1854.16

The Eagle Club's Field Diagram - A Real Diamond

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Text	John Thorn [email of September 2, 2009) has supplied an image of the printed "Plan of the Eagle Ball Club Bases" from its 1854 rulebook. It seems possible that he who designed this graphic did not intend it to be taken literally, but it sure is different. Folks around MIT here would call it a squashed rhombus. Using the diagram's own scale for 42 paces, and accepting the questionable guess that most people informally considered a pace to measure 3 feet, the four basepaths each measure 132 feet. But the distance from home to 2B is just 79 feet, and from 1B to 3B it's 226 feet [for football fans: that's about 75 yards]. Foul ground ["Outside Range" on the diagram] leaves a fair territory that is not in a 90 degree angle, but at . . . wait a sec, I'll find a professor and borrow a protractor, ah, here . . . a 143 degree angle. Query: do we have evidence that the Eagle preferred, at least initially, a variant playing field? Or did the Eagle Club just assign this diagram to some Harvard person?
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