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This page was last updated in April 2010.
New Protoball Initiative on The
Spread of Base Ball in NYC:
Gregory Christiano’s Findings on
Where the Games Were Played
In the summer of 2009,
cartographer Gregory Christiano of Hopatcong, NJ set out on an ambitious project, the determination of
where base ball was played in Greater New York in the years before it had
spread extensively across the United
States.
We have long understood that “the
New York Game” began to diffuse across the United States before the Civil War
began. But we still don’t have a clear
picture of the 15 years [about 1840 to 1855] when the Knickerbocker rules
became the game for all of the New
York area. Did
the game spread block-by-block across Manhattan
and then into adjacent areas? Was Brooklyn ballplaying particularly important to the rise
of base ball as a favorite pastime? Did
the game inch forward year-by-year, or did it expand suddenly after a gestation
period?
At this writing, Gregory has
assembled data on over 150 New York
area 1850s and 1860s ballclubs and on the locations of their home fields. He has completed an extensive hand-drawn map
that shows where and when the game originated across the settlements that, as
of 1898, became the five boroughs of New York City
[before that, Brooklyn was considered a part of Long
Island]. We are now seeking
ways to make this map widely available to origins researchers.
In the coming months, this page
will feature:
- Directions for accessing
the master Map, perhaps in digital form
- Map sequences that
show how the game saturated the city over time
- A table of
addresses for the clubs’ playing areas
- A table showing the first clubs in each ward
This project is being coordinated
with a new
project of the Society for American Baseball Research [SABR] on the spread
of base ball. That project is anchored
to a wiki-style collection of data on the local origins of base ball as the
game spread across the US,
and then internationally.
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