\u201cHow Baseball Happened: Outrageous Lies Exposed, The Truth Revealed<\/a>.\u201d<\/p>\nGilbert knows the story of the sport\u2019s rise better than almost anyone. And he knows which parts of that origin story hold up in the historical record, and which parts are more mythology.<\/p>\n
There\u2019s a common story that the first recorded baseball game was held on June 19, 1846 in Hoboken, at a sprawling park called Elysian Fields, hosted by the first baseball club, called the New York Knickerbockers. The club faced off not against a rival club, but against a squad of their friends called the New York Nine.<\/p>\n
Gilbert can point out a few problems with that story. That game wasn\u2019t the first to be recorded \u2014 a few in New York had been written about in local newspapers months before. And the Knickerbockers weren\u2019t the first baseball club.<\/p>\n
\u201cBecause of accidents of history, the New York Public Library has a huge amount of records and information from the Knickerbocker Club. And other clubs, there was almost nothing,\u201d Gilbert said. \u201cBecause they left a lot of records, their importance is exaggerated.\u201d<\/p>\n
The Knickerbockers lost that hallowed game on June 19, 1846, by the way, and they lost it badly. The final score was 23-1.<\/p>\n
It begs a question, Gilbert said: If the Knickerbockers were supposedly the most important group to baseball\u2019s creation, how could they have lost so badly?<\/p>\n
\u201cImagine if you and I invented a sport, and then we rounded up a bunch of novices to play it, and we lost 23-1,\u201d Gilbert said. \u201cThat’s sort of absurd.\u201d<\/p>\n
But Elysian Fields was real. And, Gilbert said, it was as important a place to baseball\u2019s development as any.<\/p>\n
New York City had few open spaces for people to use at that time. The Stevens family, which founded Hoboken and once owned all of the land that makes up the city today, knew there was a need for a grand park for city residents to use.<\/p>\n
The answer to that problem was Elysian Fields. The sprawling riverfront park, served by a cross-Hudson ferry to Barclays Street in Lower Manhattan, became a place where New Yorkers could go to get some fresh air and experience the latest and greatest in entertainment.<\/p>\n
\u201cThere were all kinds of events. P.T. Barnum put on things there. There were Penobscot Indians doing canoe races,\u201d Gilbert said. \u201cThe Elysian Fields becomes an ancestor of about five or six different types of institutions that we have around now.\u201d<\/p>\n
And critically, Gilbert said, there were ballfields. Ballfields in the heart of a park visited by thousands and thousands of people, giving baseball exposure to fuel its growth.<\/p>\n
\u201cThere was a real problem with playing space, and you could argue that the Stevens family making these playing fields available in Hoboken might have saved baseball, and certainly helped its development,\u201d Gilbert said.<\/p>\n
One of the people who stumbled on baseball at Elysian Fields was Henry Chadwick, a sports journalist who in 1856 was returning from covering a game of cricket \u2014 which had been played in America since British colonists arrived \u2014 when he saw a baseball game in the park.<\/p>\n
\u201cHe’s shocked by the level of organization and how seriously it’s all being taken. They’re having practices in uniforms and people are keeping score,\u201d Gilbert said. \u201cIt hits him like a religious experience that this is the game that Americans are going to play, not cricket.\u201d<\/p>\n
Today, Chadwick is sometimes called the \u201cFather of Baseball.\u201d He invented statistics like batting average, created the box score and wrote the earliest baseball books.<\/p>\n
Eventually, the sport outgrew the park. By the late 1850s and early 1860s, more baseball clubs had been established in Manhattan, Brooklyn and beyond. Crowds grew as people started following the clubs and taking an interest in who won and who lost. But Elysian Fields lacked the infrastructure to handle crowds, Gilbert said, and the Stevens family wasn\u2019t interested in making that sort of investment.<\/p>\n
\u201cThere’s really no such thing as fans of team sports in the United States until baseball in the 1860s. And the Elysian Fields look like Central Park’s baseball diamonds,\u201d Gilbert said. \u201cThere’s no stands. There’s no berm to sit on or anything. There’s just a diamond in the middle of some grass.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cPeople played there for decades after that, but it no longer was that important to baseball because baseball was turning into something else,\u201d Gilbert said. \u201cIt didn’t fit there.\u201d<\/p>\n
Elysian Fields is gone, save for a slice of land with a small playground dubbed Elysian Park. Visitors today can find brass markers at the intersection of 11th Street and Washington Street \u2014 the location of the original baseball diamond.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"It\u2019s baseball season, and the nation\u2019s pastime has for generations been a core part of American summer culture.…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":308804,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[9,24,55,54,56],"class_list":["post-308803","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-new-york-city","tag-new-york","tag-new-york-city","tag-new-york-city-headlines","tag-new-york-city-news","tag-ny"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/308803","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=308803"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/308803\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/308804"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=308803"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=308803"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=308803"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}