[tm1681]

FORGOTTEN HISTORY: MORE ON THE FIRST SEASON

Initially, not much was written about the first year of organized baseball, and to be fair the maiden season of the National Base Ball Organization was as much of a curiosity as anything else so not much press was devoted to it. Teams were drawing 1,500 to 2,500 fans per game, with the best attendance always coming on the weekends. Most of the spectators were middle to upper class since those people could afford to take a day off for a family outing or spend money on a curious new sport.

Baseball was still such a fly-by-night operation at that time that even the clubs whose founding easily predated the NBBO, such as the Knickerbockers and the Gotham Base Ball Club, spent maybe $2,000 all year for facilities, field time, equipment, travel, and player per diems in the amateur league.

Players in senior-level rosters ranged from teenagers fresh out of high school, like Konrad Jensen and Anthony Mascherino, to men pushing forty years of age and retiring after a season or two, such as Victory Club’s #2 starter Ståle Hansen. Anyone capable of playing the game at the highest amateur level was welcome.

As mentioned (in one of the first posts in this thread but expanded on more here), the on-field product itself was something completely unlike anything that a person today would think of as baseball. Examples (many from here):

• The game ball was hand-made, comparatively soft, and had a brown leather cover.
• A bat could be of any length so long as the hitter could effectively swing it.
• What passed for a glove was basically a wrap on a player’s off-hand, or at most a leather gardening/work glove.
• Home plate was circular and made of iron.
• Catchers didn’t wear protective equipment of any kind and stationed themselves 20-25 feet behind home plate.
• A run was called an “ace”.
• There were no called balls, and called strikes had only just been introduced.
• There was no strike zone, with a strike instead being called if the umpire felt the batter refused to swing at a ball that was hittable.
• There was no set number of balls for a walk – one was awarded if the umpire felt the pitcher wasn’t giving a batter a chance to hit the ball.
• Batters could request that a pitch be delivered to them in a specific manner (think schoolyard kickball).
• Pitchers could only throw the ball underhanded, and with no windup.
• Pitchers delivered the ball from a line 45 feet from home plate.
• One way to get a batter out was to catch a batted ball after one bounce.
• One way to get a baserunner out was to hit him with a throw while he was between bases.

All of the above meant that the sport was very much an action-based product. Walks were minimal since they were based on pitcher unfairness – Josiah Rayburn led the NBBO with 56 in 261 innings. Strikeouts were even rarer since batters could request the type of pitch they wanted – Terrance Sampson was the strikeout king with all of 31 in 258.2 innings for the Sportsman’s Club. Strikeouts and walks were so rare that the entire 24-team New York League combined for 1,051 walks and 1,229 Ks by their pitchers in nearly 15,000 innings. About five out of every six hits were singles, so there were ample opportunities to steal and nearly every one of the NBBO’s 48 teams averaged one stolen base per game or more. Batters rarely saw more than a few pitches per at bat, and pitchers could easily take to the mound every other game.

The above rules on balls and strikes also meant that balls and walks weren't a matter of a pitcher lacking control, but they were more of a matter of the pitcher being perceived by the umpire as unfair to the batter. This basically meant Josiah Rayburn was a jerk instead of a comparatively wild pitcher.

The lack of specialized gloves meant error rates were huge. Teams typically committed about half a dozen fielding errors per game, and seeing a team commit a double-digit amount over the course of nine innings was not at all uncommon. Passed Balls were a very frequent occurrence too, as the New York League’s first Golden Glove catcher, Joram Stolk of Orange B.B.C. committed no less than one hundred of them in 66 games.

The most striking difference between the NBBO version of the sport in 1857 and now came in the long ball, because back then you could forget about home runs. The softer balls and huge fields – center field at several NBBO venues were over 500 feet from home – meant most of the round-trippers were of the Inside the Park variety, and in 1857 the 48 teams combined to hit a total of 138 home runs, or about three per team. Granite B.C. were the NBBO leaders with seven. There was not an individual Home Run king in the NBBO’s first season – a trio of players hit three home runs each to share the crown. The almost total lack of round trippers also meant that triples were a far more common sight than they are in the 21st Century.

What this all meant was that even though batters didn’t pack much of a punch – OPS was in the .640 range in 1857 – the average team scored between 7.5 and eight runs per game, with Eckford of Greenpoint having the NBBO’s best offense at 9.3 runs per outing on nearly thirteen hits per game and the worst offense still scoring more than six times per game.

It wouldn't be long before some of the strange rules of 1857 baseball were changed and the sport began to look like its modern version, but in that first season things were different...very different.