up by a 29-page white paper analyzing the league's business and media dominance across every conceivable measure, is “America's Choice.”

If football is today our “biggest civic tent,” as historian Michael MacCambridge describes it, the one thing all Americans can still agree upon, in 1869 there was no such consensus on football or any other sport. The year was a pivotal one that saw the official formation of professional baseball, which began barnstorming the hearts and minds of a growing nation. The Cincinnati Red Stockings, the sport's first fully salaried club, went 57–0 to complete the only perfect season in baseball history. Every social club and fraternity of any worth had its baseball club, including the leading East Coast colleges and universities, where formal athletic programs were still in their infancy. Young veterans returning from Civil War battlefields brought back to campuses a newfound passion for athletic competition, which the faculty still regarded as a frivolous distraction from academic studies. While intramural “rushes” and other contests were common on campuses, organized intercollegiate contests were largely unheard of.

In 1866 Rutgers University had hosted its first intercollegiate athletic event—a game of baseball against Princeton University, known then as the College of New Jersey, and situated a mere 20 miles away. Although they'd never faced each other over a ball before, the two neighboring colleges already had an intense and bitter rivalry. For years, the two student bodies had struggled over possession of an old Revolutionary War cannon, staging midnight raids to capture and recapture the prize until Princeton finally sealed the deal, and the cannon itself, in several hundred pounds of cement.

Having lost the cannon battle, Rutgers students turned next to baseball, the most popular sport on campus. The result was the same: an embarrassing 40–2 routing on their home turf. And so, in the fall of 1869, in a last-ditch effort to avenge defeat and restore the pride of their alma mater, a group of Rutgers students issued a challenge to Princeton to play a three-game series of football. The challenge was formally accepted by William Gummere, captain of Princeton's baseball team who a year later would enter the annals of that sport as the first base runner to steal second base with a hook slide, throwing himself feetfirst under the tag of his opponent.

The two colleges didn't have football teams to speak of, but like other leading East Coast colleges at the time they had their own intramural traditions that stretched back to the early 1800s. Yale played a game as part of the mass freshman-sophomore rush, celebrated in poetry for its “breaches of peaces, and pieces of britches.” Harvard had a similar rite, in which plenty of crimson was spilled, known as Bloody Monday. And Princeton students played an annual game called “balldown” that pitted students with names A–L against those with names M–Z.

Given their proximity, Princeton and Rutgers had developed similar though not identical traditions, allowing the captains to settle quickly on the series rules. The field was to be 360 feet long and 225 feet wide. There would be 25 men to a side and the round rubber ball, supplied by the host team, would be advanced by kicking only. Any throwing or running with the ball was forbidden, as were tripping and holding. Goals would be scored, as in modern soccer, by kicking the ball between two posts (with no crossbar) set eight feet apart. The game hosted at Princeton would follow Princeton's code, which allowed a player who caught the ball on the fly or first bounce a free kick from a clear space of 10 feet (a rule perhaps influenced by baseball's bound rule?). The games at Rutgers, however, would follow their code, which did not allow for free kicks.

As Parke Davis described the scene on game day, “the jerky little ‘dummy' engine that steamed out of Princeton that memorable morning of November 6, 1869, was crowded to the aisles and platforms with a freight of eager students.” The Rutgers students met their rivals at the New Brunswick station, gave them a tour of town, and shot a few games of billiards before heading to College Field. There were no uniforms to put on, though the Rutgers men wound their scarlet scarves around their heads to form “turbans.” The players, none of whom weighed much more than 150 pounds, simply stripped off their coats and hats and took to the field in their street clothes. A thin but boisterous crowd of 100 spectators showed up to watch.

The teams' strategies were crude at best. Two men from each side, called “captains of the enemy's goal,” took position directly in front of the opponents' goal where they awaited an opportunity to knock a goal in. The remaining 23 were split between “fielders” who took up fixed defensive positions in the back field and “bulldogs” who pursued the ball. Princeton won the coin toss and “bucked” or kicked off the ball from a “tee of earth.” The inexperienced kicker missed his mark, sending the ball off to the sidelines, where the Rutgers men “pounced on it like hounds” and forced it down and through the posts to score the first goal. “Big Mike,” a Civil War veteran from the Princeton squad, responded, scattering the Rutgers defense “like a burst bundle of sticks” to put the visiting team on the board. Further into the game, Big Mike and Rutgers' George Large (no nickname required) chased the ball into a fence serving as makeshift seating for fans, taking fence and fans down into a crashing heap and eliciting cheers of approval from those in safer seats. The teams traded goals back and forth to tie the game at 4–4. By the rules agreed upon, the first team to score 6 would win.

At that point, the Rutgers captain shifted tactics. Observing that Princeton was using its height advantage to block high kicks, he ordered his men to keep the ball close to the ground. With short low dribbles and passes that wouldn't be out of place on a modern soccer pitch, Rutgers scored the final two goals to win the historic contest 6–4. Contrary to a recollection by one of Princeton's players of being run out of town, the day “closed with a supper,” according to Davis, “in which both teams participated together, interspersing songs and speeches with the deliciously roasted game birds from the Jersey marshes and meadows.”

Though the spectators, especially Rutgers fans, were delighted with the rough-and-tumble affair, the local media was less than impressed. An editor of the
Bergen County Gazette
described it as a “jackass performance” by young men for whom it should be more essential to “construe correctly a page of Homer or of Virgil than to be able to kick a football powerfully.”

A week later, Princeton returned the favor in game 2 of the series, shutting out Rutgers 8–0 in a decisive win that's been unfairly forgotten by all but a handful of Princeton boosters. The deciding game 3, scheduled for just after Thanksgiving, was never played. Just two weeks into the first season of college football, faculty at both schools had had enough of the new game and its jackass performances. They swooped in and shut down the series, alarmed at the “great and distracting interest aroused” by this new football fever.

They had no idea.

W
hen I saw the headline of a recent
New Yorker
article on football's concussion crisis—“Does Football Have a Future?”—I had to chuckle. Seriously? If you include earlier forms of the game, people have been asking the same question for going on, let's see, 700 years or so.

“Yes,” I muttered to myself while turning the page, “next question.”

From literally the first appearance of the word “football” in the English language, critics of the game in its multitude of forms have been eager to predict, if not usher in, its demise. Writing back in the 1950s about English football in particular, Morris Marples captured perfectly the game's history of moral siege:

At one time it was banned as a threat to military training; at another condemned by some as a violent and unseemly pastime, dangerous alike to person and property; praised by others as a manly exercise, of potential educational value. To the Puritans it was a sin, especially if played on the Sabbath; to the cultivated gentleman of the nineteenth century a vulgar amusement, fit only for the common herd; to the schoolboy of whatever century, we may suspect, the best of games.

Here's to the schoolboys! If NFL football is “America's Choice” today, it is thanks, in part, to the elite offspring of 19th-century English society who preserved an embattled and dying tradition behind the ivy-covered walls of their public schools. The late 18th and early 19th century had seen an all-out attack on traditional mob football across the British Isles. The mayors of Derby, a town with an ancient street-ball tradition much like the Kirkwall Ba', attempted to purge the game several times, declaring in 1796 after a player was accidentally drowned during the annual melée that football was “disgraceful to humanity and to civilization, subversive of good order and Government and destructive of the Morals, Properties and very Lives of our Inhabitants.”

The game hung on in Derby until 1847, when another mayor led troops in on horseback. He was stoned by the crowds but beat them back and read them the original Riot Act, which empowered authorities to clamp down on any unlawful gathering of more than a dozen people. The Derby game was never played again. Only in the peripheries and backwaters, places like the remote skerries and isles of Orkney, did football stubbornly persist. There, and in the elite public schools, where natural selection was the only law consistently observed.

Britain's public schools were the “ludic zoos of the age,” as David Goldblatt characterized them, preserving endangered games and diversions long after they'd been snuffed out elsewhere. Left to their devices, the boys in these rarified academies demonstrated an endemic predisposition to violence and brutality. At Harrow, an exclusive London school that counts eight former prime ministers among its alums, students indulged in a common pastime known as “toozling,” which involved the torture and killing of small songbirds. Long before quarterback Michael Vick was prosecuted in federal court for animal cruelty, it was a well-known fact that “no dog could live on Harrow Hill.” The heat of the scrum was the perfect Darwinian testing ground for separating boys from men and establishing the social pecking order.

Each school had its own rules for playing football, determined largely by the grounds available for play. Harrow's muddy pitches inspired a slow game with a flat-bottomed ball that could skid through the puddles. Students at Westminster and Charterhouse in London played in brick-covered cloisters, where pushing, shoving, dribbling, and some handling of the ball were acceptable but not tackling, throwing, or high kicks. Eton developed a unique “wall game” on a field 120 yards long but just 6 yards wide, bounded on one side by an 8-foot-high brick wall and on the other by a ditch. One goal was a garden door and the other an old elm tree. When school officials temporarily banned the wall game owing to excessive injuries, the students took to a nearby field and modified play to emphasize a more open game of running, dribbling, and kicking.

Meanwhile, in the sweeping expanse of green known as Old Bigside, the boys of Rugby School were playing an entirely different kind of football that allowed for carrying of the ball, lateral passes, and tackling. The school and its rough, chaotic game gained notoriety in the 1857 novel
Tom Brown's Schooldays
:

The two sides close, and you can see nothing for minutes but a swaying crowd of boys, at one point violently agitated. That is where the ball is, and there are the keen players to be met, and the glory and the hard knocks to be got: you hear the dull thud of the ball and shouts of “Off your side.” “Down with him,” “Put him over,” “Bravo.” This is what we call a scrummage, gentlemen, and the first scrummage in a School-house match was no joke.

As students arrived from these schools for university at Oxford or Cambridge, debate naturally erupted over which rules of football to play by. Negotiations to find a compromise between Rugby's catch-and-run game and the dribble-and-kick game played at Eton and other London schools broke down repeatedly. Committees even debated such questions as whether “hacking” an opponent's shins should be allowed. One defender of that brutal but effective tactic for tackling argued that to get rid of hacking would “do away with the courage and pluck of the game, and I will be bound to bring over a lot of Frenchmen who would beat you with a week's practice.”