Protoball:About

Origins

Project Protoball was conceived when it became clear that interesting new finds were still being added to our store of knowledge about the origins of baseball… and about earliest forms of ballplaying.

A few years ago, John Thorn and Tom Heitz assembled a helpful chronology of early baseball, one that listed about 70 key documented events from 2000 BC to the Civil War. In 2000, Tom Altherr published a prize-winning paper in Nine that included scores of new citations to “baseball-like” games from 1621 to 1830. Our project began as an attempt to build, and to maintain, a comprehensive tabulation of such evidence, adding bibliographic sources for each.

Aims: Our central objective is to provide a wide range of primary and secondary information on the evolution of ballplaying to today’s researchers, so that they can identify interesting patterns readily -- and do so without chasing after elusive texts stored in libraries and personal collections around the globe.

We also believe that this website provides a way to remove unsupported claims from the literature. Some early histories included plain errors, and some included generalizations that were not supported by evidence that came to light in later years.

The Chronologies

Our central online document is the Chronology, a listing of primary sources on known events in ballplaying. Owing to recent finds by (most importantly) in David Block’s stunning 2005 book, Baseball Before We Knew It, in John Thorn’s recent research, and to a fresh scouring of the research notes of Harold Seymour and the 1905 Mills Commission files, the current version has about 1150 entries. Recently, 27 “sub-chronologies have been added on topical areas – ballplaying on campus, in the military, by African Americans, etc.

The primary focus of the chronology, like the Protoball effort itself, is on what some term “bat-and-ball” games, but which are called “safe-haven” games at this site. (The desire is to understand the evolution of ballgames that involve bases − where runners are magically immune from harm − and not to spotlight the many other games that employ striking clubs, such as golf, hurling, lawn tennis and other racquet sports, croquet, field hockey, lacrosse, and such ancient non-base games as soule, trap ball, bandy, kingball, ballstock, and northern spel.) The site’s current time range is from Antiquity to 1862, with information now being collected for the years 1863-1871 for later inclusion. The idea is that 1871 represents the beginning of the Pro Era and the end of the Protoball era.

Source Materials

The Project’s files include a (often sparsely filled) folder for each entry in the chronology, and about twelve shelf-feet of baseball histories, each of which has at least nominal coverage of ballplaying prior to the advent of the Pro Era.

Need a Hand

We are happy to consult with site visitors about these assembled sources to help answer questions, to supply current Word versions of our documents upon request, and mail photocopies of requested file materials at cost, and to look up material held in the Buzz McCray Collection on Early Ballplaying. The Project is centered at the Massachusetts home of Larry McCray, who can be reached at lmccray@mit.edu and at 125 Vine Street, Lexington MA 02420.

The Project has close ties to the Society for American Baseball Research (SABR). Many of the individuals whose names appear on this site are SABR members, and SABR’s Nineteenth Century Baseball [19CBB] listserve is the primary venue for our discussions of the early evolution of ballplaying. For more information on SABR, go to http://www.sabr.org/ or contact Larry. From 2007 to present, Larry has served as Chair of the SABR Committee on the Origins of Baseball.

Protoball’s expenses are met, in part, by funds received from the late Vernon [Buzz] McCray, who loved Mets baseball and, for a below-average future college centerfielder, was a patient and proficient fungo-hitter. And a lot more.

Project Launch Advisors

Priscilla Astifan, Rochester, NY Evelyn Begley, New York City Tom Ruane, Poughkeepsie NY George Thompson, New Paltz, New York John Thorn, Kingston NY

Other Special Contributions

The Project is particularly indebted to John Thorn, who offered enabling encouragements, access to his rich personal files, and many key strategic design ideas; to Dave Smith, impresario of the amazing Retrosheet data base, who offered substantial practical assistance; to Tom Ruane, who is providing crucial advice, and hours of painstaking assistance, in organizing web space for the Project; to Paul Wendt, former chair of SABR’s Nineteenth Century Research Committee, who made innumerable helpful bibliographic and other practical suggestions, and whose 19CBB listserve is a continuous wellspring of data and perspectives on the evolution of ballplaying; to David Block, who has been extremely generous in providing both information and advice based on his prodigious new finds on early ballgames; to Phil McCray, who provided often patient advice and always savvy assistance in use of the Seymour Collection at Cornell University and baseball coverage in Syracuse newspapers; to Tim Wiles, who provided broad early encouragement, and help in searching the files of the Giamatti Research Center at the Baseball Hall of Fame; to Craig Waff for conceiving and creating the Protoball Games Tabulation of known games up to 1860; and to cartographer Gregory Christiano, who has started an ambitious Protoball effort to document the early spread of base ball in Greater New York City.