A HISTORY OF UK BASEBALL
A brief history of UK baseball Early bat and ball games
THE SABR UK EXAMINER
Archive of articles and pictures
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News and Articles
On January 12 of this year I did something that I should have done years earlier. [pause] I put a counter on our website, www.sabruk.org. It was a free counter from Statcounter.com – got to give them a plug. SABR UK has had a website for years, but I’ve never had a clue as to how many hits it got. We did get the odd email from someone who came across our email, but they were very few and far between. When the stats started coming in, I was amazed. It was not just the odd expat SABR member. There were hundreds of hits, from all over the world. So far we’ve received hits in 68 countries. If you’ll indulge me, I want to read the entire list right now: Argentina Austria Australia Bahamas Belgium Brazil Bulgaria Canada Chile China (plus Hong Kong) Colombia Costa Rica Croatia Czech Republic Denmark Dominican Republic Egypt Finland France Gambia Germany Greece Hungary India Indonesia Ireland Israel Italy Ivory Coast Japan Lebanon Lithuania Mexico Monaco Mongolia Morocco Netherlands Netherland Antilles New Zealand Nigeria (plus offshore) Northern Marianas (Saipan) Norway Oman Pakistan Panama Peru Poland Portugal (plus Madeira) Philippines Romania Russia Saint Lucia Saudi Arabia Singapore Slovenia South Africa Spain Sri Lanka Sweden Switzerland Taiwan Thailand Trinidad and Tobago Turkey UAE UK USA (inc Puerto Rico & Hawaii) Venezuela (Hugo Chavez, like Castro, a baseball fan?) These are obviously not just expats. One of the joys of Statcounter is that they record how the person came to the web site. A lot come through Google and a lot through Wikipedia. If you Google “UK baseball”, we come in second. And these Googles are often in German or Arabic. Get this: someone in the Gulf of Guineau, no doubt in an oil platform off the Niger Delta, entered my name in google.it in Italian, and found one of my examiner articles. I don’t believe in having too much ego, but this is hard to ignore. It is also obvious that a lot of the surfers came across our website looking for something else. However, they still come to our website. Someone in Moscow today entered “brief history of uk” in google Russia – the second entry was our article “A Brief History of UK baseball”. They clicked on it. A London surfer entered “Arsenal babe” in google and came across Mike Ross’ article “Babe Ruth makes waves at Arsenal that reach Parliament”, in Examiner 11. Who knows if a spark of interest might have been ignited. Here’s a summary:: Average visits per month 1120 Average pageloads per month 1746 Average repeat visitors 50 The bottom line of all this is, people are paying attention. People are listening. We are not alone in this universe. This is very gratifying. Sometimes when I think of SABR UK, I feel like a typical Jewish mother, “You don’t write, you don’t phone.” But it’s okay now, for I know now that whether or not people write, they read. And now we have further gratification, because Major League Baseball has sent a film crew to document our research on the origins of baseball. Welcome. We should be proud of the work we’ve done, because we’ve attracted attention from all over the world. To me, this is perfectly appropriate. I’ve always said that we’re in a unique position to uncover the origins of baseball. I mean, pean, pean, people like David Block are spending thousands of dollars of their kid’s inheritance to come over here, but for us, the resources are just around the corner. We care about baseball, we care about baseball history and research, and we live in Britain. There are so many open areas of research, and frankly, they’re just waiting for us to choose one. One other point – because we do live here, we would understand more the social implications of ancient texts. In other words, the structure of British and American societies in the late 1700’s were remarkably different. Maybe a coincidence, but the first references to baseball found date from the period that America was splitting off from Britain. Which brings home another point. The search for baseball’s origins is more than just sports history; it had political and sociological implications. The question of why baseball took on in America but floundered in Britain, is central to the understanding of how a family of bat and ball games coalesced into the Knickerbocker game. To us, that is the Big Question and again, we are in a unique position to understand it. I mean, when I was a teenage I knew all I knew about Britain from watching the Avengers; when I finally came over here, it wasn’t like that at all. Whether local or expat, because we live here, we are more fit to understand the social structure in place when these games were developing in Britain. In a different vein, lately I’ve been reading biographies of all the founding fathers – Washington, Adams, Jefferson, Sam Adams, Benjamin Franklin, Alexander Hamilton, John Hancock – in a attempt to rediscover the country that I’d left 21 years ago, which was never to be a permanent change. I feel America has lost its way recently and I was trying to remind myself about what was great about the country of my birth. And it really was an incredible story. As a deeper understanding of that time period and the varying political and sociological situations seeped in, it became obvious that the general British attitude towards its wayward colony hadn’t changed a whole lot in 230 years. Back to the point, I think the question of why baseball succeeded in America and failed in Britain, can only be approached from the position of understanding the reality of the late 18th and early 19th centuries. No one can deny that baseball has international origins. I think this is symbolized by the hot dog. It was invented by an Englishman for a German clientele in an American ballpark. And from Britain, going back in time, we have possible French, German, Polish, Finnish, and Berber influences. Berber??? And certainly last year’s World Baseball Classic confirmed the international appeal of the game; it was not just marketing; it was real. On top of this, we have the rich history of baseball as played in the United Kingdom. Baseball was particularly active over here in the 1890’s and 1930’s, but it has never gone away. This also is a field that is ripe for the picking. Britain is like a surface littered with dinosaur bones – it won’t take much digging to unearth something new. We have copies of two scrapbooks, the Kay Marshall scrapbook, from Joseph Wright who lived in the North of England and put together a scrapbook of clippings and photographs on baseball in the 1890’s; and the Wilson Cross scrapbook, put together by the chairman of the American Club in London in the late teens and early twenties. “Pic” Cross hobnobbed with the rich and famous, and personally escorted George V when he met the Giants and White Sox in 1924. Both these resources have only had their surfaces scratched. In our search for baseball’s origins this topic has often been given the short shrift. In fact, we’ve even had the discussion whether the “Society for American Baseball Research” means that we are only interested in American baseball. Seriously, if anyone from Cleveland watching this, we need clarification. Or is it because the ‘A’ was inserted for phonetics – I mean, SBR is hardly a word. In the search for baseball’s origins, we are lucky to have Larry McCray. I don’t mean we’re lucky to have Larry McCray in attendance – take a bow – but we’re just lucky to have him. You see, most of us think it’s tedious to chronicle and coordinate the worldwide research on baseball’s origins, but Larry seems to enjoy it! Not only that, but his communiqués point out references that are unclear, thus giving direction to potential researchers. I confess it was me that encouraged Mike to appoint you his successor as Chair of the SABR Origins committee – I simply told him that you were doing the work anyway! Thank you thank you thank you, because he wanted me to do it! I might also add that Larry teaches at M.I.T., on the north bank of the Charles in Boston. I don’t know whether that makes him the Old Perfesser or the Young Perfesser, but we’re honoured to have him. Today we’re going to release the SABR UK Examiner 14, and anthology of articles from issues 1 – 13. I’m not sure the best time to release it; I don’t want your copies to get covered in chilli sauce during dinner. I want to apologize for the long gap between issues. If I need an excuse, it is because I’ve been working on a novel, which takes place in one night and has more than 100,000 words. Besides that, I commute four hours a day, car to train to tube and back again, and then come home to a seven-year-old who loves nothing more than to play dinosaurs with his daddy. And he’s the most important thing in the world for me – much more than you boffins. So if you can imagine me spending 12 hours commuting and working and commuting, and when I get home I run around – not only like a T-Rex, but like a spinosaurus, giganatosaurus, carcharodontosaurus, velociraptor, deinonychus, or any other major predator. This guy knows his dinosaurs, and my performance is brutally critiqued. This moan also means I need help. No, not that kind of help, though I’ve considered it. We’d like to issue a new Examiner with new articles, so I’m putting out a call for submissions. I can’t encourage it enough; who knows, someone on a Nigerian oil platform might google your name too.e too.Martin Hoerchner - 16 June 2007
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