First Time for a Pasttime
American Documents: The Knickerbocker Baseball Club Rules
2026 is America’s 250th birthyear. To celebrate, I’m highlighting 50+ significant American documents from our history. So far I have covered The Mayflower Compact, Patrick Henry’s Speech, The Lee Resolution, The Declaration of Independence, the Articles of Confederation, the Treaty of Paris, the Virginia Plan, The Northwest Ordinance, The Constitution, the Bill of Rights, the Louisiana Purchase, the Star-Spangled Banner, the Monroe Doctrine, and the Indian Removal Act.
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Play Ball!
There’s almost no chance you expected this one. I didn’t either. Nevertheless, in the book I’m using for this little project, and after reading up on it I thought it was kind of neat.
So. Baseball! Fun sport. It’s been around for a minute…officially speaking, it’s 181 years old in America, but it started before that. The Knickerbocker Club was the big one that put these rules together and they formed the basis of the sport’s evolution.
Here’s a link. I’m fascinated by the fact that the very first rule was punctuality. Baseball was a gentleman’s game after all, right? You start on time. There were addenda for eventualities like guys who showed up late: you could sub in someone who wasn’t on the roster (“Put me in, coach!”) but only if both teams agreed to it. If a team member showed up late and had already been replaced, he was out of luck for that game.
Other rules dealt with the measurement of the fields (“forty-two paces from home to second, forty-two paces from first to third”) and what constituted a run or a foul. Also, originally they didn’t call points “runs.” They were “aces,” as the language of card games had more initial influence on the sport.
There was a league president, and an umpire for each game, and each team had to agree to the rules beforehand. Boilerplate stuff. Home runs were against the rules; those were fouls. Nowadays you still can’t hit it outside of the first or third baselines, but back then you couldn’t hit it straight of the park either. If it left the field, it was a foul. Like many sports, rules changed as the culture grew and players went through the iterative process to build on the work of their forbears.
Hitting it out of the park is a more regular occurrence now. Plus it looks cool, so we should let them score off of it. (I think we should raise the NBA hoops by about six inches for the same reason but whatever.)
Overall I think it’s cool to see what the clubs agreed to when the first formal set of regs started to make the rounds. The fact that it started first in our history probably has a lot to do with why it’s America’s Pasttime, even as some other sports have grown to dominate their own sectors.
Make sure you read my novel HEARTLANDERS when it comes out in June. There’s a baseball scene.
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