Tag Archives: One from the Past

New findings upturn previous beliefs on baseball’s intro to the UK

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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.”

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 “Digger”, 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 (“IA”) and Saturday Inverness Advertiser (“SIA”) 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.  


 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.


    

  1. Did AK Brotchie import equipment, or was it fashioned from raw materials in Scotland?
    2. 

  2. Were more teams formed in the area?
    3. 

  3. Did any formal competition take place?
    4. 

  4. What happened to the club and AK Brotchie?
    5. 

  5. Finally, and most importantly, was Dingwall Base Ball Club the first-ever club established outside of North America?
    6. 



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.

					

		
		
	


	

				

									

				One from the Past: Selection of photos from 1976 national final uncovered
			

										

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Rhode Island native Jeff Archer has been a great friend of Project COBB since its inception and he recently sent through some photos from the 1976 British national final, in which his Spirit of ’76 team was pipped by the Liverpool Trojans. The photos that Jeff obtained were taken and kindly scanned from the negatives by Tom Evans (official photographer for the game). I believe that Tom has more shots like this, and if he can come through with them they would represent an invaluable pictorial record of 1970s senior and youth baseball in southern England. In any case, though, the batch he has sent are very useful in their own right. Continue reading →

					

		
		
	


	

				

									

				The Croydon Pirates at the 2005 European Cupwinners Cup (Part 1)
			

										

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Countries with clubs involved in competitions sanctioned by the Confederation of European Baseball this season, with their world rankings as of March 2013


In 2013, baseball clubs from 25 European countries will take part in competitions sanctioned by the continent’s baseball federation. The highest-ranked European nation absent from this list is Great Britain (#21 in the world), and the only other ranked countries not sending a team are Israel (#28), Sweden (#34), Slovenia (#58), Ireland (#61), Hungary (#63), and Latvia (#72).


It is eight years since any British teams competed in a European club competition. Among the prohibitive factors contributing to this are the increasing strictness of the stipulations by the Confederation of European Baseball (CEB) against non-passport holders (see Rule 7a, for example) and the difficulty of self-funding travel at a time of growing economic strain.


The last season that British clubs competed was 2005, when: the Edinburgh Diamond Devils went 0-and-4 in the CEB Cup Qualifier; a GB Juniors squad, playing under the moniker of Greater Berkshire 1938, finished fourth out of the eight teams in their half of the European Cup B-Pool; and the Croydon Pirates competed in the Cupwinners Cup.


The year 2005 marked the 40th anniversary of Britain’s first foray into European club competition.


The early years


Josh Chetwynd’s still-indispensable chronicle Baseball in Europe, which I have gratefully drawn on in this article, records the first European Cup — historically, the continent’s premier club competition — as having taken place in 1963 and been won by Picadero Jockey Club, a Spanish side.


A record of British clubs in major European club competitions (kindly compiled by Mark Tobin for the now-defunct British Baseball Data website and currently housed online by Project COBB) reveals the first British entry into the competition to have occurred in 1965. That year, the Stretford Saints — despite the best efforts of ace pitcher Wally O’Neil — went winless in their two games in the event’s northern section.


The Saints return to Manchester’s Piccadilly train station after their European Cup adventure in 1965


In the closer of the Saints’ two contests in 1965, against Belgian outfit Luchtbal, they fell 6-5. This became all the more respectable when the Hull Aces — the Saint’s great rivals — were unable to score a single run in their three trips later in the decade. After the last of Hull’s trips to the Continent, in 1969, there was an 18-year span with no British clubs sides at all in major European competition.


The Hull Aces’ batting from a 7-0 loss to Colt 45, 1968 European Cup (Hull’s Alan Asquith struck out 13)


The B-list


The return of British baseball to European club competition came with the Southglade Hornets’ entry into the 1988 European Cup B-Pool tournament. They finished fourth of seven teams, with their solitary victory coming over the Zürich Lions.


The programme cover for the European Cup B-Pool, hosted in Reading and featuring the Enfield Spartans


Over the next five seasons, two additional club competitions were launched by the European federation. In 1990 came the Cupwinners Cup and in 1993 the CEB Cup, which are described by Chetwynd as the most and second-most prestigious events, respectively, after the European Cup. The Leeds City Royals were the first British team to compete in the A-Pool of one of these events, which they did in 1993 (going 0-and-3 in their group and losing their positional play-off too).


However, in both competitions, as with the European Cup, there have been B-Pool events run.


Across the three competitions, a host of other British teams besides the Hornets have competed in B-Pool events, including the Birmingham Bandits, Birmingham Braves, Brighton Buccaneers, Edinburgh Diamond Devils, Enfield Spartans, Hounslow Rangers, Hessle Warriors, Hull Mets, Kingston Cobras, London Warriors, Menwith Hill Patriots, Richmond Flames, and Windsor Bears. Only the last listed of these teams enjoyed real tournament success.


Windsor’s table-setting


In 2003, the Windsor Bears were victorious in their half of the European Cupwinners Cup B-Pool, compiling a 5-0 record in the round-robin competition. This earned Britain a berth in the Cupwinners Cup A-Pool in 2004, which the Bears won their way back to fill. In play-offs for the lower placings in the 2004 tournament, Windsor’s 10-6 victory over the French representatives Savigny (the first ever win by a British team in an A-Pool event) preserved Britain’s spot on the upper rung.


Enter  Croydon


A couple of months after the Bears defended Britain’s A-Pool berth, they met the Croydon Pirates in the domestic national final, which would determine the qualifier for the Cupwinners Cup in 2005. The Pirates were underdogs, not least because they had used all of their regular arms to get to the winner-takes-all showdown. In contrast, Windsor still had ace hurler Ryan Koback in reserve; an indication of his pedigree was given by his six regular-season shutouts the previous year.


Croydon settled on part-time knuckleballer Jeff McDonald for the biggest game in the club’s 20-plus-year history up to that point. He gave up five home runs, including a grand slam to former Pirate Roddi Liebenberg, but still picked up a complete-game, 12-10 victory.


The Croydon Pirates, 2004 British baseball national champions


Four Croydon players had multi-hit games. The Canadian pairing of Ian Bates and Charlie Caskey went 4-for-5 and 2-for-5, respectively, while the Australian Rhys Dixon (whose brother played professionally in the States) was 3-for-4 and there was a 3-or-5 performance from Brett Willemburg (whose .500 batting average for South Africa at the 2006 World Baseball Classic placed him behind only Adam Stern and one Ken Griffey Jr at that inaugural event).


 


Part 2 of this article will tell the story of what happened to Croydon in the 2005 European Cupwinners Cup A-Pool.

					

		
		
	


	

				

									

				One from the Past: Classic pre-WWII finals in British Baseball
			

										

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On 28 March 2009 I published an article describing the six classic national finals of British baseball’s post-war era, where a classic is simplistically defined (for reasons justified in the original piece) as one where the deciding game [a] went to extra innings or [b] had a winning margin of a single run. That article noted that there were also six finals in the pre-World War II period that would be defined in this way as having classic status.


I’ve been scrambling round for several years now, trying to piece together details of those earlier six finals, and below I present the still-incomplete findings.


For available details on all pre-World War II national finals, click here.


 Continue reading →

					

		
		
	


	

				

									

				One from the Past: Gaps
			

										

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This year’s National Baseball Championship will represent the 100th anniversary of, well, nothing. Starting in 1912, British baseball experienced a 22-year period without an official national final. The title deciders that bookended this lapse were both spectacular, at least judging by their 1-run winning margins, but, regardless of that, even the most meagre of British baseball appetite would have been left far from the point of satiation during this period of the game’s history.


Anniversaries are historically easy ways of generating promotional copy for almost anything, but this hiatus does not provide much of a fulcrum with which to lever publicity. If you push down on one end of plank of wood that is lying on the ground, the other end’s coordinates are not going to be overly troubled.


Still, we should at least be reminded to not take what we do have for granted, when the British baseball community gathers in Hertfordshire this bank holiday weekend.


The only event that historians are aware of from the barren field of 1912-1933 that comes close to being considered as a national final is a game that took place in 1926 at Stamford Bridge between Chipping Norton and an all-star team from London. A Daily Mail scribe who reported on the contest branded it the “British baseball championship”, and that is certainly how you’ll find the game, which Chipping Norton won, being remembered if you ever visit Chippy’s local history museum to take in its wonderful baseball exhibition. However, without any evidence of a qualifying structure underpinning the clash it is difficult to see how it can be considered anything more than a novelty. Moreover, the Daily Mail article must be taken with a hypertension-inducing quantity of salt. It adds a fascinating prequel to the Abner Doubleday farce by stating that he “was born at Wootton, near Chipping Norton, and took the game to the United States.” This Doubleday myth was debunked in the American press much more swiftly than the more famous one was.


Finally, if we set our backward-gazing power not to 100 years but rather a solitary season, there is more scope for reflection, as Michael Jones found out in his latest post on the UK American Sports Fans website.

					

		
		
	


	

				

									

				One from the Past: “Balks”
			

										

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Sports junkies are addicted to oddities, and a regular fix is offered by the abundance of individual incidents played out within North American organized baseball’s daily schedule, not to mention the global game. I count myself among the junkies’ number and, until half an hour ago, took pride in thinking that if there was a potential event that I had not seen with my own eyes, I had at least conceived of its possibility. But that was before I started browsing through some press cuttings for the Cobham Yankees in 1987.


On Sunday 10 May of that year, the Yankees played regional rivals the Sutton Braves in a league contest. The Yankees entered the seventh inning facing a 9-1 deficit but rallied for 8 runs in the frame to draw even. On an initial skim of the cutting I read the following:


The inning featured three base-hits by both Brad Thompson and Alan Smith, Cobham’s catcher and centrefielder.


There was my fix. An incredible occurrence. But then I did my sums and had a rapid come-down. For two players to get three hits in an inning, a minimum of 14 runs would need to score. Cursing the journalist who had been so cruelly inept, I re-read the words. And then I spotted something. My eyes had tricked me by vaulting a hyphen over a four-character gap. What the journalist actually wrote did add up; but, sadly, it was not going to get me my high:


The inning featured three-base hits by both Brad Thompson and Alan Smith, Cobham’s catcher and centrefielder.


Feeling a little ashamed, I meekly read on, but then suddenly realized why my eyes had been so prone to deception. The opening paragraph had promised an “ending so bizarre that nothing like it had been seen in the Southern League in years.” I had just been premature, I thought.


I read on. The Braves were not done yet: they rallied back to take a 12-9 lead into the bottom of the ninth. But the Yankees responded with 3 runs of their own and had runners on first and third with one out.


Was this it? A double comeback? It was probably very exciting to have been a part of, but 25 years on it was just not doing it for me. Again, I cursed the journalist. Again, I had erred.


So what was the bizarre ending then? Well, Cobham had Gene Hickman at bat, and Sutton decided to intentionally walk him, presumably to set up the force at home. As the journalist kindly explained for a readership who would, for the most part, have been unfamiliar with baseball’s finer points: “in order to walk Hickman, the Sutton pitcher had to pitch the ball outside the strike zone four times.”


Well he managed this once, but on the second pitch he “inexplicably halted his motion” and was adjudged to have balked. And this ended the game, as the winning run trotted home from third. A walk-off balk on a failed intentional base on balls attempt. Is there a stranger, or more embarrassing, way to end a game?


The Yankees also got the better of the Braves in the quarter-finals of that year’s national play-offs, on their way to securing a second championship in their record-setting run of three straight titles.

					

		
		
	


	

				

									

				One from the Present; One from the Past — A consolidated, semi-regular column
			

										

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I can derive great joy from uncovering details of an important but long-forgotten British baseball clash in a newspaper library. The enjoyment has much to do with the respect I have for the history of baseball. This is an appreciation that extends to other sports. As an example of this, I have my cycling computer set to kilometres instead of miles, not to cheer myself up by the greater rate with which the digits tick over, but to pay a small kind of homage to the land of all things metric and so many great two-wheelers, including the late Laurent Fignon. His gruelling battle with — and eventual 8-second loss to — Greg Lemond in the 1989 Tour de France is probably a singularly important factor in the development of my love for sport. (Eight seconds is an infinitesimal amount in the context of a 3-week stage race; if the action was condensed into a 10-second dash, the cyclists would not have been split by the naked eye or by a photograph).


I also get excited by baseball that happens in front of me, in three dimensions, using the full spectrum of colour and the entire range of audible sounds. Only last Sunday, instinct lifted me from my seat (and sent my head on a treacherous journey into the internal spidery mechanism of my ground-rooted fishing umbrella) when the Harlow Nationals’ first baseman Jarrod Pretorius threw himself over the fencing marking the edge of foul territory — his intended domain — and came up with the ball for the out.


If you tried to weigh up these two types of enjoyment using a pair of scales, the measuring aid would vapourise out of the space-time continuum because they are incompatible as far as making comparisons is concerned.


In the same way, I gained orthogonal enjoyment from writing two previous BaseballGB columns, one on current reflections (Roundshaw Hop) and the other featuring historical snippets (the Cobbettes). If, with your replacement set of scales, you tried to make another comparison of enjoyment levels here, you’d again find yourself heading out to the hardware store with your hand in your pocket.


Fortunately, I don’t need to make a choice between the two areas. Project COBB (the Project for the Chronicling of British Baseball) has the dual purpose of preserving details of baseball today and restoring the happenings from yesteryear. And my new semi-regular column on BaseballGB will consolidate the themes of my two previous serials in alternating between the current and the realms of history: One from the Present; One from the Past.