John Varnam got in touch with me a few weeks ago mentioning that he had pulled together a history of the Leicester Green Sox Baseball Club (1954–64), primarily based on a collection of cuttings, a copy of which he could send through to me along with various other items of British baseball memorabilia. This post details some of these generous additions to the Project COBB collection. Continue reading
We can now announce the winners of the 2013 British Baseball Writing Awards. There were three award-winning entries, and they were of such varied themes that it did not seem reasonable to try to rank them; thus, the prize fund will be shared equally between the winners.
The award-winning writers were:
All three entries have been accepted for publication in the first issue of This Diamond Isle, a new journal from Project COBB, and you will be able to read them all in the new year.
Today the fifth annual class of the British Baseball Hall of Fame (BBHoF) has been announced, and there are four new inductees, bringing the total membership to 22. The inductees include there long-serving and well-decorated players as well as someone who built the backbone for British baseball’s historical recording. The four individuals are presented below.
To see details on all inductees, please visit the official site of the BBHoF:Â http://bbhof.org.uk/Â
Peter Crook
A true team leader, Peter Crook spent 60 years playing and coaching baseball, steering teams to success throughout the South of England. Primarily a first baseman, Crook got his start with the Dulwich Bluejays in 1948 and remained with the club until 1959. His career was interrupted when he joined the army as a regular soldier in the Royal Artillery but he always managed to get leave to play as many games as he could. As well as a solid first baseman Crook developed into a power hitter and in 1959 he was invited by the Detroit Tigers to try out at their Spring Training camp. Owing to the expense Peter was unable to accept. From 1960 to 1969, he was a member of the Richmond Red Sox, guiding the club to a Southern baseball trophy as player–manager and earning All-Star team selection twice. In 1970, he joined one of the South’s most famous clubs, the Sutton Braves, and spent 7 years with the squad. He was named the team’s Most Valuable Player twice and was a league All-Star in six straight seasons. In 1977, he returned to his original club, who now played as the Croydon Bluejays. During his second tour of duty, which lasted until 1984, he was a two-time Most Valuable Player and an All-Star on five occasions. His 1984 Blue Jays team won the national championship. Crook also played for the Gillingham Dodgers winning the Division Two title in 1986. Then, in 1988, Crook helped found of one of Britain’s most enduring clubs, the Old Timers. Under his management, the team captured an international championship trophy at a tournament in Germany in 1993. During two decades, in all, with the Old Timers, Crook was also an ambassador to the game at home. He was an architect of a friendly league to encourage new teams to form. Through the league, teams like the Medway Mariners and the Burgess Hill Red Hats, which later became established clubs, got their first taste of organized play.
Ray Reynolds
A dominant player on one of Great Britain’s all-time greatest clubs, Ray Reynolds competed for 31 seasons (1950–80) at Britain’s highest level of play. As one of the most junior players (if not the all-time youngest) to ever earn a regular place at the top level of baseball in the United Kingdom, Reynolds made his debut for Thames Board Mills (TBM) as a 12-year-old boy in 1950. During Reynolds’ tenure, TBM captured more than a dozen league titles and two national championships (1959 and 1960). Reynolds, a versatile athlete who starred in both the infield and the outfield as well as behind the plate, was named to numerous All-Star teams. He was also dubbed the British Baseball League Most Valuable Hitter in 1967 and earned Southern League Most Valuable Player honours twice. Internationally, he represented Great Britain regularly during contests in the 1950s and 1960s and was part of the silver medal-winning England roster at the 1967 European Championship A-Pool.
Brad Thompson
A member and team leader of title-winning teams in nine sanctioned national championships and two unsanctioned events, Brad Thompson won more titles than any other player in British baseball history. Thompson, whose career began in 1976 as a catcher for the Golders Green Sox, was a winner from nearly the beginning. In 1977 and 1979, the Green Sox earned national titles, with Thompson playing a crucial role in the 1979 finals. Not only did he hit a home run early in the contest, but he also later scored the game-tying run in an 11-inning triumph. Based on records available from his time with the Green Sox, Thompson batted .456 with a .779 slugging average for the club. During this period, he tallied a league-leading .500 batting average in 1979, which was one of several such titles he is reported to have won. Thompson later joined the London Warriors, helping that club to secure back-to-back national titles in 1981 and 1982. Continuing a trend of being clutch in the big games, Thompson scored 4 runs and went 2-for-2 with a double in the 1981 finals. His next stop was with the Cobham Yankees, where his .404 batting average and .603 slugging percentage were key factors in propelling that team to three straight national championships (1986–88). After the Yankees folded, Thompson served as a central figure in reforming the London Warriors. The Warriors went on to capture multiple titles, including a first-place showing in the 1988 Scottish Amicable League and national club trophies in 1997 and 2000. When Thompson retired in 2003 after 28 seasons, he was the only player to have registered more than 300 runs batted in top-tier competition, according to Project COBB’s available records. Beyond his accomplishments on the field, Thompson also served as league secretary and then president for the Southern League between 1979 and 1984 and as chief administrator for the Scottish Amicable League, which ran from 1987 to 1989.
William Morgan
William Morgan (born 9 October 1923) was for decades British baseball’s pre-eminent historian and journalist, and his seminal research and chronicling efforts form the backbone of much of what we know about the game’s history in Britain. The most invaluable of his many important works was a list of national champions dating back to the game’s organised start in 1890. This now serves as the basis of the official record. Another considerable contribution to British baseball came by way of newsletters he self-published. He edited 24 issues of Baseball Courier between 1963 and 1967 and then went on to produce 51 issues of a second newsletter, Baseball Mercury, between 1972 and 1989. Not only did he chronicle the contemporary game, but he also made sure the history of British baseball was a major focus of his work. Without these materials, information on expansive periods of British baseball history would have simply disappeared. Moreover, by distributing the publications to over 20 countries, Morgan played a major role in maintaining an international profile for British baseball (at the time, this was probably the only source of information on British baseball for a lot of international recipients). Morgan first came across the game of baseball in 1938 in Cardiff, where, he later recounted, a seven-team league operated (two Royal Air Force sides, Central YMCA, Mail & Echo, St David’s, Lumberjacks [timber importer employees], and Penzance Social Club). He could not afford to join a club but played for a couple of innings in a pre-season pickup game for Central YMCA at second base in 1939. Aside from his role as chronicler and historian, William also served in an administrative capacity at a national level. He was engaged as both Information Officer and Treasurer for governing bodies of baseball in Britain at different times. In recognition of his contributions to the game, he handed out the MVP trophy at the 1976 British baseball national final (a game for which he was listed in the programme as ‘Official Baseball Historian’) and was the guest of honour at the 1986 final. Based on his knowledge and experience, he was chosen to serve as one of the inaugural selectors for this British Baseball Hall of Fame.
A few weeks back, while clearing out her family home, a lady named Peggy Farrington came across an unusual small, white, round, stitched object. It was a baseball, unused, but clearly on the older side. Continue reading
September in British baseball, with only a few exceptions, has in the game’s modern era become the October of Major League Baseball. Building on this tradition, in 2013 the National Baseball League postseason and the ninth month share a start day.
Tomorrow, the teams ranked third through sixth from the regular season will travel to Hemel Hempsetad, where Grovehill Ballpark will be hosting the first round of the play-offs. Following 28 games of jostling for seedings, going back to April, each of these sides now has 27 outs between them and a spot in the national semi-finals at Farnham Park on 14 September.
According to a schedule posted on the Essex Arrows’ Facebook page, the timings are likely to be as follows.
Below, we examine each of the four teams involved.
With sincere thanks to Inverness Reference Library, I now have a digital copy of what might well be the first box score to ever appear in a British newspaper (the Inverness Advertiser, 19 July 1870). In addition, a cutting from the same paper on 18 April 1871 confirms that the club survived at least one Scottish winter. The cutting is transcribed below, followed first by the scan of the box score from 1870, and after that with the transcribed box score. For details, and an ensuing comment thread, relating to the initial finding, please click here. Continue reading
The deadline is approaching to submit an article to the first issue of This Diamond Isle, a new biannual journal of British baseball (to be published online only as the periodical for the Project COBB Chartered Community of the Society for American Baseball Research).
You can see the Call for Papers by clicking here. This notes a deadline for submission of 15 August, but if you need an extension, please do let me know, via here. It should be possible to accommodate this, within reason.
Pieces may focus on anything linking baseball to Britain, from roots games, through the “invasion†of American baseball in the late 19th Century, all the way to the modern game (including aspects of developing the minority sport and its players in Britain or following foreign professional leagues from afar).
As teams with a chance of making the British baseball play-offs begin to make final preparations, so must those individuals whose grip is not on a seam or bat handle but rather a shutter or a pen. Just as the season’s sand grains are tumbling, so is time running out for entries to be submitted to the British Baseball Photography Competition and British Softball Photography Competition (in their fourth years) and the British Baseball Writing Awards (being run, initially at least, as a 1-year experiment to assess interest).
If you’re umming and arrhing about submitting something to one or both of the competitions, the organizers sincerely encourage you to enter. You have nothing to lose, and — who knows — you might just win.
Specific details for each of the competitions are provided below.
Apologies for the list nature of this post, but I’m just cataloguing the latest additions to the Project COBB website, which this time fall under the top-tier feats category. In the list below “[NF]” indicates the feat occurred in a national final. Many of these are added owing to the extension of the top-tier stats coverage from 1995 back to 1977. A few are simply ones I failed to cross-tally when producing the feats in finals tables.
1998
1996
1994
1993
1990
1989
1987
1986
1982
1981
Note: In this article, to show that the sport being referred to is a direct antecedent of modern American baseball, the term “baseball†is used throughout, except in quoted passages. The alternative of “base ball†is actually a more accurate way to refer to the sport in its early years.
Going all the way back to the late 19th Century, histories of American baseball in Britain (or at least the more accurate ones) have observed that the sport was first played on the country’s soil in the summer of 1874 during the tour of two leading teams from the United States: the Boston Red Stockings and Philadelphia Athletics. The tour’s opening game was played at Liverpool Cricket Club in Edge Hill, placing an important early marker for the game’s history in Merseyside, where later so many teams would enjoy success.
A more interesting question concerned when baseball first established a domestic footing. Writing in 2010 for the book What About the Villa?, after extensive research into baseball in 1889 and 1890, I noted that there were two domestic teams claiming to be the first established in Britain: Birmingham Amateur Base Ball Club and Derby Base Ball Club. I concluded that perhaps the clubs deserved joint credit, “Derby for being the first British group to assemble to play baseball of their own volition; and Birmingham for being the first to go a step further and form themselves into an official club.â€
Then, in late 2011, following an upload of new material to the British Library’s online searchable database of 19th Century British newspapers, I began running my searches again. I was stunned to find that domestic baseball had been played in Leicester in 1876, fully 13 years before teams were being founded in Derby and Birmingham. At an almost identical time that I was reading through these newly emerged cuttings, the discovery was also being made by a researcher on the other side of the Atlantic: San Francisco resident David Block. More can be read about this joint finding in its announcement on BaseballGB here.
I swiftly followed up this online finding with a visit to the British newspaper library in Colindale, accompanied by fellow BaseballGB writers Matt Smith and Mark George. We carefully searched other papers from Leicester in 1876 but sadly found no additional mentions of the sport.
After this, the dust settled, and we began to get comfortable with the notion that baseball was first established in a domestic fashion in 1876, but that the 1874 tour remained the first example of it being played in any capacity.
That was until about a month ago, when an email landed in my inbox that would upturn all previous beliefs on American baseball’s introduction to Britain. The email was from David Block, who was forwarding a message he’d received about a new finding from a Protoball “Diggerâ€, Bruce Allardice. Protoball is a tremendous initiative that continues to unearth findings on the early evolution of games in baseball’s immediate family tree, and “Diggers†are the enthusiastic and skilled researchers making the discoveries.
Bruce Allardice’s discovery (published here) was as follows:
The Washington, DC Evening Star, June 13, 1870: “The American game of “Base Ball” has been instituted at Dingwall, Scotland.” Dingwall was then a seaport in extreme northern Scotland. To the same end, the New London [CT] Democrat, June 25, 1870: “Scotland announces the introduction there of “the American game of base ball.” We pity Scotland.” and the Springfield [MA] Republican, Aug. 19, 1870: “Base-ball is popular in Scotland.”
This suggested that not only was domestic baseball established earlier than previously thought, but that the 1874 tour did not in fact represent the introduction of the sport.
To fully confirm this, we would need evidence that a club was formed and a game played. Thus, David suggested that a search of Inverness newspapers at Colindale could yield further results. I am delighted to announce here, following my visit on the Saturday just gone, that it did just that.
I was particularly thrilled that the stories I found in the Inverness Advertiser (“IAâ€) and Saturday Inverness Advertiser (“SIAâ€) presented a narrative: club formed; funding obtained; club looks for other teams to form in order to start competition; organizers get bored waiting and hold intra-club game; club gets more funding). Together, the reports confirm that we are definitely talking about American baseball, that at least one club was formed, and that at least one game was played (with, it would appear, eight on each team).
IA – 3 May 1870 (repeated in SIA – 7 May 1870)
DINGWALL—On the 27th ult. a numerously attended meeting of young men was held in the Burgh Court-room—Mr James Maclennan, Sheriff-Clerk-Depute, in the chair—for the purpose of instituting the American game of “Base Ball.” Mr D. Macdonald, after intimating the purpose for which the meeting was called, read a proposal, signed by thirty young men, to get the object carried into effect, which was unanimously agreed to. Mr A. K. Brotchie, of America, gave an explanation of the manner in which the game is played. Office-bearers were then elected; and after a vote of thanks was awarded to Mr Maclennan for his conduct in the chair, the meeting broke up.
IA – 14 June 1870 (repeated in SIA – 18 June 1870)
The Treasurer of the Dingwall Base Ball Club begs to acknowledge, with thanks, the following contributions made towards the funds, viz. :— Charles Munro, Esq. of Fowlis £1 ; Crawford Hill Esq. of Allenfield, 10s ; Captain Warrand, Ryefield, 5s ; John Macrae, Esq. of Ardlair, 5s. The club is in good working order, and carried on with spirit. The wish now expressed is that similar clubs be started in the surrounding towns, that challenges might be received and given for prizes to be awarded. Information regarding the game can be had by applying to Mr Brotchie, Captain of the Dingwall Club.
IA – 19 July 1870 (repeated in SIA – 23 July 1870)
DINGWALL.—BASE BALL.—The friendly match of this game came off in Dingwall on Saturday the 9th inst. A number of spectators assembled to witness the contest between picked nines of the club, headed by the Captain and Lieutenant. The match was extremely well contested, and victory seemed to hover over the second nine, until the fifth innings, when they stood 29 to 17. The first nine, not the least intimidated, were only spurred on by their opponents’ success, and in the 6th innings added 16 to their score, which odds the second nine were unable to cancel though they fought well until the termination of the game. The following is the score :—
First Nine.     Runs. Second Nine.     Runs.
A. K. Brotchie ..  6    W. W. Jack .......  8
R. J. Gibson ....  3   W. Nelson ........  7
H. Main ......... 11   J. Munro .........  3
D. Maciver ......  7   J. Mackay ........  5
J. M. Forbes ....  9   A. Strachan ......  3
J. Stewart ......  7   W. R. Ross .......  5
A. Reid .........  3    J. Robertson .....  5
D. Macdonald ....  5    H. Maclennan .....  3
—51                       —39
IA – 5 August 1870 (repeated in SIA – 6 August 1870)
The Treasurer of the Dingwall Base Ball Club begs to acknowledge, with many thanks, the receipt of £1 1s from Duncan Davidson, Esq. of Tulloch. Â
IA – 30 August 1870
The Treasurer of the Dingwall Base Ball Club begs to acknowledge with many thanks the receipt of £1 1s from Sir Robert Mackenzie, Bart. of Coul.
Naturally, some further questions remain, including the following.
The answer to questions 2 and 3 may well be no in both cases. I subsequently conducted an online search for “base ball†and “baseball†on an archive of various Inverness area papers and only found one additional report, from 18 April 1870. I have ordered this article and will add a note below if it yields any additional information.
Finally, it’s worth reflecting that Dingwall might be considered an unusual spot for baseball to gain its first foothold. Today it has a population of 5000, and (nestled into Scotland’s geography near the mouth of the Cromarty Firth) I hope that any residents reading this can forgive me for describing it as being in one of Britain’s forgotten nooks and crannies. Nevertheless, it is firmly on the country’s sporting map, with home soccer team Ross County having risen from the ranks of the Highland League in the early 1990s all the way to the Scottish Premier League. In the campaign just completed they finished a mere three points shy of a Europa League place.
Long before Ross County were delighting Dingwall’s residents (as early as 7 July 1870 in fact), the town was being entertained with American baseball.