The Death Of Baseball Circa 1881

Can you imagine if the National Pastime were actually Cricket instead of Baseball?  Well more than a few people thought this was our future back in the early 1880s.  One person wrote an editorial column about just this topic in the New York Times in 1881.  Here is the entire article, which is good for a laugh or two at his misguided sense of our nation's affection with baseball.  The gambling issue is raised here, but as with all sports of the time, they were heavily gambled on and much money was to be won or lost on each event.  Cricket would not have avoided the gamblers looking to make any money they could on results, which can be manipulated in many sports, including Cricket.

The intelligence issue is laughable at best as well.  They actually try to pen the lack of interest in Cricket on low intelligence of the American people, stating that baseball is an easy game that everyone can understand and is not a high intellect sport.  They then completely destroy their own theory by later stating that rules were becoming really complicated, which would mean people would have to be pretty intelligent to keep up with the changes right?  Here is the editorial in it's entirety below.

"There is really reason to believe that baseball is gradually dying out in this country.  It has been openly announced by an athletic authority that what was once called the national game is being steadily superseded by cricket, and the records of our hospitals confirm the theory that fewer games of baseball have been played during the past year than were played during any other single year since 1868.

About twenty-five years ago there was an effort made to induce Americans to play cricket, but it failed.  We were not at that time worthy of the game and in our ignorance we said, "Give us something easier."  It was then that certain unknown persons resolved to take the old game of rounders, which had gradually become known by the name baseball, and to make of it an easy substitute for cricket.  To the latter game it bore much the same relation that the frivolous game of euchre bears to the grand science of whist.

The baseball conspirators said to their fellow countrymen, "Here is an easy game which everybody can learn.  Let us play it and call it our national game."  The suggestion met with a warm response, and baseball clubs sprang up all over the country.  Of course the national game soon lost the simplicity of the familiar baseball of country small boys.  Elaborate rules were made and these were so constantly changed and so many additions were made to them that the study of baseball jurisprudence became a gigantic task.

When objection was early made to the national game that it was really fit only for boys, the conspirators hit upon the plan of using a ball about as hard as a ten-pound cannon ball and much more dangerous, and then proudly asked if they had not taken away the reproach that baseball was a small boys' game.  From that time on it became rather more dangerous to play baseball than to fill lighted kerosene lamps or to indulge in any other of our distinctively national sports.

It is estimated by an able statistician that the annual number of accidents caused by baseball in the last ten years has been 37,518, of which 3 percent have been fatal; 25,611 fingers and 11,016 legs were broken during the decade in question, while 1,900 eyes were permanently put out and 1,648 ribs were fractured.

During the halcyon period of the national game a number of enthusiastic players went to England in order to introduce it in that benighted land.  They played several games in public, but the Englishmen refused to take any interest in the matter.  They said, "Ah! Yes! Very nice game for little boys, but it's only our old game of rounders, you know."  The American missionaries returned disappointed and somewhat disheartened, and from that time baseball began to show signs of waning popularity.

Then appeared the "professional players" to tell upon the game.  They made a living by hiring themselves out to baseball clubs.  They made what was originally designed to be a sport a matter of business.  Worse than this, they made the national game a national instrument of gambling, and generally succeeded in placing it on a level with the game of three-card monte.  Games were won and lost in accordance with previous "arrangements."  In other words, one set of players sold the game to their opponents before it was played, and the unfortunate people who had bets on the results were thus systematically robbed.

Of late years baseball has been rather more disreputable than was horse racing in the days before the existence of Jerome Park.  The honest young men who dressed themselves in ridiculous uniforms, called themselves "Red-legs" or "White-legs," and broke their fingers by playing matches in public found that they were ranked in public estimation with professional black-legs.  One need not wonder that they are now abandoning the game wholly to the professional players.

Probably the time is now ripe for the revival of cricket.  The day has gone by when Americans looked upon athletic sports which really required muscle and endurance and upon games of cards in which intellectual effort was a more important element than chance as something to which they had no time to attend.  Whist has to a large extent superseded euchre, and the latter has been banished from the drawing room in the railway smoking car.

Our experience with the national game of baseball has been sufficiently thorough to convince us that it was in the beginning a sport unworthy of men and that it is now, in its fully developed state, unworthy of gentlemen.  Cricket will probably become as popular here in the course of a few years as it is in England, and we shall be contented to play a game worth playing, even if it is English in origin, without trying to establish a national game of our own."

So what we gather from this is that not only was this the writer's opinion that baseball was dead, but the opinion of many people, including athletic clubs and hospitals.  The statistics may have been skewed a little bit to show some kind of exodus away from the game of baseball by players all over the country, but as technology got better along with better rules to keep the players safe, injuries were simply going down.  The fact that injuries were being used to possibly scare people away from the sport was reaching at best for any argument that could attack baseball unjustly.

If you look at baseball history, the person who penned this mentions the exact moment when baseball really became the major sport beloved by the whole nation.  It was when the writer of this editorial wrote that the game had become professional, that everyone became a fan of the sport.  The 1880s saw a big rise in the number of recognizable stars in the sport from Old Hoss Radbourn to Cap Anson.  The person who wrote this simply missed the idea that we would embrace the game as fans even if we were not all cut out to play at the highest level.  He thought that this weeding out of top players from the rest of the crop would discourage people from associating with the sport, and that we would all simply lose interest.

I am really glad that we embraced baseball from the get go, and never let go of our national pastime.  Cricket might be a fine game for other people, but baseball is our sport.  Cricket matches can take hours and hours, or even days to play.  There are no rules dictating how fast a pace which the game must be played, and a pitcher can literally stand still with the ball until he is ready to throw.  There are records of guys purposely waiting hours to throw the ball.  The longest match ever played was in 1939 and lasted over 11 days.  We think a long baseball game is one that goes beyond 12 innings!  England scored 654 times in that game, which just defeats all perception of what a sport should be in this country.

Baseball is truly America's pastime, no matter what football thinks, and I am proud of our game.  It has lasted strong for over 200 years(134 years professionally), and will go on for many more years to come.  Major League Baseball is the one sport for which I live, breath, and die each year.  No other sport excites me nearly as much as watching baseball.  It is the only sport that I will watch religiously, even when it is not my team playing.  I cannot imagine having to watch cricket because baseball did not exist.  I am very glad this 19th century prediction of the future was completely false.