Town Ball in Newark - 1869

Recently on SABR’s 19th Century Baseball e-mail list there was discussion of a town ball game played in Kentucky in 1866. Town ball is a game with many similarities to base ball (19th Century spelling) which lost out to base ball as the preferred game in the mid 1850’s. Of course, there was no magic date when people ceased playing town ball and base ball took over and some clubs kept playing town ball through the Civil War.

In the discussion of this town ball game, leading baseball historians John Thorn and Richard Hersberger considered the 1866 game to be one of the latest games on record. While researching the Eureka Base Ball Club of Newark, I found an article in the Newark Evening Courier from May 25, 1869 describing the annual game of the old Knickerbocker Club (Newark, not New York). There is an amazing amount of detail including high lights of the difference between this game and the “modern” game of base ball.

The differences include the use of “miniature bread shovels” and “exaggerated exercise clubs” instead of “nicely rounded ash” and wooden stakes placed fifteen inches high instead of bases. The pitcher’s primary role was to “send in balls which could be struck” making the pitcher primarily a feeder. Incredibly there is a box score for this game that lists 19 players on each team. Interestingly only a few names match those active in the Newark base ball teams of the era.

The Evening Courier began operations in 1866 as the Radical Republican paper of Newark. It had excellent baseball coverage and at one point even hired what had to have been one of New Jersey’s first sportswriters. In spite of what a member of the Eureka vintage base ball team suggested, there is no evidence to support the idea that his name was Jerry Izenberg. When I sent out an e-mail about this on the 19th century e-mail list, someone wrote that this was vintage vintage base ball.