Unit 4 · How a Diamond Got Lines

In England in the 1700s, children played bat-and-ball games with many names. One was rounders. A player hit a ball and ran around a loop of posts or stones. Another old game was stoolball, played with a stool as the target.

In 1744, a London printer named John Newbery sold a children’s book called A Little Pretty Pocket-Book. It has a short rhyme and a small picture titled Base-Ball. This is one of the oldest printed uses of the word.

English settlers brought these games to North America. By the early 1800s, people in American cities played a game called town ball. The number of players, the bases and the ways to make an out changed from town to town.

In 1791, the town of Pittsfield, Massachusetts, passed a bylaw. A bylaw is a rule made by a town. It banned games of baseball and some other ball games within 80 yards of the new meeting house.

The town wanted to protect the windows of its meeting house. Broken glass was expensive. A town does not ban a game that nobody plays. So the bylaw tells historians that baseball was common enough to cause trouble.

Historians found this record in 2004 in old town papers. It is one of the oldest written uses of the word baseball in the United States. It shows the game grew slowly from many places, not from one inventor.

In 1905, a group called the Mills Commission began studying where baseball came from. Albert Spalding, a sporting goods maker, pushed for it. He wanted to show that baseball was an American game, not an English one.

In 1907, the commission reported that Abner Doubleday invented baseball in Cooperstown, New York, in 1839. Its main proof was a letter from one old man, Abner Graves. Doubleday himself never wrote that he made up the game.

Historians call this story a legend. In 1839 Doubleday was a cadet at West Point, far from Cooperstown. Still, the legend is why the National Baseball Hall of Fame opened in Cooperstown in 1939.

In 1845, a group of young men in New York City formed the Knickerbocker Base Ball Club. Many were clerks and shopkeepers. They met to play in the afternoons. That year they wrote a list of twenty rules.

Alexander Cartwright was a member, and his name is often tied to those rules. Historians still argue about how much he wrote. Several members worked on the club’s game together.

The Knickerbockers played at the Elysian Fields in Hoboken, New Jersey. It was a park across the river from New York. Open city land was scarce, so clubs rode a ferry to reach a big, flat field.

The Knickerbocker rules said the bases would be 42 paces from home to second base. They also said 42 paces from first base to third base. A pace is a long walking step.

A pace is not an exact size. A tall person’s step is longer than a short person’s step. So historians are not sure how far apart the 1845 bases really were. Their guesses differ by many feet.

The rules also set a foul line idea. A ball hit outside the lines from home through first and third was foul. The rules also said a fielder could not throw the ball at a runner to get an out, which older games had allowed.

By the 1850s, many clubs in and near New York played the Knickerbocker game. In 1857, clubs from the New York area met in a convention to agree on one set of rules. A convention is a meeting of groups who vote together.

The 1857 rules set the bases thirty yards apart. Thirty yards is ninety feet. The same meeting said a game would last nine innings. Before that, the first team to score 21 runs won.

In 1858, the clubs formed the National Association of Base Ball Players. It was the first group to govern many baseball clubs. Ninety feet between bases is still the rule for high school, college and major league baseball.

At first, baseball clubs were amateur. Players did not get paid to play. By the 1860s, some clubs quietly paid good players with jobs or cash. The rules of the national association did not allow it.

In 1869, the Cincinnati Red Stockings paid every player openly. Harry Wright ran the team. His brother George Wright played shortstop. They were the first openly all-professional baseball team.

The Red Stockings rode trains to play clubs in many cities, from the East Coast to California. They did not lose a game that season. Crowds everywhere saw the same field shape and rules.

In 1876, club owners formed the National League of Professional Base Ball Clubs. William Hulbert, who ran the Chicago club, led the plan. Eight cities had teams in the first season.

A league is a group of teams that agree to one schedule and one set of rules. The owners, not the players, controlled this league. They banned betting and drinking at games to make the sport look respectable.

The Chicago White Stockings won the first National League pennant in 1876. A pennant is the flag and title for a league champion. That Chicago club later became the team known today as the Chicago Cubs.

Early rules put the pitcher 45 feet from home plate. Pitchers threw harder over the years. Batters had less and less time to see the ball, and scores dropped.

In 1881, the National League moved the pitcher back to 50 feet. From 1881 to 1892, pitchers threw from inside a marked pitcher's box. Leagues kept changing the rules to balance the game.

In 1893, the league set the distance at 60 feet 6 inches. The box was replaced by a rubber slab called the pitcher's plate. Batting improved right away. That distance is still the major league rule today.

Early home bases were often round or square. Some were iron or stone. By the 1870s, rules called for a square slab of white marble or stone. Its corner pointed toward the pitcher.

In 1900, the National League made home plate a five-sided shape called a pentagon. It is 17 inches wide across the front edge. The wide edge faces the pitcher, which made it easier for umpires to see the plate.

Today the same plate is set in fields at every level, from a park league to a major league stadium. The Official Baseball Rules include a drawing of the plate with every measurement.

The Civil War lasted from 1861 to 1865. Soldiers spent long weeks waiting in camps. Men from New York and other cities brought the New York rules with them. They marked out fields near their tents.

Soldiers from farms and small towns learned the game in camp. Some prisoners of war also played. When the war ended, many men went home and started clubs in their own towns.

After the war, the number of clubs in the national association grew fast. Clubs in new states wrote to ask for the rules. A printed rule book let a club far from New York line its field the same way.

Today, different groups write baseball rules for different players. Major League Baseball publishes the Official Baseball Rules. The NFHS, the National Federation of State High School Associations, writes rules for high school games.

Little League Baseball began in Williamsport, Pennsylvania, in 1939. Its fields for young players have bases 60 feet apart. The field is smaller, but it keeps the same diamond shape and the same order of bases.

Because each group prints its measurements, a visiting team knows what field it will find. A school team from Peoria and a team from Chicago can meet on a field lined to the same NFHS numbers.

Henry Chadwick was born in England in 1824. He moved to Brooklyn, New York, as a boy. In England, people kept careful written scores of cricket, a bat-and-ball game with wickets. Chadwick knew those score sheets well.

In the 1850s, Chadwick watched baseball games in New York and began writing about them for newspapers. He thought baseball needed records as careful as cricket’s. He wrote for papers such as the New York Clipper and the Brooklyn Eagle.

Chadwick wrote and edited baseball guides for about fifty years. He also sat on rules committees. In 1938, he was elected to the National Baseball Hall of Fame. His plaque honors his work on the rules and records of the game.

A box score is a small table printed after a game. Each row is one player. Each column counts something, such as runs, hits or outs. It is called a box because it fits in a small box of newspaper type.

Chadwick is credited with making the box score a regular part of baseball writing by the late 1850s. Before that, newspapers described games in a few sentences. A reader could not tell what each player had done.

A box score let a reader check every player’s part in the game. It also saved space in a crowded newspaper. Papers across the country copied the form, and box scores are still printed and posted online today.

A game moves fast, so scorekeepers use short marks. The letter K stands for a strikeout. Chadwick is often credited with choosing K, the last letter of struck. Other letters stand for hits, walks and errors.

Scorekeepers also give each fielding place a number. The pitcher is 1 and the catcher is 2. The first, second and third basemen are 3, 4 and 5. The shortstop is 6. The outfielders are 7, 8 and 9.

With these marks, one small box can hold what happened to one batter. A person who learns the marks can read a scorebook kept by a stranger in another town. The marks work like a shared shorthand.

In 1860, a New York publisher named Beadle printed a small book called Beadle’s Dime Base-Ball Player. It cost ten cents, which is a dime. Henry Chadwick edited it for many years.

Each year’s guide printed the latest rules of the national association. It also printed records from the season before. A club in a new town could buy one guide and learn the whole game.

Later, sporting goods makers printed guides too. Albert Spalding’s company printed an official guide for the National League starting in the late 1870s. Guides were one way a rule change reached every club at once.

The 1845 Knickerbocker rules named an umpire. An umpire is a judge who watches the game and settles arguments. The rules said the umpire’s decision could not be appealed. That means no one could overrule it.

Early umpires were often a gentleman chosen from the crowd or from another club. They sat or stood off to the side. They were not paid. As games grew bigger and more serious, leagues began to hire umpires.

The National League hired and paid its own umpires by the late 1800s. A paid umpire did not belong to either team. Today, the Official Baseball Rules set out what umpires decide and how they are chosen for each game.

Many people in a ballpark keep score for fun. Only one person keeps the record that counts. That person is the official scorer. The scorer sits in the press box, away from the field.

The umpire decides what happened on the field, such as safe or out. The official scorer decides how to write it down. For example, the scorer decides whether a batter reached base on a hit or on a fielder’s error.

Rule 9 of the Official Baseball Rules describes the scorer’s job. The scorer’s record becomes part of each player’s season totals. That is how records from one city can be compared with records from another.

In early baseball, catchers stood well back from the batter. As pitchers threw harder, catchers moved closer to home plate. Foul balls and pitches could hit them in the face. Broken noses and teeth were common.

In the 1870s, Fred Thayer, the captain of the Harvard University team, is usually credited with making an early catcher's mask. It was a wire cage with padding. He received a patent for a mask in 1878.

At first, some fans and players teased catchers who wore masks. Within a few years, masks were normal at every level. Later rules added chest protectors, shin guards and helmets for catchers.

In the 1845 rules and for years after, fielders caught the ball with bare hands. Swollen and broken fingers were common. Some players thought using protection was a sign of weakness.

In the 1870s, a few players began wearing thin leather gloves. Albert Spalding, a famous pitcher and first baseman, wore a glove in 1877. Spalding also owned a sporting goods company that sold gloves.

By the 1890s, almost every fielder wore a glove. The rules did not change the diamond for gloves. They added limits on glove size later, printed in the rule book like any other measurement.

The IHSA, the Illinois High School Association, was founded in 1900. It sets rules for school sports across Illinois. It decides who may play, when seasons run and how state tournaments work.

High school teams in Illinois played baseball long before a state title existed. They played nearby towns under shared rules. In 1940, Illinois held its first state baseball tournament, and Belleville won it. The IHSA took charge of the tournament in 1941.

A state tournament depends on shared records. Each school reports its scores. Games are played on fields lined to the same high school rules. That lets a team from a small town meet a team from a big city on equal terms.