history homework

Hit Ball With Stick. Run. Repeat.

Baseball and its Cousins

Child is Father to the Game • 0’-Cat • Rounders • Stool Ball • Town Ball • The Massachusetts

Game • An important change,

somewhere in the 1840s: from a game for boys to a sport for men

A Little Pretty Pocket-Book, 1744

The Early Baseballers

• Knickerbocker Club, 1845 • Voluntary associations • Urban fraternity and the

bachelor subculture • The urban middle class • Work, play, and craft

values • Joining and belonging Alexander Cartwright,

Knickerbocker

Knickerbocker and Excelsior, 1858

Why Not Cricket?

• St. George’s Club 1838 • New York Cricket Club

1844 • Also Brooklyn, Newark,

Philadelphia • Already “modern” • Already “manly” • Yet, except in Philadelphia,

it doesn’t catch on to a wide American audience

Triumph of the New York Game

• Growing spectator interest • Growing press interest • Shift from fraternity to

competition • Craft and specialization • NABBP, 1857 • New York-Brooklyn all-star

match, 1858 • Eclipse of the competing

“Massachusetts Game” • National triumph of what

was originally a New York subculture

Henry Chadwick