Hiller - Baseball

History of baseball in the United States

Main article: History of baseball in the United States

Semiprofessional baseball started in the United States in the 1860s. In 1869 the first fully professional baseball club, the Cincinnati Red Stockings, was formed and went undefeated against a schedule of semipro and amateur teams.^[18] By the following decade, American newspapers were referring to baseball as the "National Pastime" or "National Game."^[19] The first attempt at forming a "major league" was the National Association, which lasted from 1871 to 1875.^[20] The "major league" status of the NA is in dispute among present-day baseball historians, and Major League Baseball does not include the NA among the major leagues.^[20] The National League, which still exists, was founded in 1876 in response to the NA's shortcomings.^[21] Several other major leagues formed and failed, but the American League, which evolved from the minor Western League (1893) and was established in 1901 as a major league, succeeded.^[22] The two leagues were initially rivals that actively fought for the best players, often disregarding one another's contracts and engaging in bitter legal disputes.^[23] A modicum of peace was established in 1903, and the World Series was inaugurated that fall, albeit without formal major league sanction or governance.^[24] The next year, the National League champion New York Giants did not participate, as their manager, John McGraw, refused to recognize the major league status of the American League and its champion, the Boston Americans who beat the Pittsburgh Pirates in the first World Series.^[25] The following year, Giants' management relented, and actually led the formal establishment of rules that standardized the format of the World Series and made participation compulsory.

The New York Giants baseball team, circa 1910.

Compared with the present day, games in the early part of the 20th century were lower scoring and pitchers were more successful. The "inside game", whose nature was to "scratch for runs", was played more violently and aggressively than it is today.^[26] Ty Cobb said of his era especially, "Baseball is something like a war!" This period, which has since become known as the "dead-ball era", ended in the 1920s with several rule changes that gave advantages to hitters and the rise of the legendary baseball player Babe Ruth, who showed the world what power hitting could produce, altering the nature of the game.^[27] Two of the changes introduced were the construction of additional seating to accommodate the rising popularity of the game, which often had the effect of bringing the outfield fences closer to the infield in the largest parks; and the introduction of strict rules governing the size, shape and construction of the ball which, coupled with superior materials becoming available following World War I, caused the ball to travel farther when hit.^[28] The aggregate result of these two changes was to enable batters to hit many more home runs.

In 1884, African American Moses Walker (and, briefly, his brother Welday) had played for the Toledo Blue Stockings of the major league American Association.^[29] An injury ended Walker's major league career, and by the early 1890s, a "gentlemen's agreement" in the form of the baseball color line^[30] effectively barred African-American players from the majors and their affiliated minor leagues, resulting in the formation of several Negro Leagues.^[31] There was never any formal segregation rule in baseball, which presented an opportunity for integration for someone bold enough to attempt it. The first crack in the unwritten agreement occurred in 1946, when Jackie Robinson was signed by the National League's Brooklyn Dodgers and began playing for their minor league team in Montreal.^[32] Finally, in 1947, the major leagues' color barrier was broken when Robinson debuted with the Dodgers.^[33] Larry Doby debuted in the American League the same year.^[34] Although the transformation was not instantaneous, baseball has since become fully integrated.

Major League baseball finally made it to the West Coast of the United States in 1958, when the Brooklyn Dodgers and New York Giants relocated to Los Angeles and San Francisco respectively.^[35] The first American League team on the West Coast was the Los Angeles Angels, who were founded as an expansion team in 1961.

Pitchers dominated the game in the 1960s and early 1970s. In the early 1970s the designated hitter (DH) rule was proposed.^[36] The American League adopted this rule in 1973, though pitchers still bat for themselves in the National League to this day. The DH rule now constitutes the primary difference between the two leagues.^[37]

Despite the popularity of baseball, and the attendant high salaries relative to those of average Americans, the players have become dissatisfied from time to time, as they believed the owners had too much control and retained an unfair share of the money. Various job actions have occurred throughout the game's history. Players on specific teams occasionally attempted strikes, but usually came back when their jobs were sufficiently threatened. The throwing of the 1919 World Series, the "Black Sox Scandal", was in some sense a "strike" or at least a rebellion by the ballplayers against a perceived stingy owner. But the strict rules of baseball contracts tended to keep the players "in line" in general.

This began to change in 1966 when former United Steelworkers chief economist (and assistant to the president) Marvin Miller became the Baseball Players Union executive director. The union became much stronger than it had been previously, especially when the reserve clause was effectively nullified in the mid-1970s. Conflicts between owners and the players' union led to major work stoppages in 1972, 1981, and 1994. The 1994 baseball strike led to the cancellation of the World Series, and was not settled until the spring of 1995. During this period, as well, many of the functions — such as player discipline and umpire supervision — and regulations that had been administered separately by the two major leagues' administrations were united under the rubric of Major League Baseball.

The number of home runs increased dramatically after the strike. Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa both surpassed Roger Maris's long-standing single season home run record in 1998. In 2001, Barry Bonds established the current record of 73 home runs in a single season. In 2007, Bonds became MLB's all-time home run leader, surpassing Hank Aaron's total of 755. Even though all three sluggers (McGwire, Sosa, and Bonds) have been accused in the steroid-abuse scandal of the mid-2000s, their feats did do a lot at the time to bolster the game's renewed popularity.

Currently, baseball makes up around 20 percent of the franchise sports industry. The team with the highest average game attendance is the New York Yankees, with 51,848 spectators. The New York Yankees are closely followed by the Los Angeles Dodgers (46,400) and the New York Mets (42,327). The 30 Major League Baseball teams earned $5.11 billion in revenue in 2006.

Origins of baseball

Main article: Origins of baseball

The story that Abner Doubleday invented baseball in 1839 was once widely promoted and widely believed, but there was and is no evidence for this claim, except for the testimony of one man decades after the fact, and there is a great deal of persuasive counter-evidence. Doubleday left many letters and papers, but they contain no description of baseball or even a suggestion that he considered himself a prominent person in the history of the game. His New York Times obituary makes no mention of baseball, nor does a 1911 encyclopedia article about Doubleday.

The distinct evolution of baseball from among the various bat-and-ball games is difficult to trace with precision. Oina, a very similar bat-and-ball traditional game played in Romania was mentioned for the first time during the rule of King Vlaicu Vodă, in 1364. Typically, consensus was that today's baseball is a North American development from the older game rounders, however a 2005 book Baseball Before We Knew It: A Search for the Roots of the Game, by David Block, and historical evidence argues against that notion.^[6] Several references to "baseball" and "bat-and-ball" have been found in British and American documents of the early eighteenth century. The earliest known description is in a 1744 British publication, A Little Pretty Pocket-Book, by John Newbery.^[7] It contains a wood-cut illustration of boys playing "base-ball," showing a baseball set-up roughly similar to the modern game, and a rhymed description of the sport. However, on September 11, 2008, the Surrey County Council's History Centre gave documentary proof that the game was being played by the British before anywhere else and have written to Major League Baseball explaining this^[8]. The diarist William Bray recorded a game of baseball on Easter Monday 1755 in Guildford^[9]. The earliest known unambiguous American discussion of "baseball" was published in a 1791 Pittsfield, Massachusetts town bylaw, which prohibited the playing of the game within 80 yards (70 m) of the town's new meeting house.^[10] The English novelist Jane Austen made a reference to children playing "base-ball" on a village green in her book Northanger Abbey, which was written between 1798 and 1803 (though not published until 1818).^[11]

The first full documentation of a baseball game in North America is Dr. Adam Ford's contemporary description of a game that took place in 1838 on June 4 (Militia Muster Day) in Beachville, Ontario, Canada; this report was related in an 1886 edition of Sporting Life magazine in a letter by former St. Marys, Ontario, resident Dr. Matthew Harris.^[12]

In 1845, Alexander Cartwright of New York City led the codification of an early list of rules (the so-called Knickerbocker Rules), from which today's rules have evolved.^[13] He had also initiated the replacement of the soft ball used in rounders with a smaller hard ball.^[14] While there are reports of Cartwright's club, the New York Knickerbockers, playing games in 1845, the game now recognized as the first in U.S. history to be officially recorded took place on June 19, 1846, in Hoboken, New Jersey^[15], with the "New York Nine"^[16] defeating the Knickerbockers, 23–1, in four innings.^[17]

On June 3, 1953, the United States Congress officially recognized Cartwright as the inventor of modern baseball.