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Digger News
January 2008
Tom has revised a paper he presented at NASSH in 2006 (“Chucking the Old Apple: Recent Discoveries in Pre-1839 North American Ball Games History”) for possible publication. His 2007 contribution at theCooperstown symposium is based on further research and more theoretical speculations why baseball emerged in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. It may appear in the next biennial anthology. After his week in Cooperstown, Tom spent a very solid week researching at the American Antiquarian Society in Worcester. This has all led him to see a possible book on all pre-1840 North American games – base ball and beyond -- played with a ball.
“Gentlemen at the Bat” is the working title of Howard's current book project, one that focuses on the Knickerbocker Club. The book’s story is told by club members in the form of a collective oral history, in which Howard’s historical research is presented through the medium of fictionalized dialog. His earlier books include one on Shoeless Joe Jackson and one on 1950’s stickball inNew York.
Jerry's work continues on the 19th-century. He wrote an expanded piece on the Philadelphia Pythians and its captain, Octavius Catto. It will be published in Pennsylvania Legacies, a periodical for the Pennsylvania Historical Society. The issue, published in May, examines Negro baseball in Pennsylvania. At the Cooperstown Symposium in June, Jerry presented “Which Irish Played Baseball in the Emerald Age?” He is now finishing up a study of the life and career of Lipman Pike.
The Vintage Base Ball Association’s [VBBA] recently-installed Glenn as their president. One of Glenn’s objectives is to review the organization’s Rules and Customs program to reinforce historical accuracy. Glenn is in touch with Peter Morris, Fred Ivor-Campbell, and Tom Shieber as part of that initiative.
Researcher and author John Freyer reports that his interest is still Chicago-area baseball from back before the National League. Among other feats, he has accumulated every Chicago box score between the years 1859 and the Chicago Fire in 1871. He also enjoys researching New York baseball before the Civil War. John has an ongoing project of bat and ball games over history, from Wicket to Wiffleball, but hasn't determined whether it amounts to a new book. Currently, John is working with others to establish a Chicago Baseball Museum, and serves as the project’s ad hoc historian.
César is exploring the origins of baseball in Mexico and Cuba. His article “A New Perspective on Mexican Baseball Origins” appeared in the inaugural issue of Base Ball.
Long-term preparation for a special exhibit on cricket and baseball is under way by Beth. The exhibit is slated for spring of 2010 at Lord’s Cricket Ground in London, home of the MCC cricket museum, where Beth serves as a guest curator. The exhibit may also tour in the US and Australia. For details, send Beth an email. Beth, a Yale-educated Cleveland Indians fan, has 20 years experience in curating social-history events at Australian and American museums.
SABR-UK maintains an interest in the origins of baseball. Martin has produced a handsome compilation of articles on the English roots of baseball in 1995-2003 issues of the SABR-UK Examiner. The material was distributed at the June 20 meeting of SABR’s UK chapter in London, which was addressed by David Block and Jules Tygiel.
In addition to helping lead the Boston SABR Chapter and pushing along an anthology of Deadball Era baseball poetry, Joanne is working on a local project that brings together the histories of the Massachusetts game and the NY Game as they impacted one small town — Holliston. She sees a big story in these local events. She says that when one wanders around among the ghosts of the game, the stories are impressive: they involve triumph and tragedy, sex and violence, pathos and drama. Besides, she lives in the original Mudville, and that’s part of the story. Her tentative title: For Fun, Money or Marbles: How Baseball Transformed a Perfectly Good Town. She hasn’t set a target date for publication yet.
Wendy's main baseball research interest is Billy Sunday. However, she is also interested in American cultural history in general, and while doing research on a book about a contemporary of Ralph Waldo Emerson, she was delighted to find [and to submit for the Protoball chronology] an entry on baseball from Emerson's journals. It was while reading Emerson's journals to get a handle on Emerson’s friendship with (and admiration for) her current research subject, Edward T. Taylor, that she found the June 1840 baseball reference (see Protoball entry 1840.20), which imagines that some young ballplayers feel “a faint sense of being a tyrannical Jupiter driving spheres madly from their orbits.
Jim has just completed coding all of the 178 rich entries in David Block’s bibliography in Baseball Before We Knew It for SABR’s Baseball Index (http://www.baseballindex.org/). In doing this, Jim has added several new search codes to TBI, including stool-ball, trap-ball, trapstick, cat, and tipcat.
MLB Advanced Media is preparing a full-length documentary on the origins of baseball. Directed by Sam, Origins of the Game traces baseball back to its early roots, and shows why predecessor games from outside the US are just now being considered integral parts of the sport's evolution. The crew consulted with SABR’s John Thorn, David Block, and Martin Hoerchner, among others, in piecing the story together. And its work in England in June led to an original find of a 1755 diary entry referring to young adults playing "base ball." (David describes this lucky disclosure in the Fall 2007 issue of Base Ball.) The MLB.com crew spent a damp week filming games of stoolball, rounders, cricket, and trapball. There were times when a combination of equipment malfunction, rain, noisy low-flying aircraft, and early-morning auto mishaps might have discouraged a weaker soul, but Sam kept on smiling.
MLB Advanced Media runs the website MLB.com. Sam, who has covered ports for nearly 20 years, has worked there since 2003, receiving two Emmy nominations, including one for the 2006 documentary Vintage Base Ball.
The documentary is scheduled to be released online at about the All-Star break of 2008. Online viewing will be free, with downloads available at a fee.
"The Next Destin’d Post will provide additional details on the release of The Origins of the Game" when they become available.
Larry is succeeding Mike Ross as chair of SABR’s Committee on the Origins of Baseball. Mike has led the SABR-UK chapter for many years, including its creative early examination of the British roots of baseball in the 1990s.
Wayne is trying to piece together the history of baseball in the Claremont area.
Eric, author of a compendium of 19th Century rule changes, is currently researching information on the history of pitching deliveries for an article for his website, www.19cbaseball.com. Eric is hoping to release a new book on base ball in the 1860’s by next summer. This book, written in part with the perspective of someone with extensive VBB experience, will offer suggestions of why certain rules evolved as they did.
SABR’s Seymour Medal, awarded to “the best book of baseball history or biography from the previous year,” was awarded to Peter for the amazing two-volume Game of Inches (Ivan R. Dee, 2006). He thinks of his book as “a never-ending project,” and in that vein he is posting updates to the book on his website at http://www.petermorrisbooks.com. Peter reports that the work has gone through several printings, with sales of about 4000 copies.
Peter’s next publication will be But Didn’t We Have Fun, which examines the first generation of ballplayers, and is based on “dozens of previously unpublished or unavailable reminiscences.” It is slated for release in March 2008.
Marty continues to explore the influence of the advent of the New York Game on rural towns. He is finding that The New York game (along with improved transportation) brought competition, and had a profound social, economic, and cultural impact on small towns that previous, less structured versions of ballplay did not.
Bill is putting together a narrative history of baseball from 1845 to the Civil War. Look for it to hit the shelves in 2009.
Andrew notes that his new biography of Henry Chadwick, The Father of Baseball, is scheduled for early 2008. To order this $29.95 McFarland offering, or for more details, go to http://www.mcfarlandpub.com/ and search “Schiff.”
John identifies his continuing primary interest as baseball (and base ball) in Philadelphia, not the easiest choice for someone living far from the local sources at Temple University and the Free Library of Philadelphia. His Base Ball in Philadelphia (McFarland, 2007) is out, with contributions from our colleagues Altherr, Casway, Helander, Hershberger, Thorn, and Marshall Wright, but John still longs to know such things as “did the Olympic Club there really, as Robert Smith wrote in 1993, play on a diamond-shaped field? What was Smith's source for that assertion? And who were the original Olympics . . . a bunch of local rope-makers?” He admits to having thoughts about doing a more extensive book on Philadelphia’s hardball origins, once Georgia and the people at Clayton State University let go of him.
Trained in the history of science, Craig is focusing for now on early ball in New York and Brooklyn, and on games played on ice skates in the mid-1800s. He has been using the online databases of the New York Times and Brooklyn Daily Eagle to not only track the development of interest in astronomy in New York City and Brooklyn in the late 19th century, but also to collect systematically, for the PROTOBALL archives, copies of all baseball-related articles that appeared in these newspapers up to 1860. During that search he discovered what may be the first recorded triple play (occurring on 16 April 1859). He is also researching the winter baseball games played with skates on ice from 1860 to 1887.
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