Chronology:Music
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1833.8 Untitled Drawing of Ball Game [Wicket?] Appears in US 1830s Songbook
Tags:
Game:
A songbook drawing shows five children - a tosser, batter, two fielders, and boy waiting to bat. The bats are spoon-shaped. The wicket looks more like an upright cricket wicket than the long low bar associated with US wicket.
Sources:
Watts' Divine and Moral Songs - For the Use of Children [New York, Mahlon Day, 374 Pearl Street, 1836], page 15. Accessed at the "Origins of Baseball" file at the Giamatti Center in Cooperstown.
David Block, (see Baseball Before We Knew It, page 196), has found an 1833 edition.
Comment:
Is it wicket? Base-ball?
Here's Block's commentary. " . . .an interesting woodcut portraying boys playing a slightly ambiguous bat-and-ball game that is possibly baseball . . . . A goal in the ground near the batter might be a wicket, but it more closely resembles an early baseball goal such as the one pictured in A Little Pretty Pocket-Book" (see #1744.2, above).
Query:
Is the drawing associated with a song that may offer a clue?
Year
1833
1856.29 Ball Play in Children's Song
Tags:
Age of Players:
The New Year's number of a children's magazine, Stu-dent & Schoolmate, featured a musical piece entitled "The Holiday Song" in 1856. The second stanza went as follows:
Hark! we hear our schoolmates call,
And we see the whizzing ball
From the bat stick flying;
Bat the ball,
One and all,
Great and small,
Keep the ball a flying.
Sources:
"The Holiday Song," in Student & Schoolmate: A Monthly Reader for School & Home Instruc-tion Containing Original Dialogues, Speeches, Bio-graphy, History, Travels, Poetry, Music, Science, Anecdotes, Problems, Puz-zles, etc., January 1, 1856, p. 108. Reprinted in Originals, Newsletter of the Origins Committee of SABR, Vol. 4 No. 12. Dec. 2011
Year
1856
1858.12 Base Ball, Meet Tin Pan Alley
Tags:
Location:
Game:
Blodgett, J. (composer), "The Base Ball Polka" [Buffalo, Blodgett and Bradford]. Block marks this as the first baseball sheet music, as composed by a member of the Niagara Base Ball Club of Buffalo. "On the title page, under an emblem of two crossed bats over a baseball, is a dedication 'To the Flour City B. B. Club of Rochester, N.Y. by the Niagara B. B. Club.'"
Sources:
David Block, Baseball Before We Knew It, page 218.
Year
1858
1858.20 Knicks Compose 17-Verse Song on Current Base Ball
Tags:
Location:
Game:
Age of Players:
Chorus: Then shout, shout for joy, and let the welkin ring,/ In praises of our noble game, for health is sure to bring;/ Come, my brave Yankee boys, there's room enough for all,/ So join in Uncle Samuel's sport - the pastime of base ball."
The song was sung in honor of the Excelsiors at a dinner in August 1858.
Sources:
Reprinted in Dean A. Sullivan, Compiler and Editor, Early Innings: A Documentary History of Baseball, 1825-1908 [University of Nebraska Press, 1995], pp. 30-32.
Reprinted in Henry Chadwick, The Game of Base Ball (Munro, 1868, reprint Camden House, 1983), pp. 178-80.
Reprinted in "Ball Days, A Song of 1858", Our Game, Thorn, http://ourgame. mlblogs.com/?s=Ball+Days%2C+A+Song+of+1858. July 18, 2012
Year
1858
1862.9 First Admission Fees for Baseball?
Game:
Age of Players:
May 15, 1862: "The Union Baseball Grounds at March Avenue and Rutledge Street in Brooklyn is opened, the first enclosed ball field to charge an admission fee."
Sources:
James Charlton, The Baseball Chronology (Macmillan, 1991), page 15.
Regarding the opening of the Union Grounds, see:
Brooklyn Daily Eagle, Feb. 12 and May 16, 1862; New York Clipper, Feb. 22, 1862; New York Sunday Mercury May 11 and May 18, 1862,
Warning:
Caveats: Admission was charged in 1858 for the Brooklyn-New York games at the Fashion Race Course, Queens, which was enclosed but not a 'ball field'.
Before the Union Grounds, there were no ball field enclosed for the purpose of charging admission.
Comment:
Admission had occasionally also been charged for "benefit" games for charities or to honor prominent players.
Year
1862