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| SABR AGM reveals two major projects to highlight baseball's British origins |
The UK chapter of the Society of American Baseball Research (SABR) held its AGM on Saturday, June 7 at the Three Kings Pub in Clerkenwell, London, and two American guest speakers revealed major projects that will highlight Britain as the primary source for the origins of the game.
About 25 people attended the AGM in one of London’s more idiosyncratic and knick-knack filled pubs, and SABR Co-chair Mike Ross announced that formal AGM chapter business would be suspended for this year so that members could hear about the two exciting projects – and one important historical revelation.
Baseball and Cricket Exhibition
First to speak was Beth Hise, a professional museum and exhibition curator who grew up as a baseball fan in Cleveland, Ohio and then developed a love of cricket after moving to Australia at the age of 20.
Beth has been commissioned by the Marylebone Cricket Club (MCC) to curate a major exhibition on Baseball and Cricket that will open in March 2010 at the MCC headquarters at Lords Cricket Ground and will subsequently travel to the Melbourne Cricket Club Collection in Australia and the Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, New York over the following two years.
Beth has already curated an exhibition on The Ashes for the MCC that made use of new research to develop a deeper understanding of cricket’s origins and its roots in social history. The new exhibition on baseball and cricket that she has now been asked to head will provide the first international perspective on the relationships between the two sports.
The exhibition will look at the origins of both games and the bat-and-balls sports that came before and after, the pioneers who developed professional teams in both sports, and the overseas tours and attempts to internationalise on the part of both baseball and cricket. An important part of the exhibition will look at baseball in Britain and cricket in the United States.
“What makes this exhibition so fascinating and the possibilities so rich,” Beth told the SABR AGM, “is that both sports are part of the fabric of their cultures, and provide a narrative of their societies. Both sports spread from a local base (the New York area for baseball, the South East for cricket), and both have grappled with issues of colonialism and racism as they expanded.”
The Marylebone Cricket Club, which essentially ran the sport in England and around the world until 1969 and still updates and enforces the laws of the game from its base at Lords, has recently been modernising its image, and the Baseball and Cricket exhibition is part of a wider outlook that the MCC is trying to adopt.
Beth Hise is just beginning her researches for the exhibition in the UK, and the help of UK SABR members and research they have already undertaken will be instrumental in filling in part of the story that the exhibition will tell.
Beth is aware of the event taking part on Saturday, October 4 this year at the Somerset Country Cricket Ground in Taunton, when a team of international cricketers led by Marcus Trescothick will take on the GB Baseball Team in a seven-inning game of baseball, and she noted that this might be only the second time in history that players from the two sports have played baseball at that level. The first was in 1859, when the England cricket team played against a professional baseball team in Rochester, New York. So the MCC will be sending photographers to cover the event in Taunton as another chapter in the relations between the two sports.
Documentary on Baseball’s Origins
Beth’s presentation was then followed by the world premiere of an informative and moving hour-long documentary called Baseball Discovered, produced by Sam Marchiano for MLB.com.
The film, made on a shoestring and, as Sam explained, as a “labour of love”, explodes once and for all the myth that baseball was “invented” in the United States and instead traces the origins of the sport through a variety of bat-and-ball games that go back to the Middle Ages in Britain. The documentary will soon be available for viewing through the MLB website and Itunes.
The film includes some footage from last year’s SABR AGM, and then follows research trails established by UK SABR members to discover ancient sports such as Stoolball being played in Sussex and Ball-and-Trap, a game that survives only in certain pubs in Canterbury.
Historians of the game have long noted a reference to baseball in Jane Austen’s novel Northanger Abbey, but the real revelation in the film – and on exhibit at the SABR meeting in its original version – was a diary kept by a lawyer called William Bray, in which he notes, in 1755, playing baseball with friends – both men and women – at the house of an acquaintance in Sussex. The diary was part of a collection salvaged from a garden shed in Sussex by a local amateur historian, then misplaced, and found again just in time to get into the film.
Sam Marchiano’s film also reveals an ordinance passed by the local authorities in Pittsfield, Massachusetts in 1791 banning baseball from being played in the centre of town, which has led to Pittsfield claiming pre-eminence over Cooperstown as the American home of the sport.
Fascinating as they are, none of these early references provides a coherent evolutionary narrative that demonstrates clearly how cricket, baseball, ball-and-trap, stoolball, rounders, Welsh baseball and other bat-and-ball games are related, or establishes a chronological progression. But what they and the film clearly demonstrate is that baseball’s origins, at least this side of antiquity, lie in England, and the documentary reveals an entertaining and exhilarating process of discovery.
SABR
The UK chapter of the Society of American Baseball Research, called the Bobby Thomson Chapter after the legendary Scotman (born in Glasgow) who hit “the shot heard round the world” in the 1951 playoff series between the Dodgers and Giants, was founded about 15 years ago in that same Clerkenwell pub.
Key figures then and for much of the chapter’s existence were and are Mike Ross, Andy Parkes, Barry Winetrobe, Michael Olenick, Martin Hoerchner and Patrick Carroll, father of BSUK London Coach-in-Residence Liam Carroll.
Patrick Carroll set the theme for the AGM at the very beginning of the meeting with recollections from the first Major League Baseball game he ever saw in person (Giants v Dodgers at Ebbets Field in 1952) and his first cricket match (an MCC 11 v Middlesex at Lords). “How is it possible,” Patrick asked the meeting, “that anyone can like one sport and not the other?”
Many of the UK chapter’s members are aging (Mike Ross is stepping down this year as head of the organisation) and there is an air of gentle obsession about the dress in which many of them choose to attend the AGM (a Brooklyn Dodger shirt, 1920s New York Yankee pinstripes, a Hanshin Tigers T-shirt and a Houston Colt-45 jersey and Jeff Bagwell Astros shirt were all on display). But SABR as constituted in the United States is a serious research organisation, and the UK chapter is no different. Some extremely valuable history relating to British baseball and the origins of the sport has been uncovered and developed by SABR members over the years, and the fruits are on display in Sam Marchiano’s film and will contribute significantly to Beth Hise’s MCC exhibition.
For more information on SABR UK – new members are always welcome – email the Secretary, Michael Olenick or the Webmaster, Martin Hoerchner.
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