EF Wind-up Memo
Sent: Tuesday, December 27, 2022 11:48 AM
To: Jonathan Popovich; Bailey Bob; tgilbert@zoho.com; John Thorn; Richard Hershberger; David Block; Robert Tholkes; bryczek@colebrookfinancial.com; rich.arpi@outlook.com; just.mckinney@gmail.com; danielglennneumann@gmail.com; John Zinn; Bruce Allardice; Peter Mancuso; Irwin Chusid
Subject: Completing the Elysian Fields ["EF"] Exercise -- Please Respond to the Group on Substantive Matters
This is the final planned mailing on the impromptu "State of Knowledge about Elysian Fields" exercise.
Two remaining focus areas: Our two main discussion targets at this late stage are:
-- Discussing plausible overall assessments -- How did Elysian Fields actually influence the evolution of modern base ball?
-- Highlighting subtopics where we think more research might be fruitful.
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[1] Assessing EF's Impact on Base Ball
Did EF affect base ball significantly? Below [see "Gilbert" essay insert, below] is Tom Gilbert's late-December essay, for our group, on EF's influence on how base ball evolved. It concludes with a range of 4 alternative speculative but plausible assessments. We seek your reactions to them, and invite you to offer your own thoughts about this general subject. This may, or may not, lead toward partial consensus among us. And f it doesn't, future origins researchers may want to ponder the matter further.
[2] Possible Future Research Targets
Please reflect for a few moments about items we've covered where you think some more digging might fill some of our knowledge gaps. I have listed a few top-of-head possibilities [see Follow-on Topics? insert, below], but you folks can do better than that. Note that such topics are not restricted to EF itself, but might treat issues that arose in the EF postings -- like the availability of playable grounds, etc.
[3] New -- John Zinn's 2022 Update on the State-wide Spread of Base Ball in New Jersey during the EF Era
See John's new findings in the forthcoming January issue of the Origins Newsletter. John does not conclude that EF markedly boosted the spread of base ball within New Jersey.
[4] So What's happening next?
A. Bob Bailey and Bruce Allardice have agreed to consider the notion of promoting further research on selected issues emanating from our "State of Knowledge" compilation. It is conceivable that limited SABR funds may be requested to facilitate looks into questions that deserve more hard data. Let us know if you want to join this framing effort.
B. Protoball plans to put contributions onto a new 'Elysian Fields' page on the Protoball.org website. This will include our past conversations, Tom's robust EF Time Line (supplemented with 20 or so bits from Protoball's Chronology, Bob Bailey's substantial list of sources about EF, the fine 2012 Mann article on EF in volume one of the Journal Base Ball, material from Irwin and Jonathan and John Z, etc.) We hope new researchers will find this useful as background on the Elysian Fields phenomenon
C. Special thanks to Peter Mancuso for initiating this EF email experiment, and for the subsequent substantial input from so many of our most-knowledgeable friends -- Tom G, John T, John Z, Irwin C, Jonathan P, Bruce A, and many others.
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INSERTS
Gilbert: How Did EF Impact Base Ball's Evolution? Four Plausible Notions
NOTES FOR GENERAL CIRCULATION ON THE SIGNIFICANCE OF THE ELYSIAN FIELDS IN BASEBALL HISTORY
We know that several adult baseball clubs were organized by New York City residents starting in the 1840s – or earlier, or much earlier, depending on what we mean by “organized” -- and that the Knickerbocker club format – as distinct from other kinds of clubs, associations or pickup games – served as a model for clubs in the wider metropolitan area and beyond in the 1850s. In the late 1850s, the idea arose that the USA needed a unifying national sport, as cricket was for the UK, and that the New York City game of baseball was better suited for this purpose than other regional bat and ball games (like Town Ball and the Massachusetts game), cricket or other sports or games like boxing, boat racing or gymnastics. This idea succeeded in an astonishingly short time.
Ostensibly because lower Manhattan was running out of open space, or perhaps for mere convenience – Hoboken was connected to NYC by state-of-the-art daily ferry service that made it more accessible to men who worked on Wall Street than much of non-urban central and upper Manhattan – or for other reasons, the Knickerbockers and other clubs began to cross the Hudson River from lower Manhattan to New Jersey, where the sports-positive Stevens family, the principal landowners of Hoboken, provided playing grounds gratis.
For about a decade – from the mid-40s until the mid-50s – the Elysian Fields essentially contained the entire world of baseball as an adult sport.
That is, as far as we know.
The problem is what we do not know. There is a lot of circumstantial (and other) evidence that the first “organized” clubs had less formal antecedents and that by the 1850s the game of baseball was so established in the culture of NYC and at some point in the wider metropolitan area (and beyond) that when young men formed clubs in the 1850s in NYC, Brooklyn, New Jersey and elsewhere, they did not have to learn the basics of how to play.
The clubs that played in the Elysian Fields in this key decade were not the first baseball clubs – depending on how we define the term, of course. It is also possible that lack of playing space was not the reason, or was not the main reason, that the Knicks and their ilk played in New Jersey.
Another way of looking at it is that New Yorkers took baseball with them wherever they went for non-baseball reasons. This would explain why baseball in the 1850s appears in places like Yorkville, Harlem, Morrisania (now part of the South Bronx), Brooklyn and various parts of New Jersey – an explanation that seems more plausible than the “search for playing space” theory. It makes little sense that baseball players would travel 12 miles from lower Manhattan to Morrisania through mostly undeveloped open space in search of open space. The better explanation is that New Yorkers traveled to Morrisania because they wanted to live in that attractive young suburb --- and that they brought their culture with them, which included baseball.
The historical importance of the Knickerbockers has obviously been exaggerated for all kinds of reasons. Their leadership role in the NABBP has been exaggerated, and so has their agency in founding other clubs and spreading the game socially and geographically. This may well have caused the historical importance of the Elysian Fields, where they played their home games, to be exaggerated as well.
So, what are the possible answers to the question: what role, if any, did the Elysian Fields play in the birth and spread of baseball as a national sport?
I do not have an answer. But here is a list of possible answers of varying plausibility:
1. By providing convenient playing space 15 minutes by ferry from rapidly developing lower Manhattan, the Stevens family, patrons of the Elysian Fields, saved baseball as an adult club sport. Without the Elysian Fields, the Knickerbockers and the other NYC clubs might not have survived to the mid-50s when Brooklyn began to form Knickerbocker-style clubs. In that case, baseball might today be as forgotten as Town Ball and wicket.
2. Baseball was a vital part of New York culture in the mid-19th century and was in no danger of dying out for lack of space in lower Manhattan or for any other reason. But the Elysian Fields helped the movement to make baseball our first national sport by putting the Knickerbockers and contemporary clubs – with their membership of socially influential men – on public display in a place that attracted thousands of New Yorkers as well as tourists from other parts of America and abroad. Baseball was, in effect, compared and contrasted with cricket by its proximity to the St. George CC grounds on Fox Hill, which was adjacent to the EF baseball grounds. Its time in the EF popularized and gave social cachet to the new sport, helping it compete with cricket as a potential national sport.
3. The EF facilitated the spread of baseball by exposing particular individuals to the sport as played by the Knickerbockers et al. Known examples include Henry Chadwick, who in 1856 had his famous epiphany -- the realization that baseball was destined to become America’s national sport – while stopping to watch a baseball game on his way back from covering a cricket match on Fox Hill. Harry Wright decided to try baseball after his St. George cricket club and the Gotham baseball club became neighbors in Hoboken. It is hard to imagine two more influential men in 19th-century baseball than Chadwick and Wright. There is also John Suydam, a well-off young man whose family had moved from lower Manhattan to the new suburbs springing up near Brooklyn Heights. He was inspired by seeing baseball at the EF to found the Excelsior baseball club, the first in Brooklyn. There must have been others that we do not know about. The Excelsiors are important historically because the Brooklyn-NYC rivalry greatly stimulated the development of baseball and because the Excelsiors became the sport’s first great proselytizers, making the first multi-city road trips and marketing the game to Boston, Philadelphia, Baltimore and elsewhere.
4. The Elysian Fields have little significance to baseball history other than the fact that the Knickerbockers, Gothams, Empires, Eagles used them. They were no more important than the town of East Rutherford, NJ is to the NFL – important only because New York clubs go there to play. The EF contributed little to the spread of baseball – even in NJ -- because its patrons, like the members of its baseball clubs, were virtually all coming from NYC by ferry.
You asked, Larry
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Follow-on Research Topics?
It may be helpful to suggest factors that future researchers might consider working on. The factors might include [A] data about EF themselves, and [B] evolutionary actors that may have affected the way that bae ball evolved later and in other locations. I am, here, timidly suggesting a few items below, but do realize that my own past focus has been mainly on ballplaying in the the 1800-1840 period!
Type A Some Possible Questions about Elysian Fields 1845-1860:
[1] Are contemporary estimates of EF crowd sizes reasonable? In the 1830s, ferried visitors were said to exceed 20.000 per day on summer weekends; an 1843 account reports 10,000 visitors on July 5; an 1859 England v US cricket match attracted 24,000 attendees; and a 1875 Hoboken BBC game reported 3,000 spectators. Were plumbing and comestible needs adequate for such multitudes?
[2] Do we understand why a new era of interclub play swept in abruptly in 1853, after 8 years of mainly intraclub games at EF? Was this an artifact of an upswing in newspaper game accounts, or what? Did Brooklyn exhibit the same shift for 1853?
[3] What do we know about the extent of cricket play at EF in the 1845-1865 period? Was base ball played on the cricket pitch? Were the cricket grounds superior to the base ball fields? Were any other early baserunning games known at EF?
[4] Are we confident in our view that EF was not the source any major changes in bae ball's rules from 1845 to 1857? Can we check a some existing year-by-year account of changes to test the finding? Are there any other accounts of EF-specific ground rules . . . other than the solitary report that fly balls that hit trees were regarded as still in play?
[5] Did the prominence of EF from 1845 to the late 1850s affect the way that base ball clubs were organized, financed, and/or governed?
[6] Do we understand why base ball activities at EF seemed to pale in the late 1850s? Was there owner concern about visitor behavior, which may have detracted some from EF's appeal to potential real estate sales? Did more Manhattan sites materialize then?
Type B Some further exploration of factors in our 2022 EF review that may have persisted as base ball later evolved?
[1] Was the lack of suitable playing space an important factor in the pace of evolution for US baserunning games? Why did Philadelphians travel to Camden to play Town Ball? Were city and town commons generally available -- and useful -- for early base ball games? Were local exhibition grounds and/or parklands available and suitable? Has anyone already tabulated where earliest local games took place? Do we know why base ball grew so quickly in Brooklyn (and later in Philly), but Manhattanites chose to leave town to play in Hoboken?
[2] Did the opening of Central Park at some point provide legal(or opportunistic) sites for baserunning games? Or was the Park mainly a considered nature reserve? Did base ball and cricket proponents lobby for facilities in the new park?
[3] The rapid growth of interclub base ball in games in1853-1854 must have strained the market for new balls. Do we know who supplied them, and what the standards for size and weight (and 'carry') turned out to be? Is there any reason to conclude that highly-similar English cricket balls were not used in base ball in this and in the later pre-pro period?
Larry McCray, 12/27/2022