The Early Years of College Baseball

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After the Williams-Amherst game in 1959, collegiate baseball was officially off and running.  Soon the sport would move far beyond the confines of western Massachusetts.  (College baseball had a head start on other major sports – intercollegiate football was first played on November 6, 1869 when Rutgers played Princeton in New Brunswick, NJ.  The first college basketball game did not take place until January 18, 1896, when the University of Iowa invited the University of Chicago to play the new sport.)

The Williams-Amherst game of 1859 was followed by another game between the two schools on July 4, 1860 and was emulated by schools far and wide.  Within a year, as word of the game spread, other colleges in New England formed baseball teams using Massachusetts Rules.  By 1861, colleges including Bowdoin, Dartmouth, Middlebury, Brown, and Trinity all had formed teams and began playing against one another.  Elsewhere around the country, Fordham, Princeton, Hamilton and Kenyon also had active baseball teams by 1861. 

With the end of the Civil War, many returning veterans who had played the game while in the service began enrolling in college – bringing a love of baseball with them to campus.  But while these veterans were at war, the game of baseball had shifted around them.  While most of the baseball played in the Union and Confederate camps appears to have been the Massachusetts game, many towns and cities were gradually adopting the New York rules during the war years.  Even in New England, the last stronghold of the Massachusetts Rules, the New York game began to gain in popularity.  In July of 1862, the celebrated Brooklyn Excelsiors toured throughout Massachusetts, giving many New Englanders their first look at the New York rules in action.  The Brooklyn team was acclaimed as one of America’s finest, and representatives of many local baseball clubs made the trip to Boston to watch them.  They came away impressed, both with the team and the brand of baseball they played.  When the National Association of Base Ball Players made major rules changes that mirrored the New York game, the older Massachusetts Rules began to fall out of favor.  As colleges began to follow the recommendations of the NABPP, college baseball looked less like an Americanized version of cricket and began to more closely resemble the game we know today.

Harvard, which had been playing baseball on campus on an intramural basis since 1858, finally played an intercollegiate game in 1863, when Harvard defeated Brown in Providence.  It was 1864, however, that proved to be the critical year for Harvard baseball.  In the spring, the faculty agreed that a permanent diamond could be laid out on the campus, and Harvard played what then passed for a full slate of games against other schools and semi-pro teams.  In June of 1864, in what was to be the centerpiece of the season, Harvard hosted Williams in a game in Worcester, where the annual Harvard-Yale regatta was also taking place on the same day.  Harvard was favored, since the Crimson was coming off a win against Bowdoin and a narrow loss to the crack semipro Lowell Club of Boston.  Williams pulled off an upset that day, winning 12-9. 

In November of 1864, Williams accepted a challenge from Princeton, and travelled to New Jersey for the first intersectional collegiate game in American history.  Princeton (which was then known as the College of New Jersey and played under the name the Nassau Base Ball Club), regularly defeated semi-pro and professional teams from New York and New Jersey.  In 1863, Princeton offered to take on all comers.  The Nassau Literary Magazine reported in September 1863 that “the Nassau B.B.C. has thrown down the gauntlet before all of the colleges in the country, challenging them to play a game of baseball.”  Williams accepted, and made the long trek from the Berkshires to southern Jersey.  The Ephs promptly lost to Princeton by a 27-16 score, but the Princeton boys proved to be gracious hosts.  Princeton treated Williams to a grand celebratory dinner near campus, featuring turkey, duck, ham, beef, chicken, oysters, plum pudding, minced apples, custards, and assorted cakes and ice creams. 

In 1865, Williams got its revenge against Princeton, winning the rematch by a 30-17 score in Williamstown.  Later that summer, however, Harvard also proved that turnabout was fair play.  The Crimson evened the ledger with Williams by winning 35-20 on July 19.

Harvard soon became a national leader in the college game.  In 1869, Harvard left Cambridge for a two-week baseball tour – the first of its kind for a college team – that took it from eastern Massachusetts through New York into New Jersey and down to Philadelphia.  In one game on that tour, the Crimson lost 30-11 to the first professional baseball club – the Cincinnati Red Stockings. 

That two-week Harvard trip in 1869 looked like a long weekend compared to what transpired the following year, when a Civil War veteran named Archie Bush took over as Harvard captain.  Bush, a catcher and occasional relief pitcher, championed a 25-game western swing that summer.  From early July to the middle of August of 1870 the Crimson rode the Union Pacific Railroad as far west as St. Louis, Milwaukee and Chicago, playing games against the best professional and semi-pro teams.  Harvard represented college baseball very well, compiling a 17-8 record on the trip. As more and more colleges started playing against each other regularly, it was perhaps only natural that there should be an effort to keep records and award championships.  This lead to the formation of the first-ever college sports conference — the American College Base Ball Association — in 1879.  The Association initially consisted of Amherst, Brown, Dartmouth, Harvard, Princeton and Yale.   Williams joined in 1882.