While the modern iteration of Amherst College’s baseball team is approaching three decades of minimal success in NCAA Division III, its origins date back over 165 years. That’s before John Smoltz was regularly announcing how much he hates baseball on national baseball broadcasts, before Nolan Ryan demonstrated the thrilling force of old man strength, before the Shot Heard Round the World, before the Iron Horse, before the Red Sox were cursed or Mordecai Brown lost the end of his index finger.
The team began before rules were consistent.1A note on the genesis of this post: On a train ride back from the Newark airport I searched for “Baseball” in the Hartford Courant archives on Newspapers.com, set my sights anywhere starting in 1839, and sorted by oldest available reference. Since 1839 is apocryphally considered the year when Abner Doubleday established the modern game of baseball, it’s a useful starting point for the search. But it took several more decades before there was standardization. Starting at 11 in the morning on the “cool, clear, and bracing”2Springfield Daily Republican, July 2, 1859. day of July 1, 1859, Amherst faced Williams in the first recorded “Base Ball” game between two colleges.
It’s a small miracle that the report for the Daily Republican managed to track any statistics. They delightfully use “Tallies” instead of “Runs”, and a careful observer will note that the teams played 25 rounds or “innings”, with 24 outs attributed to various Amherst players and 26 to Williams. This Massachusetts Rules form of baseball was closer in construction to cricket given its lack of fair/foul distinction, and each inning requiring only a single out.3James Overmeyer, “July 1, 1859: Baseball goes to college,” Society for American Baseball Research Games Project. Teams would play to an agreed-upon score; on that Friday, the target was 65.
Each roster had 13 men, more similar again to cricket than modern baseball. Pierce, Boone, Hastings, Bush, Anderson: Their lineups read the same as any group of Major Leaguers playing in Boston before 1959.
It’s unclear who challenged whom or how the required score was determined, but after playing three and a half hours—a respectable time in 2015—Amherst handily defeated Williams, 73-32.4The Daily Republican reports that Williams scored 33 tallies, but all other articles I’ve read about this game give their total as 32.
Did this light a fire beneath the feet of the Williams baseball team, at least the hodgepodge group that had been scrounged together to play against the famous Amherst club? Was this Williams team the original Mighty Ducks, the Cool Runnings of mid-Massachusetts antebellum collegiate baseball?
All you fans of Betteridge’s Law can guess what happened next: Amherst and Williams ran it back the following summer on July 4, 1860, and it was more of the same.5Hartford Courant, July 7, 1860. Amherst won 70-39—a small improvement by Williams, and still a decisive victory for Amherst.
That’s not the end of the story. These two baseball games were, in fact, billed as twin events of baseball and chess! That’s right: in 1859, the Daily Republican reported that the only spectators on behalf of Amherst, outside of their own players, were their chess champions. Then, several newspapers that reported on their 1860 match, including the Daily Republican again,6Springfield Daily Republican, July 6, 1860. specifically call out the matchup as one of both baseball and chess. Surely, the Williams fans were more than pleased to earn the victory in chess in 1860 over baseball.
Postscript
These historical explorations through the lens of local reporting are utterly fascinating. It’s exciting to discover insights through primary sources—tidbits like the use of “innings” and the outs-versus-innings comparison that suggested stronger connections to cricket than I would have expected—and then confirm and refine those findings from secondary articles. I found so much I could dig into while looking at the Springfield Daily Republic and Hartford Courant, and had a hard time focusing myself on this early instance of collegiate baseball.
I’m more broadly satisfied by poking around Newspapers.com because I have the opportunity to read an article, see an advertisement, and otherwise experience a bit of work made by a real person that is, in the broad scheme of human creation, fleeting and likely to be lost to history in most meaningful ways. Our rate of creation has only increased, with LLMs putting a fine point on precisely how much humanity has made, and how precious human thought and work are.
Creating is wonderful. I write this blog. I record podcasts. Very few people engage with either, but I keep at it each week because I find it valuable for myself. It’s nice to imagine some curious person off in the future stumbling across my work and, whether the content has a real impact, they may enjoy that minor act of discovery and recognize that they found something from a human; that there is some thread of kinship in the act of creation and subsequent preservation that has defined our sentience and ability to form culture for thousands of years.
So, you small-time reporters from the mid-1800s, I’m glad you went to those small-time baseball games and wrote a few paragraphs about them. I’m that much richer a person for having found your work.
- 1A note on the genesis of this post: On a train ride back from the Newark airport I searched for “Baseball” in the Hartford Courant archives on Newspapers.com, set my sights anywhere starting in 1839, and sorted by oldest available reference. Since 1839 is apocryphally considered the year when Abner Doubleday established the modern game of baseball, it’s a useful starting point for the search. But it took several more decades before there was standardization.
- 2Springfield Daily Republican, July 2, 1859.
- 3James Overmeyer, “July 1, 1859: Baseball goes to college,” Society for American Baseball Research Games Project.
- 4The Daily Republican reports that Williams scored 33 tallies, but all other articles I’ve read about this game give their total as 32.
- 5Hartford Courant, July 7, 1860.
- 6Springfield Daily Republican, July 6, 1860.