Fall quarter, 1985

The College of Liberal Arts

Wright State University

Baseball players of the nineteenth century might recognize the modern contests in arenas such as Riverfront Stadium, Carl Becker says. Despite early 20^th –century revisionist history that put the game’s origins in America, baseball developed from the English "rounders", and even from medieval origins, according to Becker.

Rules of early contests thus had aspects strange to modern eyes, although its more basic elements-hitting and catching, running bases-remain constant.

Following are descriptions of baseball through the ages, as compiled by Becker:

• The infield was diamond-shaped.

• Bases were 90 feet apart.

• Each team had three outs for its time at bat.

• Fielders put runners out by catching a batted ball in the air or on its first bounce; by throwing to first base ahead of a runner; by tagging a runner between bases or by "plugging" him with a thrown ball.

• Infielders stood atop the bases, and wore no gloves.

• Three strikes constituted an out.

• Originally the batter could call for a strike above or below the waist. In 1889, batters lost the "high-low" privilege, and the base on balls was reduced from nine pitches outside the strike zone to four.

• Pitchers had the right to throw overhand beginning about 1884.

• Catching the ball on a bounce and "plugging" runners no longer constituted an out.

The middle-America World series of 1985 brought baseball back to its heart and soul. TV moguls and league executives infatuated with the big media markets thought the confrontation of teams from Kansas City and St. Louis a dreadful draw, but a heartland Series is close to the way it’s supposed to be.

At least that’s the opinion of Carl Becker, professor of history at Wright State. In a study to be published soon as a chapter in the book Sport in America.

Becker says small towns, typified by many Ohio communities of the nineteenth century, were the breeding grounds of modern baseball.

"No other sport in a village was as bound up in social processes or was as closely related to a sense of communal pride as was baseball," Becker reports in his chapter, entitled "Baseball and the Small Community, 1865-1900." Becker says this belief is at odds with more traditional thinking, which holds that the National Pastime grew from urban beginnings.

"Historians have portrayed baseball as particularly suited to an urban order," he reports. "The game brought to the city, they have suggested, images of a more postoral, individualistic, and informal way of life identified with a rural past."

Becker notes that this view obscures a substantial portion of the game’s background. "They have left relatively untouched old portraits of baseball as a medium through which the localism and parochialism of small communities found its expression," he notes.

Teams sported names as individual as their communities. Germantown’s first team was the Essayons; from Springboro came the Actives; Indian tribes were represented by the Mohawks of Xenia and the Senecas of Troy, and the Modocs of Miamisburg and Springfield.

Uniforms also were points of pride for community teams, according to Becker. For the Essayons’ first game players wore blue knee breeches with red cord running down

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