1859 Birth of College Baseball
Williams College baseball has a rich history, which dates back to an 1859 game in Pittsfield against arch-rival Amherst – the first college baseball game in American history.
In the spring of 1859, the Amherst student body president challenged Williams to “a friendly game of ball” one day in 1859. A furious round of deliberations between the two schools occurred via mail, and eventually the ground rules were agreed upon. The game would be played July 1 (the academic calendar was vastly different then, adjusted as it was by the need of most students to be home for farming season) in Pittsfield. Teams would have seventeen players each, and they would be selected by a student ballot. The first team to score 65 runs (or “tallies”) would win.
Williams suggested that a chess match between the schools be added, and it was agreed that this would be played the following day, also in Pittsfield.
The game would be played using Massachusetts Rules, which were commonly in use in New England at the time. These rules approximated cricket as much as modern-day baseball. (If you still believe that Abner Doubleday invented baseball with a bunch of school kids in Elihu Phinney’s cow pasture in Cooperstown, NY, in 1839, well… stop it.)
Amherst Express Article featured to the left
Massachusetts Rules
To picture the field under Massachusetts Rules, think of a square as opposed to a diamond. The four corners of the square are each of the four bases. The four bases are sixty feet apart, and are not slabs on the ground but rather four-foot high wooden stakes that stick out of the ground. Players grab the stake as they round the bases, and once they are on base they must hold onto the stake until the ball is put in play. Home plate is located midway between Fourth Base and First Base, and is therefore only thirty feet from first base. A run is scored when a player crosses fourth base. Therefore, after a player bats he will not return to home plate until his next at-bat.
There was no foul territory — any batted ball in any direction was a fair ball. (Remember, the game was played on an open field. The Pittsfield Base Ball Club, the official host for the event, selected the “town lot” at the corner of North and Maplewood, as the site for the game. The field was actually a few blocks from where Wahconah Park sits today.)
This diagram shows the dimensions of the field under Massachusetts Rules
The pitcher (or “thrower”) had to throw the ball where the batter (or “striker”) told him to. The pitcher’s mound was actually a box drawn on the middle of the diamond, thirty-five feet from home plate.
The schools agreed that any ball caught in the air is an out. (There was some debate about this rule at the time. In some areas, a ball caught on the first bounce was also an out.) Both schools agreed that “soaking” a runner – hitting him with a thrown ball – would likewise represent an out. Each team was allowed one out per inning.
With the bases so close together and with no foul territory and no fences to swing for, the game emphasized speed and defense.
(Amherst won that historic game, by a score of 73-32 – and Amherst won the chess match that day as well. So let’s not dwell too long on that…)
Press coverage
Three newspapers covered the game – the Amherst Express, the Adams Transcript and the hometown Pittsfield Sun. The Transcript noted that four passenger cars full of students came down to Pittsfield from Williamstown for the game – approximately 150 students in all. The paper noted that one Williams student predicted that “there would not be five (students) left in Williamstown.”
The Sun reported that there were fewer Amherst students in attendance because Williams professors gave students the day off to go watch the game but the Amherst professors did not. Representatives from the Pittsfield Base Ball Club and the North Adams Base Ball Club were out in force, as were local business and political leaders from Pittsfield and the surrounding towns. The Williams and Amherst chess clubs were also there, as guests of the Pittsfield Chess Club.
The two balls used during the game are on display at Amherst
More history from that famous first game is provided by “Baseball In the Berkshires” a non-profit organization that celebrates baseball history in Berkshire County:
Amherst’s account of the game provided exact specifications for its ball (2.5 ounces in weight and 6.5 inches in circumference) and estimated the Williams ball at about the same. A modern-day baseball weighs at least twice that and is about 50 percent larger around. Mathematics and physics dictate that a present-day ball is harder than the balls used in Pittsfield that day. While that was good for the baserunners who were put out by being hit by throws, it would have cut down on the long ball and strong throws from fielders.
Both teams were feted that evening by their Pittsfield hosts, where the Williams players presented their game ball as a trophy to the Amherst team. Both balls are still displayed, side by side, in a glass case at Amherst. The next day Amherst, with Claflin one of its three players, also won the chess match, Williams resigning on the 48th move.
Almost all of the 26 collegians playing in the first game went on to graduate from Amherst, Williams, or some other school. Claflin, the only man to participate in both the baseball and chess competitions, went into education and wound up a high-school principal and state representative in Chicago. Pierce, the first of the three productive hitters behind him, eventually became city administrator and police chief in New Orleans.
The Civil War was just over history’s horizon as the young men played that day, and at least 11 of them served the Union cause as officers or doctors before war’s end. The Williams starting thrower, Robert Edes Beecher, a nephew of the famous abolitionist preacher Henry Ward Beecher, became a lieutenant colonel in the Union Army.
One player from each side died in the war. Henry Gridley of Amherst, a lieutenant with a New York infantry regiment, was shot dead on a Georgia battlefield in 1864. George Alanson Parker of Williams became a naval doctor and died on shipboard that same year of a fever contracted from sailors he was treating.
