Ballists, Dead Beats, and Muffins: Inside Early Baseball in Illinois

Long before there were rules dictating how long a pitcher had to throw the ball, when the hitter had to be ready to swing at it, and where the infielders could stand to catch it, baseball spread across Illinois like a “malady unknown in medical texts” (p. 11). With names like the Counter Jumpers, Dead Beats, Suckers, Bummers, Shakespeares, Sum Punkins, and Lively Turtles, over a thousand new clubs organized between 1865 and 1870 to play a version of baseball that, while looking a lot like the modern game, was played with a much different purpose.Robert Sampson, recently retired Millikin University history professor and author of John L. O'Sullivan and His Times, unspooled hundreds of reels of newspaper microfilm and scoured other sources to answer “how and why Illinoisans passionately embraced baseball in the post-Civil War years” (p. 7). Sampson brings to light those who brought baseball to several Illinois communities, how they formed, funded, and outfitted their teams, the rituals they followed, the controversies they faced, and, most importantly, their reason for playing.The precise moment when baseball came to Illinois is uncertain. For years, the study of baseball was beneath professional historians, and myths became accepted as truth while those who actually pioneered the game passed away, taking their stories with them. Sampson and other members of the Society for American Baseball Research have begun ferreting out facts and correcting the narrative of our national game. We now know that Abner Doubleday invented nothing, and that baseball was played in Illinois much earlier than expected. An early Rockford resident recalled watching town ball, an early variant of baseball, there in 1846. Chicago's first team, the Union Club, was organized in 1856, Alton's two teams gained national attention in 1858, and Freeport was home to several notable teams in the early 1860s.While baseball was clearly played in Illinois before the Civil War, the teams rarely endured and their play tended to be “spontaneous, disorganized, and sometimes disruptive” (p. 8) scrimmages found only in the state's larger population centers. After the war, however, Illinois's booming population and economy helped foster a statewide boom in baseball as well. By 1865, Illinois was the fourth most populous state, with the majority of its residents having been born elsewhere. Men like William Johns, M. A. Stearns, Sol Silver, Hiram Waldo, and George Lackey were all born back east and Sampson credits them with either pioneering or reviving baseball in Decatur, Peoria, Cairo, Rockford, and Bloomington, respectively, between 1865 and 1870. During that same period, Illinois's rail network expanded to nearly five thousand miles of track—more than any other state—a factor Sampson calls “essential” (p. 29) to the postwar growth of baseball, illustrated by a map showing nearly all the organized teams of the era dotted along the state's many railroads. Soon, “like a new hotel building or a railroad depot, a baseball team signified [a town's] progress” (p. 28).The teams the towns tended to form were not made of the polished, professional players we know today. Rather, baseball's first players were simply young men whose jobs or financial comforts allowed them to be available for afternoon games or practices, and they “clumsily played . . . a mishmash of running, throwing, hitting, and confusion” (p. 64). Nevertheless, fans still flocked to see this new “manly art” (p. 24) with its performers clad in flannel uniforms of every imaginable color. These fans supported their teams in the off-season as well by attending benefit balls throughout the winter. The dances were such a frequent hit in Centralia that the town's Egyptian Club was declared champions of both the ball field and the ballroom after the 1868 season.In this early incarnation, baseball was more fraternal than athletic. Baseball clubs came into popularity at the same time as the Knights of Pythias and the Elks Lodge, and just like those social clubs, baseball, too, was held to written rules and unwritten rituals. The written rules came from the National Association of Base Ball Players as communicated in New York sportswriter Henry Chadwick's Haney's Base Ball Book of Reference, which was carried to Illinois in the pockets of its early baseballists and encouraged such ideals as hospitality, courtesy, and honor.The rituals the clubs adhered to fostered these ideals, starting with a formal, politely written invitation from one club challenging another to a match. One surviving invitation from Quincy reveals two universal purposes of the early game: to further interest in baseball and to better bond clubs and cities together. Once an invitation was accepted and the visitors arrived, they were greeted by the host team and paraded through town while spectators marveled at their brightly colored uniforms. At their hotel, the guests were treated to a meal and subjected to speeches by civic dignitaries. On the field, play was little different than it is today, and while winning was preferred just as it is now, it was expected to be achieved “within a gentlemanly framework” (p. 33) that did not belie honor or insult one's opponent. Upon a game's conclusion, custom called for the defeated club to present a baseball to the victors and someone from each team to give a brief speech. When a team bucked tradition and failed to follow any of these expectations, the press pounced and baseball became “tinder for local jealousies” (p. 113) that played out in the newspapers.As foreign as this intertwining of baseball and chivalrous rituals may be to modern fans, Sampson reminds us to keep in mind that baseball back then was “a social activity” that was “played for fun, not perfection” (p. 66). No one much cared about athleticism, practicing was often shrugged off, and championships were usually self-proclaimed. In fact, newspaper box scores were almost nonexistent in the immediate postwar years, and readers often had to get through several paragraphs reporting the “pageant and spirit” (p. 34) of the game just to learn who won and by what score.Sampson best illustrates this point by including several reports on muffin games, a type of baseball burlesque in which players with little or no skill played against each other on teams usually organized by occupation, marital status, body type, or some other quirky grouping. As professionalism and competition—along with gambling and hot-headedness—began to make their way into baseball toward the end of the 1860s, participation in and attendance at muffin games increased for they retained the original, light-hearted spirit of the game. Muffin games were also a “godsend to [newspaper] editors looking to fill space by exercising their senses of humor” (p. 72).Not every town embraced the fun, however. Folks from Peoria to Decatur to Cairo soon grew tired of foul balls and foul language about town and lobbied for baseball to be prohibited, at a time when public parks were still a generation away and debate emerged over how available public space could be used—and by whom. Not even the success of Bloomington's club, rivals of the Chicago Excelsiors, could prevent the city council from outlawing the sport in August 1867. The Bloomingtons asked the public to reconsider, for the ban made it difficult for the club to endure once they could no longer leisurely walk from their downtown homes or jobs to the ball field, but the appeal was rejected and the club moved out to the countryside.Nor was baseball immune to the postwar efforts to initiate Jim Crow laws. The young sport's governing body voted in August 1867 to deny membership to any club having at least one Black member. Nevertheless, Illinois's Black clubs played on and proved to a Chicago Tribune reporter that “our colored brethren can play base ball and do it well into the bargain” (p. 94). Sampson also uncovered evidence of Black clubs existing in Jacksonville, Ottawa, Quincy, Bloomington, Springfield, Rockford, and Decatur.Sampson begins Ballists, Dead Beats, and Muffins with an apt juxtaposition. On October 13, 1869, baseball's first professional team, the Cincinnati Red Stockings, trounced the Quincy Occidental Senior Base Ball Club 51–7 in a game that stood as “the contest between the founding ideals of [baseball] and the new reality of professionalism” (p. 1). Soon thereafter, teams would no longer be paraded through town for onlookers to note their colorful uniforms before watching them in a fun and joyous athletic contest where the score hardly mattered. Instead, winning would be everything after “the old game, the ‘gentleman's game,’ died that day on Quincy's fairgrounds” (p. 4).Sampson's diligent, almost obsessive research is evident in the scores of quotations he shares from contemporary sources encompassing the entire state. These quotes vividly show the passion with which Illinoisans embraced baseball immediately after the Civil War. One is left to wonder what role the war itself may have played in the process. Did Illinoisans—and Americans in general—so fervently embrace baseball to help them move past the war? Was the sport purposefully noncompetitive and fun and fraternal instead because the war was so awful? With his contribution to this growing field of study, Sampson joins the likes of Peter Morris and Major League Baseball's official historian, John Thorn, as authorities on the early history of our national game.

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