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 New Hampshire Baseball Quiz QUESTION 1: How and when was baseball created, and how did a New Hampshire native play a role in it? ANSWER: Historians generally agree that, in 1845, Alexander Cartwright, a New York clerk and member of the Knickerbocker Base Ball Club, was the first to set down rules for baseball as we know the game today. A fellow member of the Knickerbockers, Daniel Adams, born in Mont Vernon, NH, is credited with refining the rules of the game in the 1850s. Creating the Game
Sportswriter Henry Chadwick commented that baseball had evolved from the English game of "rounders," although it bore only faint resemblance to it by the mid-19th century. A game similar to baseball, called "town ball," was played at town meetings in New England. But the early games were informal. Baseball and related games were played primarily in urban social clubs, those in New York City being most prominent. The first games following the Cartwright rules were played in the mid-1840s at Hoboken, New Jersey's, Elysian Fields. New Hampshire native Daniel Adams, a New York City physician, served as president of the club and as head of the first convention of baseball players in 1857. In the following year, he was instrumental in establishing the National Association of Base Ball Players, for which he served as chairman of the rules committee. Among other contributions, Adams made all the balls for the Knickerbockers and is said to have been responsible for adding the shortstop position to the game. The Civil War spread baseball across the land. Country boys and factory workers took the sport home when the war ended in 1865. By the end of the 1860s, baseball was indeed the national pastime, and New Hampshire shared an American passion for the game. At first, it was a game played in upper class clubs, but as little expense was involved, it soon became a game for all. Although the explosion of interest in baseball followed the Civil War, Manchester chartered the Granite Base Ball Club as early as 1860. By 1866, Portsmouth, Concord, and Barrington, among others, had established town teams. These teams and the amateur leagues which developed were sources of great community pride, often generating intense rivalries between towns. By the turn of the century, virtually every village would have its "nine." Baseball and the Popular Press Baseball rapidly captured the interest of the press. Within a few years after Alexander Cartwright established rules for the game, baseball was regularly reported in city papers. With establishment of the National League, newspapers across the country were devoting greater space to baseball news and box scores. By the 1860s, New Hampshire papers occasionally reported baseball news from around the nation. In 1866, the Concord Daily Monitor reported on a Harvard College tour to New York and Connecticut to play several well-known amateur nines. By 1880, Manchester, Nashua, and Concord papers carried news of baseball games and regular updates on league standings. Concord's own Jacob Morse, along with Henry Chadwick, would be among the first baseball journalists in America. A reporter for the Boston Herald in the 1880s and 1890s, Morse wrote an early history of the game, Sphere and Ash, in 1888. Shortly after the turn of the century, Morse established Baseball Magazine, which was published through the 1950s.  |
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