1874.2

Tennessee Visitor Lauds Local "Base-ball, Shinny, Baste Grounds"

Salience	Peripheral
Tags	Pre-modern RulesPre-modern Rules
Location
City/State/Country:	Chattanooga, TN, United States
Modern Address
Game	Base Ball, Baste BallBase Ball, Baste Ball
Immediacy of Report	Contemporary
Age of Players	UnknownUnknown
Holiday
Notables
Text	"Chattanooga possesses some advantages that sister towns cannot boast of. For base-ball, shinny, baste grounds and shanty buildings, she can not be surpassed." (Attributed to a visiting editor of the Cleveland Banner.)
Sources	Knoxville Press and Messenger, March 18, 1874, page 5
Warning
Comment	As of February 2017, data on early ballplaying in the Chattanooga area are sparse. They include five accounts of soldierly play during the Civil War and brief mentions of area base ball clubs after the war Protoball believes "shinny" to be a game resembling field hockey and ice hockey, and not a baserunning game. Protoball has only two other reports of the game of "baste" in a Princeton student's diary in 1786 and in a biography of Benjamin Harrison on his teenage activities in the Cincinnati area. A good guess is that baste was a variant spelling of "base," a base ball precursor. The Cleveland Banner is a newspaper in Cleveland TN. Edit with form to add a comment
Query	Edit with form to add a query
Source Image	[[Image:\|left\|thumb]]
External Number
Submitted by	"Mark Marksman"
Submission Note	Via Email from John Thorn, 2/15/2017
Has Supplemental Text

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