Joy in Mudville!
Pittsfield scores a first: 1791 bylaw banned 'baseball' near meetinghouse
By Tony Dobrowolski Berkshire Eagle Staff



PITTSFIELD -- Is Pittsfield the first place where baseball was played in North America? A noted baseball historian said yesterday that it very well could be.

John Thorn of Kingston, N.Y., who has written and researched several baseball books, has discovered a document in the Berkshire Athenaeum that he said is the earliest known written reference to baseball being played in North America.

During a packed news conference at City Hall yesterday, Thorn said the document, a Pittsfield bylaw issued on Sept. 5, 1791, predates the previous oldest mention of baseball in North America by 32 years. (In 2001, a librarian at New York University discovered two newspaper articles published on April 25, 1823, that note that an organized game known as "base ball" was played in Manhattan, according to The Associated Press.)

The Pittsfield bylaw states, "... for the Preservation of the Windows in the New Meeting House ... no Person or Inhabitant of said Town, shall be permitted to play at any game Called Wicket, Cricket, Base ball, Bat ball, Foot ball, Cat, Fives or any other Game or Games with Balls, within the Distance of Eighty Yards from said Meeting House."

To protect windows

According to information supplied by the Berkshire Athenaeum[!], the bylaw was written by Woodbridge Little, the first lawyer in Pittsfield and a longtime selectman. The document was presented for vote on Sept. 5, 1791, for the purpose of creating a bylaw that would ensure the protection of the windows of the new meetinghouse. The building referred to is the Congregational Church on Park Square -- a wooden structure, not the present gray stone church.

"It's clear that not only was baseball played here in 1791, but it was rampant," Thorn said. "It was sufficiently rampant to warrant an ordinance against it."

Several articles below, including how Hall of Famer and author Jim Bouton, who is running an Indie team in Pittsfield, fits in to all of this. Suck on it, Abner Doubleday!

More

On April 23, Berkshire Athenaeum librarian Ann Marie Miles found the bylaw in the library's files. The document was sent to the Williamstown Art Conservation Center, where its authenticity was established.

The bylaw will be kept in a vault until city officials determine where it should properly be displayed. Bouton said a copy of the document will also be on display at Wahconah Park, after the ballpark's renovations are completed.

"Pittsfield is baseball's Garden of Eden," Mayor James M. Ruberto said yesterday.

It was originally believed that former Civil War Gen. Abner Doubleday founded what was known as modern day baseball in 1839 in Cooperstown, N.Y., where the Hall of Fame was founded 100 years later.

But the authenticity of Doubleday's claim was always in question. On June 3, 1953, Congress officially cited the research of New York City librarian Robert Henderson as proving that Alexander Cartwright founded the modern game of baseball in 1845 in Hoboken, N.J.

Cartwright is credited with drafting what became the first codified baseball rules on Sept. 23, 1845.

"There's no way of pinpointing where the game was first played," Jeff Idelson, a spokesman for the Baseball Hall of Fame, told The Associated Press. "Baseball wasn't really born anywhere."

'Incredibly monumental'

Thorn said yesterday that evidence of bat and ball games in North America dates back to 1621, the year after the Pilgrims arrived in Massachusetts.

But Idelson told The Associated Press that if the Pittsfield document is authentic, it would be "incredibly monumental."

Thorn said he has worked with people at the Baseball Hall of Fame since the 1970s.

"They know about this," he said. "I e-mail my pals there regularly."

Pittsfield's previous footnote in baseball history occurred on July 1, 1859, when Amherst College beat Williams College on a field off North Street in what is believed to be the first collegiate baseball game ever played.

Thorn said he found a reference to the 1791 Pittsfield bylaw in April 2003 while doing research for a baseball book over the Internet. The reference was contained in a "History of Pittsfield" that had been published in 1869, Thorn said.

Met Bouton

After locating the reference, Thorn said, "I pretty much sat on it for a year," before he met former major league pitcher and author Jim Bouton of North Egremont, at the taping of a show on the New York Yankees that aired on ESPN in early April.

Although he had never met Bouton before, Thorn said he had heard that the former Yankees pitcher and two partners were interested in renovating Wahconah Park.

"I knew that he was involved with Pittsfield and Wahconah Park," Thorn said. "I said you might want to know baseball was played in Pittsfield before anywhere else.

"Jim got quite excited, told the good people of Pittsfield, and we've been doing a lot of scurrying around since then," Thorn said.

When asked why he waited so long to tell anyone about his historic find, Thorn said he believed it was better for him to reveal it in this manner.

"It's a much better story this way," he said, "because it does some good. It's a good find and it landed, happily, in a town that has had some hard luck."

Bouton said that after Thorn told him about the document at the taping of the ESPN show, "I couldn't get home fast enough. I was trying to stay on the road."





http://www.berkshireeagle.com/cda/article/print/0,1674,101%257E7514%257E2142622,00.html

Who founded baseball? Who knows?
By Tony Dobrowolski
Berkshire Eagle Staff

Wednesday, May 12, 2004 -

PITTSFIELD -- Who really invented baseball?

Although there have been mentions of bat and ball games played since before the birth of Christ, it was widely believed that Abner Doubleday "invented" baseball in 1839, before that myth was abandoned in favor of a story involving Alexander Cartwright in 1845.

Noted baseball historian John Thorn of Kingston, N.Y., recently discovered a document in the Berkshire Athenaeum dating from 1791 that he said contains the first written reference to baseball in North America.

Thorn was asked yesterday whether the existence of the 1791 document means Pittsfield was the first place where baseball was mentioned in North America, or if it establishes the city as the birthplace of the game.

'Until further notice'

"It's the birthplace until further notice, let's put it that way," Thorn said. "Do we believe that baseball was really played here [first]? No.

"The way I like to put it is, baseball is like a field of dandelions. It was growing up everywhere in the late 18th century anyway. Looking back from the vantage point of 200 years, it's important to identify the first dandelion."

The official "founder" of the modern game of baseball has been shrouded in mystery since the beginning of the 20th century when a commission of former players and baseball executives determined that Doubleday had founded the game in Cooperstown, N.Y., in 1839.

According to several baseball historical sites on the Internet, Albert G. Spalding, a former professional player who later founded the Spalding Sporting Goods Co., proposed in 1905 that a commission should be formed to investigate the origins of baseball after sportswriter Harry Chadwick, a native of Great Britain, suggested the game had originated from an English game known as rounders.

The members of the commission, whom Spalding picked himself, determined in 1907 that Doubleday founded baseball in 1839 based on a letter written by an 80-year-old Denver miner named Albert Graves, who had lived in Cooperstown as a young man. The commission later claimed Graves' story was "verified" when an old rotting baseball was discovered in Doubleday's artifacts.

However, as one baseball history Web site puts it, "there were a lot of problems with the story."

First, there is no evidence that Doubleday, a Civil War general, ever visited Cooperstown, according to a baseball history Web site. Second, Doubleday left extensive writings and diaries that never mention baseball, a fact that even the Baseball Hall of Fame's Web site calls surprising. Doubleday also died in 1893, 14 years before Spalding's commission determined that he invented the game. The Hall of Fame's Web site suggests there may have been two Abner Doubledays.

In 1937, as organized baseball began making plans to celebrate baseball's supposed centennial by establishing the Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, Cartwright's grandson, Bruce Cartwright, wrote a letter to baseball officials claiming that his grandfather had invented baseball in 1845 in Hoboken, N.J., and offered his diaries as proof.

On June 3, 1953, Congress cited research done by New York City librarian Robert Henderson proving that Cartwright, not Doubleday, founded baseball. Ironically, Cartwright was inducted into the Hall of Fame, while Doubleday was not.

When asked if the existence of the Pittsfield document challenges the assertion that Cartwright is the founder of baseball, Thorn said:

"It's a challenge to anyone who is foolish enough to assert that he has found the first.

"I'm not interested in challenging Cooperstown, Hoboken, provoking legislation or municipal fights," Thorn added. "The history is the history.

"And I present this with all modesty," he said. "There are other people who are working out there diligently. There will be other great finds. I know there will."

posted by prof_booty | 09:14 AM