An Annotated Article on Baseball in New York City in 1854

Here, from the New York Times of December 19, 1854, is an article on the status of baseball in and around New York City as of that date. I’ve added various notes, comments, and annotations in brackets to help give a sense of the sport’s status in 1854, seven years before the Civil War started.

There are now in this City three regularly organized Clubs, who meet twice in each week for about eight months in the year, for exercise in the good, old-fashioned American game of Base-Ball. [“Old-fashioned” indicates that New Yorkers had played some form of baseball for quite a few decades and found it “good,” making the establishment of formal base-ball (not “baseball”) clubs inevitable. Also, the base-ball season was just as long as the MLB season is now.]

They are known to us as the Knickerbocker, Eagle and Gotham Base-Ball Clubs. The “Knickerbockers” and “Eagles” play at the Elysian Fields, Hoboken, and the “Gothamites” at the Red House, Harlem. [The Knickerbockers are generally credited with beginning the sport of baseball at Elysian Fields in the fall of 1845 , after Alexander Cartwright drew up some formal rules earlier that year. In 1854 Harlem, a rural village made up of farms and country estates, was only thinly connected to urban Lower Manhattan . By late 1858, ballfields were under construction at brand new Central Park.]

These Clubs are composed of residents of the City [Manhattan, that is], of various professions, each numbering about thirty members, and their affairs are conducted in such a manner as to enable all persons who can give the necessary time for the purpose, to enjoy all the advantages of the game. [In order to play a game New Yorkers had to take a boat across the Hudson River to Hoboken, New Jersey. Or, given the lack of a subway or any kind of travel powered by internal combustion engine, in order to get to Harlem, they had to either walk, take a slow-moving steam or horse-driven train (on the New York and Harlem Railroad ), or ride a horse or horse and carriage. Harlem is 11 miles away from Wall Street. It must’ve taken two or more hours to get to and from either of the ballfields.]

There have been a large number of spirited trials of skill during the last season, which have shewn that the game has been thoroughly systematized, and that the players have attained to great skill and activity. [This sentence is another sign that base-ball was fairly mature.]

The season for play closed about the middle of November [at that time of year, snow in the city wasn’t particularly unusual, so maybe the New Yorkers played in the snow on occasion], and on Friday evening the three Clubs partook of their annual dinner at Fijux’s, in Barclay-street. [Fijux’s was the home of Charles Knickerbocker Fijux, a member of one of the clubs, and Barclay Street runs west from City Hall to the West Side Highway in Lower Manhattan, just north of the World Trade Center site.]

About forty-five members were present, and enjoyed themselves in a manner that indicated that ball-playing does not seriously diminish the appetite for either physical or intellectual enjoyment. [I love this conclusion and its very restrained praise of base-ball.]