Property:Digger Activity

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Showing 50 pages using this property.

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George Thompson, November 2013 +

<div class="source"> </div> <div class="source">[[George Thompson]] contributed two essays to the Special Protoball Issue of Base Ball this May: </div> <ul> <li> <div class="source">"<a title="1805 -- An Enigmatic 1805 "Game of Bace" in New York">1805 -- An Enigmatic 1805 'Game of Bace' in New York</a>." Base Ball. 5(1): 55 - 57. </div> </li> <li> <div class="source_note">"<a title="1823 -- Game of Baseball Reported in "National Advocate"">1823 -- Game of Baseball Reported in "National Advocate"</a>." Base Ball. 51: 61 - 64.</div> </li> </ul> +

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Tom Altherr, May 2011 +

<div class="source">[[Tom Altherr]] contributed two essays to the Special Protoball Issue of Base Ball this May:</div> <ul> <li> <div class="source">"<a title="1841 -- Barn Ball">1841 -- Barn Ball</a>." Base Ball. 5(1): 85 - 88.</div> </li> <li> <div class="source">"<a title="1850 -- Southern Ball-Games">1850 -- Southern Ball-Games</a>." Base Ball. 5(1): 103 - 105. </div> </li> </ul> <div class="source_note"> </div> <div class="source"> </div> +

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Gregory Christiano, August 2013 +

“Baseball in the Bronx, before the Yankees,” is Gregory Christiano’s new book. It focuses some on the Morrisania Unions, and draws extensively on Craig Waff’s Games Tab (<a>http://protoball.org/Games_Tabulation</a>) and other PBall data. A google search of <”Gregory Christiano” Bronx> takes you to Amazon page for Gregory’s book. +

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Jeffrey Kittel, January 2013 +

“This Game of Games”, a snazzy website dedicated to the history of 19th century St. Louis baseball, is the creation of Jeff Kittel. See (<a href="http://thisgameofgames.blogspot.com/">http://thisgameofgames.blogspot.com/</a>.) Jeff has agreed to help curate Protoball’s “Glossary of Games” feature, which is meant to serve as a registry for diverse baseball-like games, both those that precede our game and that appear to have later been derived from it (<a>http://protoball.org/Glossary_of_Games</a>). In that role he has helped write short accounts of evidence about town ball, the Massachusetts game, and English Rounders (<a>http://protoball.org/Essays</a>.) He has contributed essays to SABR’s Pioneer Project reports and to The Rank and File of 19th Century Major League Baseball. (<a href="http://www.amazon.com/Rank-Century-Major-League-Baseball/dp/0786468904">http://www.amazon.com/Rank-Century-Major-League-Baseball/dp/0786468904</a>) Jeff is currently working on an extensive monograph on baseball’s full history in St. Louis, in which he traces the roots of the game in the city back to the 18th century. +

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Eric Miklich, June 2013 +

Eric is working on a book on the World Baseball Tour of 1874. +

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Larry McCray, May 2011 +

[[Larry McCray]] participated in several short articles in the Special Protoball Issue of Base Ball this spring. He also served as Guest Editor of the issue: <ul> <li>"16<a title="1621 -- Pilgrim Stoolball an the Profusion of American Safe-Haven Ballgames">21 -- Pilgrim Stoolball an the Profusion of American Safe-Haven Ballgames</a>." Base Ball. 5(1): 10 -16 (with Brian Turner).</li> <li>"<a title="1672 -- The Amazing Francis Willughby, and the Role of Stoolball in the Evolution of Baseball and Cricket">1672 -- The Amazing Francis Willughby, and the Role of Stoolball in the Evolution of Baseball and Cricket</a>." Base Ball. 5(1): 17-20. </li> <li>"1<a title="1829 -- The Rise and Fall of New England-Style Ballplaying">829 -- The Rise and Fall of New England-Style Ballplaying</a>." Base Ball. 5(1): 69 - 72. </li> <li> "<a title="1830 -- Thoreau's Diary Entry and Other Tiny Clues as to Who Played Early Ball">1830 -- Thoreau's Diary Entry and Other Tiny Clues as to Who Played Early Ball</a>." Base Ball. 5(1): 73 - 76.</li> <li>"<a title="1845 -- The Knickerbocker Rules, and the Long History of the One-Bounce Fielding Rule">1845 -- The Knickerbocker Rules, and the Long History of the One-Bounce Fielding Rule</a>." Base Ball. 5(1): 93 - 97. </li> <li>"<a title="1856 -- The New York Game in 1856: Poised for a National Launch">1856 -- The New York Game in 1856: Poised for a National Launch</a>." Base Ball. 5(1): 114 - 117 (with Craig Waff).</li> <li>"<a title="1859 -- State Championship Wicket Game in Connecticut: A Hearty Hurrah for a Doomed Pastime">1859 -- State Championship Wicket Game in Connecticut: A Hearty Hurrah for a Doomed Pastime</a>." Base Ball. 5(1): 132 - 135. </li> </ul>

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Monica Nucciarone, August 2013 +

Monica Nucciarone has been contributing to a new documentary about base ball in Hawaii. The film, by former Boston University student Drew Johnson, touches on the influence of base ball on the political evolution of Hawaii, starting with 1840s ballplaying there as introduced by missionaries. Drew notes that Japanese baseball, as well as the US game, was part of the later story of Hawaiian baseball. +

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Sam Marchiano, December 2008 +

Base Ball Discovered continues to charm audiences. The MLB Advanced Media documentary on baseball’s origins, written and produced by Sam, received the Award for Baseball Excellence at the 3rd annual Baseball Film Festival at the Hall of Fame in September. The award recognizes the film that best captures “research, factual accuracy, historical context, and appreciation of the game.” This follows the warm reception Sam was given at this year’s SABR Convention in Cleveland, where she addressed the SABR Origins Committee and screened the film for a packed house of conventioneers. Others agree: Vin Scully calls the film a “grand slam,” and the unexcitable George Will calls it “fascinating.” +

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Howard Burman, January 2008 +

“Gentlemen at the Bat” is the working title of Howard's current book project, one that focuses on the Knickerbocker Club. The book’s story is told by club members in the form of a collective oral history, in which Howard’s historical research is presented through the medium of fictionalized dialog. His earlier books include one on Shoeless Joe Jackson and one on 1950’s stickball inNew York. +

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Monica Nucciarone, March 2007 +

“The Cartwright Conundrum: Fact and Fiction of Cartwright’s Baseball Legacy” was the subject of a poster session by Monica Nucciarone at the SABR 36 convention. She is in the rewrite phase of her treatise on Alexander Cartwright, and may present some results at the St. Louis SABR convention. She spent part of last April doing research in Hawaii. +

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John Thorn, March 2007 +

Conceived and edited by John, the new McFarland offering Base Ball: A Journal of the Early Game will be appearing soon. The inaugural issue will have several substantial articles on pre-1870 ballplaying, including Joanne Hulbert’s work on Fast Day in Massachusetts, Angus McFarland’s work on San Francisco’s first team, Fred Ivor-Campbell’s take on the 1857 Convention, and John’s reflections on that surprising find of bafeball in 1791 Pittsfield MA. +

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Fred Ivor-Campbell, March 2007 +

Fred is working on a book-length evaluative history of baseball from 1845 to 1857 -- Knickerbocker Base Ball. A first segment, treating the 1857 base ball convention, is slated for the second issue of Base Ball. +

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Joanne Hulbert, January 2008 +

In addition to helping lead the Boston SABR Chapter and pushing along an anthology of Deadball Era baseball poetry, Joanne is working on a local project that brings together the histories of the Massachusetts game and the NY Game as they impacted one small town — Holliston. She sees a big story in these local events. She says that when one wanders around among the ghosts of the game, the stories are impressive: they involve triumph and tragedy, sex and violence, pathos and drama. Besides, she lives in the original Mudville, and that’s part of the story. Her tentative title: For Fun, Money or Marbles: How Baseball Transformed a Perfectly Good Town. She hasn’t set a target date for publication yet. +

Jim Lannen, January 2008 +

Jim has just completed coding all of the 178 rich entries in [[David Block]]’s bibliography in Baseball Before We Knew It for SABR’s Baseball Index (<a href="http://www.baseballindex.org/">http://www.baseballindex.org/</a>). In doing this, Jim has added several new search codes to TBI, including stool-ball, trap-ball, trapstick, cat, and tipcat. +

John Schiffert, January 2008 +

John identifies his continuing primary interest as baseball (and base ball) in Philadelphia, not the easiest choice for someone living far from the local sources at Temple University and the Free Library of Philadelphia. His Base Ball in Philadelphia (McFarland, 2007) is out, with contributions from our colleagues Altherr, Casway, Helander, Hershberger, Thorn, and Marshall Wright, but John still longs to know such things as “did the Olympic Club there really, as Robert Smith wrote in 1993, play on a diamond-shaped field? What was Smith's source for that assertion? And who were the original Olympics . . . a bunch of local rope-makers?” He admits to having thoughts about doing a more extensive book on Philadelphia’s hardball origins, once Georgia and the people at Clayton State University let go of him. +

John Husman, December 2008 +

John is the author of “Ohio’s First Baseball Game; Played by Confederates and Taught to Yankees” which appeared in the spring 2008 issue of Base Ball. The match game itself, apparently played by New York rules, took place at a Civil War military prison on a Lake Erie island near Sandusky OH in August 1864. John concludes that the southern players, who were gentleman officers having connections to eastern US culture, were the ones who introduced the new game to local Ohioans. +

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Larry McCray, December 2008 +

Larry has put an initial [[Glossary of Games]] onto the Protoball website. This primitive listing includes about 120 distinct games, and names of games, of potential interest to those contemplating the full range of baseball-like games. Corrections and additions ([[Tom Altherr]] tipped us off on the game of [[Chermany]], said to resemble baseball, found in Virginia and the south) are welcome. Most of the games entail safe-haven bases. +

Larry McCray, January 2008 +

Larry is succeeding Mike Ross as chair of SABR’s Committee on the Origins of Baseball. Mike has led the SABR-UK chapter for many years, including its creative early examination of the British roots of baseball in the 1990s. +

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Marty Payne, January 2008 +

Marty continues to explore the influence of the advent of the New York Game on rural towns. He is finding that The New York game (along with improved transportation) brought competition, and had a profound social, economic, and cultural impact on small towns that previous, less structured versions of ballplay did not. +

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Peter Morris, March 2007 +

Peter’s latest book is Level Playing Fields: How the Groundskeeping Murphy Brothers Shaped Baseball. It includes coverage of the development of early ball fields before 1872. Peter’s next project is a textbook on the history of baseball from 1840-1870, and will include the scoop from many new sources that Peter has turned up. +

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Greg Perkins, December 2008 +

Pre-Civil War town ball in Cincinnati is the subject of an article by Greg Perkins in the fall 2008 issue of Base Ball. The article, “The Cincinnati Game: Townball in Cincinnati, 1858-1866,” traces the rise of a distinctive form of town ball (with a hexagonal infield, and with bases 60 feet apart, and with an all-out-side-out rule) before the War. Covington KY fielded 10 townball clubs, and 28 Cincinnati games received newspaper coverage in summer 1858 alone (average score, 155 to 112, most games lasting four innings, average team size of over 12 players). Greg, who majored in history at the University of Cincinnati, is now collecting information on Henry M. Millar, a Cincinnati reporter who traveled with the 1869 Red Stockings and later wrote a memoir of the experience. +

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Priscilla Astifan, December 2008 +

Priscilla and a colleague discuss the predecessor game to Knicks-style base ball in upstate New York in “Old-Fashioned Base Ball” in Western New York, 1825-1860,” which appeared in the fall 2008 issue of Base Ball. The article notes that until 1860 the unusually unnamed earlier game was still played competitively in several places. About 20 news accounts from that time, and from later accounts of a number of “throwback” games, allow a partial picture of the nature of that earlier game. Strong similarity to the Massachusetts Game is found. +

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John Freyer, January 2008 +

Researcher and author John Freyer reports that his interest is still Chicago-area baseball from back before the National League. Among other feats, he has accumulated every Chicago box score between the years 1859 and the Chicago Fire in 1871. He also enjoys researching New York baseball before the Civil War. John has an ongoing project of bat and ball games over history, from Wicket to Wiffleball, but hasn't determined whether it amounts to a new book. Currently, John is working with others to establish a Chicago Baseball Museum, and serves as the project’s ad hoc historian. +

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Rob Loeffler, March 2007 +

Rob has assembled a chronology of the evolution of ballmaking. Rob has a collection of photos of well over 200 19th C baseballs and is analyzing them to estimate their size and weight. +

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Martin Hoerchner, March 2007 +

The UK Chapter of SABR is preparing to resume publication of The Examiner, which has given us several accounts of members’ research on English ballplaying (see <a href="http://www.sabruk.org/examiner/index.html">http://www.sabruk.org/examiner/index.html</a>). Martin, who has uncovered contemporary stoolball and trap ball in the olde country, is leading the renewed effort. +

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Glenn Drinkwater, January 2008 +

The Vintage Base Ball Association’s [VBBA] recently-installed Glenn as their president. One of Glenn’s objectives is to review the organization’s Rules and Customs program to reinforce historical accuracy. Glenn is in touch with [[Peter Morris]], [[Fred Ivor-Campbell]], and [[Tom Shieber]] as part of that initiative. +

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Tom Altherr, December 2008 +

Tom has brought to light another big slug of references to early ballplaying. His article in the spring 2008 issue of Base Ball, "Chucking the Old Apple; Recent Discoveries of Pre-1840 North American Ball Games," resulted in 33 new entries for the Protoball Chronology. Included are references to ballplaying by slaves between 1797 and the 1840s, soldierly play between 1775 and 1815, and numerous accounts of campus ballgames between 1813 and about 1840. +

Tom Altherr, January 2008 +

Tom has revised a paper he presented at NASSH in 2006 (“Chucking the Old Apple: Recent Discoveries in Pre-1839 North American Ball Games History”) for possible publication. His 2007 contribution at theCooperstown symposium is based on further research and more theoretical speculations why baseball emerged in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. It may appear in the next biennial anthology. After his week in Cooperstown, Tom spent a very solid week researching at the American Antiquarian Society in Worcester. This has all led him to see a possible book on all pre-1840 North American games – base ball and beyond -- played with a ball. +

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Wayne McElreavy, January 2008 +

Wayne is trying to piece together the history of baseball in the Claremont area. +

Wendy Knickerbocker, January 2008 +

Wendy's main baseball research interest is Billy Sunday. However, she is also interested in American cultural history in general, and while doing research on a book about a contemporary of Ralph Waldo Emerson, she was delighted to find [and to submit for the Protoball chronology] an entry on baseball from Emerson's journals. It was while reading Emerson's journals to get a handle on Emerson’s friendship with (and admiration for) her current research subject, Edward T. Taylor, that she found the June 1840 baseball reference (see Protoball entry [[1840.20]]), which imagines that some young ballplayers feel “a faint sense of being a tyrannical Jupiter driving spheres madly from their orbits. +

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Mark Schoenberg, April 2013 +

Mark Schoenberg is a new Digger. We are looking for this street-wise New Yorker to curate Protoball’s prospective Schoenberg’s Stickball Collection. +

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Howard Burman, February 2013 +

[[Howard Burman]] has been trying to figure out the game of Irish Rounders. The game’s players see it as unrelated to English rounders, and possibly as a predecessor to American base ball. Having visited Ireland and gotten to know officials of the Gaelic Athletic Association, his report on the game is imminent, and will be posted to the Protoball site. +

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John Zinn, February 2013 +

[[John Zinn]] is working on a manuscript telling the early history of base ball in New Jersey. He has examined 47 newspapers’ coverage of base ball club activities from 1855 to 1860, a period when only five NJ cities had daily papers. John has made major contributions to the SABR “Spread of Base Ball” project and to MLB’s Thorn Committee on Origins, which has stimulated new digging on the early spread of the game. John reports that both Newark and Jersey City grew clubs that were mentioned at least once during this six-year span. The most active base ball counties in the state were Hudson County (which includes both Jersey City and Hoboken) and Essex County, the two counties closest to Hoboken's famous Elysian Fields. +

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Monica Nucciarone, February 2013 +

[[Monica Nucciarone]] is following up on her authoritative book on Alexander Cartwright, has contributed to a forthcoming documentary about 19C baseball in Hawaii, and is writing her second book, on Cartwright’s daughter-in-law, Princess Theresa. +

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Greg Perkins, August 2013 +

Greg Perkinshas written articles on base ball, town ball, and cricket for the Northern Kentucky Encyclopedia (University Press of Kentucky, 2009) and has helped organize a VBB club, the Ludlow Base Ball Club, which is named after an 1870s club. He continues to collect data on the Cincinnati Red Stockings. +

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Jeffrey Kittel, June 2013 +

Jeff Kittel has completely redesigned his “This Game of Games” website at <a href="http://www.thisgameofgames.com/">http://www.thisgameofgames.com/</a>. Its main focus is regional 19th Century ballplaying, but Jeff’s interests have expanded beyond St. Louis base ball to varieties of ballplaying in America’s trans-Appalachian West. Jeff plans to post his new finds on the site as they turn up. +

John Bowman, August 2013 +

John Bowman is taking a fresh look at the history of the 90-foot basepath in baseball, and is reflecting on how the choice of a different distance might have affected the game. +

John Zinn, June 2013 +

John Zinn has discovered an 1855 New Jersey game played among African American clubs, which is four years earlier than we had previously known for African American play of modern base ball. We are in contact with SABR’s Negro Leagues Committee to see if John’s find now stands as the first ever. Its PBall entry is at <a>http://protoball.org/1855.36</a>. +

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Mark Brunke, August 2013 +

Mark Brunke continues to collect information on very early ballplaying in Sacramento, Seattle, and Victoria British Columbia. He is finding that some early pioneers in that region played both base ball and cricket, at first. +

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Rich Arpi, August 2013 +

Rich Arpi reports that the Minnesota SABR chapter has discussed the idea of mapping the spread of base ball in Minnesota by locating the first known modern game in the larger MN towns. +

Richard Hershberger, June 2013 +

Richard Hershberger continues with his collection of data on as many early base ball clubs as he can find. At this point he has rounded up over 850 clubs that formed prior to the Civil War and that played by New York rules. Richard has generously shared his collection with Protoball, and all of the clubs are entered into the PBall Pre-Pro data base. Richard’s quest parallels the effort started in 2008 by Craig Waff to build a directory of early ball games before the War, and we are trying to systematically link clubs and games for PBall users. +

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Tom Heitz, August 2013 +

Tom Heitz participated in a large Cooperstown tour organized in part by filmmaker Ken Burns. Tom presented a lecture on base ball’s early rules and supervised a throwback Town Ball game for the tour on the lawn behind the Fenimore Art Museum. +

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Frank Ceresi, April 2013 +

Frank Ceresi’snew e-book <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Washington-Nationals-Their-Grand-ebook/dp/B00BH16SO8/ref=sr_1_2?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1364866051&sr=1-2">The Washington Nationals and Their Grand Tour of 1867</a> (Search <nationals ceresi ebook>) follows the National Club, and others, from 1859 through the following decade. He remains on the hunt for a photograph of the Nationals at the time of their tour, and is about to sift through the Matthew Brady collections in hopes of spotting one. Frank also serves as Executive Director of a new online baseball museum at <a href="http://thenationalpastime.com/">http://thenationalpastime.com/</a>, which will show up to 25,000 artifacts, including many from the origins era. +

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Richard Hershberger, October 2013 +

Introducing . . . Hershie's Nuggets! Richard Hershberger has offered to supply short pieces on assorted sweet subtopics in early base ball history. The first of these, Sliding in the Amateur Era, is a 3-page summary of contemporary news accounts' evidence on sliding. It begins: "Did base runners slide in the amateur era, and if so, how frequently? Looking at period reports, the most striking feature is that the evidence is thin. There are undoubted reports of runners sliding, but they are few and far between. The problem then is to determine if reports of sliding are rare because sliding was rare, or because it was commonplace and therefore unremarkable: are they man bites dog reports, or dog bites man? Or something in between?" Nugget #1 is found at http://protoball.org/Sliding. +

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John Zinn, October 2013 +

John Zinn Digs into Early New Jersey Ballplaying John Zinn’s objective is to understand how the New York game came to New Jersey and then developed and expanded throughout the entire state. He has been examining close to 50 contemporary newspapers that survive as well as national publications. In the pre-war period (1855-1860) there were organized base ball clubs in only about a third of New Jersey’s 21 counties. He plans to look at other information such as the reach of the railroad to try to understand why the game did and didn’t reach the different parts of the state. He is now shifting to the 1861-1870 period. John wrote the New Jersey section Baseball Founders. He is on the planning committee for the November 2014 SABR symposium on 19th century base ball in the greater New York area, including New Jersey. +

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Tom Altherr, April 2013 +

A monograph on pre-1845 North American games played with a ball or some other projectile is a goal for [[Tom Altherr]]. The work would include, but not be limited to, safe haven games, and would include indoor a well as outdoor games. He notes that some of this work has appeared in the journal Base Ball, the SABR Originals newsletter, and Protoball’s online chronology and its Next Destin’d Post newsletter. Tom is also interested in ball-playing among slave and free African Americans before 1865 and in the possible contributions of German schlagball, and perhaps other mid-European games, to the evolution of base ball. He remains convinced that ball-playing was more common in North America than most sports historians allow . . . and he continues to confirm that view with fresh finds most every month. +

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Jeffrey Kittel, August 2013 +

A new version of the “This Game of Games” website was launched in June by Jeff Kittel. The site, which traces early ballplaying in Greater St. Louis and the Trans-Appalachian West, is at <a href="http://www.thisgameofgames.com/">http://www.thisgameofgames.com/</a> +

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Mark Brunke, February 2013 +

A new voice in Origins research, [[Mark Brunke]] last year volunteered to coordinate an effort within SABR’s Pacific Northwest chapter to fill in an almost completely blank map of the first modern games in that area. “What I like about baseball history is how it fits into American history, and how it illuminates and questions the past,” he explains. Mark, who works in Human Resources and has pursued painting, music, and filmmaking as well as baseball, is presently putting together a history of pre-professional base ball in the Seattle area. Mark’s January comprehensive presentation to the Pac Northwest chapter on findings to date is found at: <a>http://protoball.org/The_Spread_of_Base_Ball_in_the_Pacific_Northwest</a>. +

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Joe Gray, August 2013 +

British-born Joe Gray is collecting information on the play of modern base ball in Britain, and has recently turned up games played as early as 1870 in Dingwall, Scotland. Joe reports that his personal interest is expanding to include earlier British baserunning games. His very comprehensive web page is found at <a href="http://www.projectcobb.org.uk/">http://www.projectcobb.org.uk/</a>. +

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Tom Heitz, June 2013 +

Film-maker Ken Burns has enlisted Digger Tom Heitz as a presenter on early base ball for a tour group to Cooperstown in June 2013. The group numbers an unprecedented 160 visitors. Some of us think of Tom as the unofficial Dean of Diggers – he co-wrote the 70- item origins chronology that inspired th Protoball Project-- and we welcome him back. +

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