Welcome to Protoball

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Supporting Researchers and Writers on Baseball’s Origins.

Protoball.org

(User Feedback Welcomed)

Protoball is in large part due to the efforts and leadership of the late Larry McCray. It welcomes input from current and potential site users on initiatives that might make protoball.org more responsive to their research interests.

In the past decade or so, due to major data contributions from several origins researchers, the site has expanded to include sourced accounts of over 1900 chronology entries, many thousands of early games of modern base ball, over 12,500 early clubs, a registry of over 300 different baserunning games, a few hundred key reference works on early ballplaying, etc. Dave Anderson, Protoball’s site wizard, has found innovative ways to search and display this somewhat unruly mound of basic data. (Try playing with favorite search terms at http://protoball.org/Special:EnhancedSearch.)

We’d appreciate your candid ideas about ways to make Protoball a better tool for baseball historian and writers. Please send your ideas and views of the site’s limitations to bsa1861@att.net.

  • Bruce Allardice
  • Ralph Carhart
  • Jan Finkel
  • Bob Tholkes

Current Resources On Protoball.org

The Protoball Chronology covers memorable mileposts in the evolution of ballgames from Ancient Times to 1870, just before the first professional baseball league began.

Our PrePro Baseball is a working database of over twenty thousand clubs and games, mostly in the Origins Era (before 1871). Its interactive maps may help you visualize the spread of baseball over time. It is designed so that individual club pages can link to a club's games, players, and field locations. For an example, see New York City's Knickerbocker Club here.

The Games Tabulation (version 2.0) is a record of over 1300 ballgames in various parts of the US from 1845 to 1860. It was compiled by the late Craig Waff᾿s careful and path-breaking research. More recently, Bob Tholkes has tabulated key data from over 5000 early games, mostly from the 1860s.

Base Ball Players Pocket Companion.jpg 1859 Base Ball Players’ Pocket Companion
The Glossary of Games provides a short description of 330 baseball-like games. The Glossary includes baseball's likely predecessor games and later games that derive from baseball.

The Bibliography is a list of publications you can use to explore the origins of ball games and baseball in depth. Some of these publications are available online. For sources that are in Protoball's Buzz McCray Collection, we can, via email and phone, help you determine what their content is.

A listing of fellow origins enthusiasts and contributors can be found in our Diggers section. You can read news about them and their work in the revived Origins Newsletter and the discontinued Next Destin'd Post. Several Diggers have contributed informal Essays relating to baseball's origins.

We offer an Enhanced Search for complex full-text searches on much of the information on the site. You can save your searches, pick out important articles, and share them with other researchers.

On a whim, we have collected information on as many baserunning games as we can find on our Glossary of Games. About half of them preceded the rise of the modern "New York" game of base ball in the 1850s.

Articles

Here are 3 of our latest articles:

  1. The New Dominion Club of Ottawa: The First Organized Ballclub in Canada’s Capital - by Steve Rennie in November 2024
  2. Protoball Interview With Richard Hershberger - by Lawrence McCray in December 2021
  3. Early Women's Baseball - by Bob Tholkes in December 2021

Here are 3 randomly selected articles:

  1. Sons of Liberty - by Tom Gilbert in June 2019
  2. Uniforms - by Larry McCray in September 2014
  3. Irish Rounders (Burman's Report) - by Howard Burman in March 2013

A 2024 Update on Protoball's Holdings

1. The Protoball Chronology: Over 1900 entries, about one-half before 1845 and one-half from 1846-1871. This collection gathered data from the Origins Committee's early "Spread of Base Ball" project, which SABR HQ put into a website, one that was hosted by Project Retrosheet later on. This collection was seeded by an origins timeline, compiled by John Thorn and Tom Heitz.

2. The PrePro data base of early clubs and early base ball games:

About 12,500 clubs and over 7,500 games. Separately, we post about 5100 early games in Bob Tholkes' "RIM" collection of interclub games (reported in NYC newspapers), about 5% of which precede 1857 and 95% were played 1858- 1865. The RIM games have been incorporated, in simplified version, into the PrePro games database. Richard Hershberger provided his collection of hundreds of early clubs to this data base.

3. 19C Clippings: over 9000 news clippings collected by Richard Hershberger, 1700 of them from before 1870. Now open to new additions.

4.David Block's research on English ballplaying.

Over 500 finds turned up in research on David's two fine books on early English play.

5. ProtoPix: [In Process] A collection of images of early base ball and predecessor games.

We will likely need volunteers to help curate this collection.

6. ProtoStats:

Studies that rest heavily on Protoball data. Bruce Allardice is, in effect, driving this new feature.

7. Original Analytics: about 35 papers by Protoball participants.

8. The Glossary of Games:

Accounts of over 150 different bat-ball games (mostly baserunning ballgames) reported before base ball was codified in New York and Brooklyn. The file includes another 150 "daughter" games that evolved from baseball. It needs a lot of work still.

9. Rule Sets: Over 40 sets of rules, including 12 NABBP updates,

Conditions of Use

Users are encouraged to freely use information on this web site. When that information is found to be useful in drafting published work, we ask that they acknowledge the Protoball Project in their writing, and supply the site's URL -- http://protoball.org -- when possible, in their citations.

Further Information

For more information about the evolution of Protoball Project, its policies, and resources, see our About page.

Contact Bruce Allardice of the Protoball Project at bsa1861@att.net with any questions or contributions.

Features in Development

Please tell us if you see that new features could make the site more useful to you. Would a User Forum for site-user commentary make sense? Should we highlight "Most Wanted" data?

Contributions

We invite you to add your own research, insights, and queries to the Protoball site.