BASEBALL?? How'd THAT Happen?? The "stick and ball" games prior to1845.

Baseball, the best game of all and the most difficult to play at the highest levels.  And I prove it without a doubt.  A short analysis of a routine major league pitch is all that is needed but a bit of icing on the cake adds to the proof.  

While there's no doubt about it, I couldn't help but wonder where did it all come from? Who decided what?  Civil War? What Civil War?  There's been a lot written, but not so much from a common sense direction.

So, in the first of 6 episodes we will look at what happened in the early 1800s up until 1845 and what impact it has on today's game.  This episode will take a look at the games that slowly but steadily evolved into baseball as we know it.   This is a look at the "stick and ball" games on the East Coast leading up to the year 1845.

Transcript

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And good day everyone, and welcome to Boomer Nation. It's TK here coming to you once again, commercial free, as always, from our international headquarters here in Northeast Ohio. And since we have completed our baby boomer project very successfully, I might say, we've decided to take a bit of a new direction. In keeping with our intention of looking at a slice of American history, research teams scoured the possibilities for our next project. When the team began its search, the temperature outside here in northeast Ohio was 17 degrees. And that was only about two weeks ago. Yesterday, the temperature was 74 and it was a sunny day. Go figure. The warmer temperature, though, and the beginning of spring training sort of hit us all at once. What about baseball? Now that seemed and sounded like a good idea, but there have been so many books out about it, and Ken Burns was that great series. Maybe it would be a good idea to take a look at how it started, where it started, and how it developed over the years, up to a certain point anyway. So the team suggested we look at its formative years. And things were very fluid there until the end of the century. Okay, let's make it baseball. How'd that happen? 1800 to 1899, let's do it. Now at first glance, at the early years, it really opened a door to an amazing scene of wide variety of rules and games blending together over the years, over the decades, really. It's truly an unbelievable, incredible story. And plus I'm happy about that since baseball has always been my favorite sport. At least in part because I know I've believed that baseball is the most difficult sport to play at the highest levels. And that's quite a claim. And you know, I think what let's go off on a tangent here because I think I can prove this right now. I have three reasons to prove the claim that it's the most difficult sport at the highest levels. Number one is about batting averages. In the major leagues, the best hitter, the best batting average is in the 300 range. 300 to 350, 350 being really incredible. Darn few got beyond that. That means they are unsuccessful 65% of the time. That must be a difficult thing if the best players in the league are unsuccessful two-thirds of the time at bat. We'll have a little more on batting average in a little bit. So, number two reason why baseball is the most difficult of sports has to do with an analysis of a routine major league pitch. Now, please bear with me on this. I think even the people in California will be able to understand this. But in the Major Leagues, a 93 mile an hour pitch is nothing special. In fact, that pitch should be routine for any major league pitcher. So we're going to use 93 miles an hour as our benchmark in our analysis. And we'll use the distance of 56 feet 6 inches instead of 60 feet 6 inches. Since while the pitcher's rubber is 60 feet 6 inches from the home plate, he doesn't pitch from there. The windup allows him to let go of the ball a few feet in front of the pitcher's rubber. And that's about 4 feet, and that's why we're going to use the distance 56 feet 6 inches. And one other part of our analysis, and that is that the batter takes a tenth of a second to swing the bat to the plate. From the time he holds it above his head over there and swings it around the home plate, that takes a tenth of a second. So now, given that speed and distance, that 93 mile an hour pitch is in the air a total of 0.41 seconds or less than half a second. Let me repeat that for you guys in California. That pitch is in the air less than a half a second. And now, in the first tenth of a second, when the ball is released, the ball has already traveled over 13 feet. And by the by time the batter tracks it and decides to swing, that's another tenth of a second, maybe a little longer. The ball is now halfway to the plate. And now, if he starts his swing any later than three-tenths of a second from the instant the ball is released, he can't hit it. The ball has passed him by. So he has less than a half a second to see the ball, decide what to do, and swing the bat. But he has to start his swing when the ball is at least 13 feet from the plate. Otherwise, the ball's gone by him. Also, let's not forget that he has to hit it in fair territory between the foul lines. And remember, he's hitting a round ball with a round bat. And now, just for fun, imagine a pitch coming in at 100 miles an hour. That flight time is about a third of a second. Maybe it's best just to get out of the way of that one. And so after looking at it this way, maybe actually a 315 batting average is actually pretty good, wouldn't you think? But that's it. I'm not done yet. Number three is here, and number three is regarding the drafting of new young players. In football and basketball, the draft is a really big deal. There's a lot of hoopla, the uh sports casters are out, they're doing analysis, who's gonna take what. And the expectation is for sure that that first round pick of theirs is gonna result in a starter in their team. That's what they're looking for, that's what they want, a starter, maybe even a star along the way. But in any case, they want somebody that will be able to contribute immediately. But in baseball, the first round picks they don't go to the major leagues, they go to the minors. Usually it's single A. But sometimes it's even the instructional league first, then single A, and then double A, and so on. It's a tough process. And believe me when I tell you, 80% of them never see major leagues. And so what an incredible game. In all this, I got to thinking, where did this 60 feet six inches come from? Then 90 feet between bases. Who thought of that? That's a magic number. If it was 91 or 89, it would change the game completely. How many close calls are there at first base on every game? And what about four balls and three strikes? Who thought about that one? In stealing bases? Well, one question led to another. I wound up going back to baseball's beginning. And in my analysis, it seems that 80% of today's rules occurred prior to 1900. Except for that stupid rule that puts a man on second base for extra innings. I don't know where that came from. Curiosity got the best of me. Maybe since it's now time for spring training, and here we are 80 years later, still with that hope, what springs eternal in Northeast Ohio. But we believe it. This is the year. This is the year it's gonna happen. Yeah, yeah, I'm sure it is. Yep, mm-hmm, for sure. So let's get into the uh baseball how that happened thing. I mean, there have been so many people who wanted to search for the beginning of baseball, and uh they did a good job. They failed, they didn't do so well anyway. Baseball or a form of baseball was being played in the early 1800s throughout the eastern United States, from New England down through New York, that area, Pennsylvania starting to go west, down south, even into the Carolinas. There were baseball games and baseball clubs throughout the the uh the East, and the interesting thing is they all had different rules. Yeah. One guy was believing this and another guy was believing that. And what we're gonna do here is just go through some of the silly rules, or at least silly now. And the first one we're gonna take a look at, I think is maybe the most interesting, and it was called soaking or plugging, and that is where a fielder could take the ball and throw it at a runner who's off the base. If the runner gets hit by the ball, the runner is out. Now, there is no restriction on distance. It could have been three feet, it could have been 30 feet, and it could have been a soft throw or it could have been a line drive. That rule lasted well into the 1840s, where I'm not sure how it happened, but they got rid of it because I don't know, maybe somebody had a fractured skull or two during this thing. Uh of course, you don't know if it was a fractured skull because they didn't have x-rays then, but maybe he just played with a headache for the rest of his life. I don't know. Also, a fly ball, like today, a fly ball uh was caught, uh, that would be an out, but also caught on the first bounce would be an out. Also, some fields had no foul lines. Every hit was a fair ball. Now that would be fun. Teams were from anywhere from eight to twenty players, sometimes more than that. And from place to place, there was a distance between uh bases that was varied, anywhere from 40 feet to 100 feet. Often the teams had to sit before the game, sit together, and decide the rules because they sometimes played under different rule bases. Sometimes there were three bases, sometimes five, sometimes even seven. There were certainly no gloves, no gloves at all. And the players, instead of playing a certain number of innings, they played to the number of runs. In New York, it was 21 runs wins a game. In Massachusetts, it was a hundred runs wins the game. Also, in most of the area, one out meant all out. There's no three outs. If you catch one guy off base, all were out. There were no strikes and balls called till after 1845. And all the pitching was underhand, underhand until the 1800s, actually. But it was underhand because the pitcher actually wanted the batter to hit the ball. And in fact, the batter could tell the pitcher where to pitch it so he could hit it, make it higher, make it lower, and the pitcher was obligated to do so. And in terms of distance, the pitcher was typically 35 to 45 feet away from the batter, and it didn't go to 60 feet six inches until 1893. Yikes! So these rules were basically regional. Within one particular region, they played amongst the same rules. But every region was as different as we've already looked at. And if you're going from one region to another, you had to sit down and say, wait a minute, I don't know what whose rules are we going to apply. The problem is there were too many rules. And until 1845, when the Knickerbocker Baseball Club sat down and created 20 rules of baseball. That was the beginning of a codified baseball system. So, folks, we're going to start the next episode with 1845 and the Knickerbocker Baseball Club in New York City. And so we have it. That's it for today, folks. We'll be back soon, starting in 1845. You won't believe all the stuff that happened then. I'm gonna leave you with some words of wisdom by Albert Einstein. The difference between stupidity and genius is that genius has its limits. Yes, indeed. He was pretty smart too, I think. And that's it, folks. I hope to hear back from you. You can contact me at Boomernation70 at gmail.com and may God bless this great country of ours. Be safe, everyone.