Made In America (53 page)

To anyone who looked into the matter even slightly, it was obvious that the story didn’t hold water. For one thing, Doubleday was not at Cooperstown in 1839, but at West Point, and in any case his family had left Cooperstown in 1837. At his death, Doubleday had left sixty-seven diaries and not once in any of them did he mention baseball. Finally, if Mills’s story is to be believed, never in their thirty years of close friendship had Doubleday thought to mention to Mills that he had invented the game from which Mills was making his living.
²⁷

In so far as baseball can be said to have a founder, it is Alexander Cartwright, a member of the New York Knickerbocker Club who in 1845 drew up a set of rules based
on the form of town ball known as the New York game. In its rudiments Cartwright’s version of the game was very like that of today. It incorporated nine-player teams and an infield in the shape of a diamond with bases ninety feet apart. Three strikes made an out, and three outs concluded a team’s at-bat.

But in its details the game that Cartwright and his immediate successors played was replete with differences. For one thing, fielders could put out opponents by catching the ball on the first bounce as well as on the fly, or by hitting them with the ball as they ran (an option that no doubt brought fielders the most pleasure if not the most outs). They wouldn’t wear protective gloves until the 1890s. Before that they caught balls barehanded or sometimes in their hats. The pitcher stood much closer to the batter than now, threw with an underhand delivery, and was required to keep offering pitches until the
batter
(an Americanism of 1824) found a pitch he liked. Until as late as 1887 he had to put the pitch where the batter instructed him to.
²⁸

Batters were at first also known as
strikers,
and after 1856 as
batsmen.
The catcher – sometimes called a
catcher-out
– stood up to fifty feet behind home plate and would remain cautiously out of range of foul tips until the development of the catcher’s mask in the 1890s. The
umpire,
a term first noted in a baseball context in 1856, also stood (or often sat) safely out of the way along the first base line. In those days the umpire’s judgement was trusted even less than now. Important matches also had a referee, whose job was simply to judge the umpire. (
Umpire,
incidentally, is one of those many words in which an initial
n
became attached, like a charged particle, to the preceding indefinite article. In Middle English, one was ‘a noumpere’, just as an apron was at first ‘a napron’.)

Uniforms were strikingly different, too. Cartwright’s Knickerbocker Club, for example, wore uniforms of white shirts, blue trousers and straw boaters, making them look
more like the lounging aesthetes in Manet’s
Déjeuner sur l’herbe
than gutsy, knockabout athletes. In fact, they often were more like aesthetes than athletes. The early teams were intended as exclusive fraternal organizations for the upper crust, which is why to this day we call them
clubs.
Often the games were largely incidental to the social gathering afterwards. Then two things happened: competition between clubs grew more prickly and intense, and the game spread to the masses, where it became evident that manual labourers often enjoyed certain advantages in terms of strength and endurance over stockbrokers and junior executives. At first, working men played in their own leagues – working men’s matches on Boston Common often began at 5 a.m. so as not to interfere with the players’ working day – but before long the gentlemen’s teams began quietly recruiting them as paid ringers. Baseball began to lose its wholesome glow as words like
hippodroming
(throwing a game for a bribe) and
revolving
(jumping teams to secure better pay) entered the parlance of the game.

In 1859, when the National Association of Base Ball Players was formed (the national in the title was a trifle ambitious since all the clubs were from greater New York), it insisted on amateurism and gentlemanly behaviour. It got neither. As early as 1860, the Brooklyn Excelsiors were paying a salary to a fastball pitcher named Jim Creighton while the New York Mutuals were charging an admission often cents to their matches and dividing the takings among themselves. Fair play was not always on-hand either. At least one crucial game was decided when the owner of one team had his dog frighten off an outfielder chasing a fly ball.

By 1869 America had its first forthrightly professional team, the Cincinnati Red Stockings, who racked up a record of fifty-seven wins, no loses and one tie during the year, and played before crowds of as many as 15,000 people.
²⁹

As baseball became increasingly professional, various
leagues and alliances formed – including one called, a trifle redundantly, the League Alliance. In 1877 the National Baseball League, the first true major league, was formed.
³⁰
The American League followed in 1901, though it had its roots in the old Western League. Among the early professional teams were the
Philadelphia Athletics, Troy Haymakers, Brooklyn Atlantics, Detroit Wolverines, Washington Olympics, Hartford Dark Blues
and
Cleveland Spiders,
who in 1899 earned the distinction of having the worst record ever notched up by a professional baseball team: 20-134. New York alone had the
Mutuals, Highlanders, Harlems, Gothams, Putnams,
and
Eagles.
Often the place name meant little. Hartford played the 1877 season in Brooklyn. Often, too, if a team was out of a pennant race (so called because the competition was at first literally for a pennant), it didn’t bother to make road trips towards the end of the season. Even when the opponent showed up, it wasn’t always worth the bother. For their last game of the 1881 season, the Troy Haymakers had a paying attendance of just twelve.

Teams endlessly formed and reformed. Many faded away. Others evolved new identities – sometimes a series of new identities. The Chicago Cubs began life in 1876 as the
White Stockings
(the name was later appropriated by a rival cross-town team) and between 1887 and 1905 went by a variety of official and unofficial nicknames – the
Colts, Black Stockings, Orphans, Cowboys, Rough Riders, Recruits, Panamas, Zephyrs
and
Nationals
– before finally settling down as the Cubs in 1905. A Brooklyn team began calling itself the
Bridegrooms
after four of its players were married in the same summer, but eventually that name metamorphosed into
Dodgers
– or, more specifically,
Trolley Dodgers.
The name referred not to the players, but to the intrepid fans who had to dodge across a series of trolley lines to reach the ballpark safely. The
Pittsburgh Alleghenys
became the more alliterative if not geographically apposite Pirates. The
Boston Beaneaters
became
the Boston Braves. The Boston Red Stockings were known alternatively as the
Pilgrims
or
Somersets
before they returned to their roots as the Red Sox.

The first
World Championship Series
began in 1884 and was being shortened to
World Series
by 1889. It was a ludicrously inflated title. Not only was the series not global, it wasn’t even representative of the United States. In 1903 there was no team in the major leagues south of Washington, DC, or west of St Louis – a pattern that would remain unchanged until the 1950s, when the rapid rise of air travel prompted a western exodus.
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During its long adolescence in the nineteenth century, baseball generated a vast vocabulary. Among the terms that are still current:
walk
for a base on balls and
goose egg
for a zero (1866),
double play
(1867),
bullpen
(1877),
bleachers
(1882),
raincheck
(1884),
southpaw
(1885),
charley horse
(1888),
fan
in the sense of supporter (1890s),
double-header
(1896), and
to play ball
in the sense of to co-operate (1901). But this is only the barest sampling. An exhaustive list would run to several pages. For
hit
alone well over a hundred terms have been recorded –
Texas Leaguer, squib, nubber, banjo, stinker, humpie, drooper,
and so on.
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Only sometimes do we know the derivation of these terms.
Southpaw
has been attributed to Charles Seymour of the
Chicago Times,
because pitchers at the city’s old West Side ballpark faced west, and thus a left-hander would stand with his throwing arm on his south side.
Bleachers
has been credited to another Chicago sports-writer, who applied it to those unfortunates who had to sit in an uncovered portion of grandstand and thus were ‘bleached’ by the sun.
³³
Mencken traces
charley horse
to a player named Charley Esper of the Baltimore Orioles, who ‘walked like a lame horse’, but Flexner points out that the term was in use six years before Esper started playing.
³⁴
Banjo hit,
dating from 1925, was coined by the appealingly named Snooks Dowd of the Jersey
City Giants, and evidently alludes to the plinking banjo-like sound made by a poorly hit ball. A
raincheck
was – indeed, still is – another name for a ticket stub. If the game was rained out in the first five innings, the customer could gain free admission to any later match by presenting his raincheck. Hence, the use of the term in the general sense of a deferred get-together.

Other terms are much less certain.
Bullpen,
for the warm-up area where spare pitchers sit, is often said to have arisen because that is where ads for Bull Durham tobacco were placed. But the story owes more to folk mythology than to any documentary evidence. The bullpen is at least as likely to be so called because of its similarity to the place where bulls are kept. At all events, the first reference to it, in the
Cincinnati Enquirer
in 1877, is not to an area where pitchers were confined, but to a place where fans were herded. Not until 1910 did it come to signify a warm-up area for pitchers.
Fans
in the sense of enthusiasts is presumed to be a shortening of
fanatics,
but the conclusion is only speculative. Mencken suggests that it may come from
fancy,
as in to
fancy someone’s chances.
In the early days, in any case, supporters weren’t called fans but
cranks,
presumably because they cranked up the home team with their cheering.

Baseball remains one of the most fertile grounds for inventive wordplay in American life. Among the more notable – and on the face of it more bewildering – recent neologisms are
to dial 8
for a home run and
Linda Ronstadt
for a good fastball.
Dial 8
comes from the practice among hotels of requiring customers to
dial 8
for a long-distance line.
Linda Ronstadt,
more complicatedly, is an allusion to her song ‘Blue Bayou’, the significance of which becomes less puzzling when you reflect that a good fastball ‘blew by you’.

During the long period that baseball was developing from a gentleman’s recreation to the national pastime, another sport was shaping up to challenge its unquestioned preeminence.
I refer to the sport that Americans insist on calling
football
(an odd choice since kicking features only incidentally in its play). As a term
football
has existed in English since 1486, before America was even known about. In its early days it primarily signified an annual competition in which the inhabitants of neighbouring English villages would try to kick or shove an inflated animal bladder between two distant points. Eventually in a more organized form it evolved into two principal sports,
rugby
(after the English school of that name where it was first played in 1864) and
soccer
(from British university slang and current only since 1891).

In its earliest manifestations in America, football wasn’t so much a sport as legalized mayhem, very like the village sport of medieval England. Beginning at Yale in about 1840 it became customary for freshmen to take on upperclassmen in a vast, disorderly shoving match at the epicentre of which was a makeshift ball. After one such match, the
New York Post
fretted: ‘Boys and young men knocked each other down, tore off each other’s clothing. Eyes were bunged, faces blacked and bloody, and shirts and coats torn to rags.’ Appalled at the injuries and disorder, Yale and Harvard banned the sport in the 1860s.

Students turned their attention away from the annual brawls and took up rugby instead. At first they used the English rules, but gradually they evolved forms of their own – even if they kept much of the terminology, like
offside fair catch, halfback
and
scrimmage
(or
scrummage,
from an English dialect word for a tussle, and now shortened in the rugby world to
scrum
)
.
Even with the imposition of some sense of order, play remained undisciplined and dangerous. In 1878 Walter Camp, a Yale student who appears to have been regarded as something of a deity by both his peers and mentors (and not without reason; one of the Yale teams he led outscored its opponents 482-2 over the course of one
season and 698–0 in another), proposed several rules to bring a greater maturity to the game. The principal ones were that teams be limited to eleven players and that each side be granted three chances – or
downs
– to advance the ball five yards. This led to the painting of white lines at five-yard intervals, which by 1897 had inspired the term
gridiron
for a football field.

By about 1880 football and rugby had permanently parted ways in America, and by 1890 Yale was regularly attracting crowds of 40,000 to its football games. Some things had still to change. The centre didn’t snap the ball with his hands, but kicked it back to the quarterback with his foot. Not until 1904 did a touchdown score more than a field goal. The forward pass wasn’t written into the rules until 1906.
³⁵
Even then no one really understood its possibilities. When it was used, which was rarely, it involved a quarterback lobbing a short pass to a stationary receiver, who would then turn and run with the ball. Not until 1913 did Gus Dorais, the Notre Dame quarterback, and his team-mate Knute Rockne come up with the idea of hitting a receiver on the run. In doing so, Notre Dame beat Army 35-13 and entered the realms of legend, at least on the sports pages.