On the day of the first professional baseball game, the columns of the Cincinnati Enquirer contained an item about Queen Victoria. The date was May 4, 1869 -- 150 years ago on Saturday -- when Her Majesty was three weeks shy of her 50th birthday. According to the paper, all of the queen's bridesmaids had married since her own nuptials with the late Prince Albert. Some of them had even died.
There was also a small notice under the "Amusements" section, saying simply, "BASE BALL. This afternoon, at 3 o'clock. CINCINNATI vs. GREAT WESTERN. First regular game of the season. 1 cent." On another page, a small item said, "The Cincinnati and Great Western Base-ball Clubs play the first regular match game of the season this afternoon at three o'clock, on the Union Grounds. Both clubs will send forth the whole of their first nines, and a very interesting game may be expected."
The next day's paper didn't mention how that contest unfolded. If it had, it would have been pointed out that the Red Stockings, as the Cincinnati nine were known, had trounced the Great Western amateurs -- the game was only half professional -- by the unholy score of 45-9. It was a typical result for the Red Stockings, who won games by scores such as 103-8 and 53-0 en route to a 64-0 record, including exhibitions.
What really marked that first game as different from any that came before it was that the team's owner, Harry Wright, was openly paying salaries to his players, the best of whom was Wright's brother, George, who hit .633 with 49 homers during the team's 57-game road trip. George made $1,400 that season, a nice haul on a 10-man team with a $9,300 payroll. Players had been paid before, of course, but it was under-the-table stuff during an era when amateurism was held up as an ideal of athletic competition. However, a change to the guidelines set out by the National Association of Base Ball Players made it possible to lay on the table that which had been taking place underneath it. Wright quickly built the country's strongest team.
Those Cincinnati Red Stockings are not an extension of the Reds we know today -- it was a prototype franchise, just as the NABBP was not a major league, but an only-kind-of-similar forerunner. The real big leagues didn't come about until either 1871 or 1876, depending on whether you think the National Association (1871 to 1875) was the first major league, or the National League (began 1876) deserves to be anointed with that honor. But Harry Wright's Red Stockings were perhaps the primordial germ of the professional game we know today, and it all started 150 years ago.
About 15 miles out of Cincinnati, a group called the Cincinnati Vintage Base Ball Club will stage a rematch of that first game on Saturday afternoon. No, there aren't any 175-year-old ballplayers still around, and zombie baseball is not yet a thing, not even after apocalyptic events such as the Cubs winning the 2016 World Series. It'll be some 21st-century folks wearing extreme versions of throwback uniforms. They'll play at a place called Dan Lyon Field near the Heritage Village Museum, located in a wooded area of suburban Sharonville, Ohio. They'll play by the rules of 1869, as laid out by the NABBP.
To that point, the rules of the game had already evolved, beginning with the first set of Knickerbocker rules in 1845, to the NABBP to the first official rule book in 1877 after the National League was founded. The rate of change remained rapid for decades, and though it eventually slowed, it never stopped. The evolution of the baseball rule book never stops, even though most of the tweaks these days are so minor that no one notices.
Eventually, things landed on the rule book that will be in effect this season in places like, for example, later Saturday night in the Cincinnati area, when the modern-day Reds take on the San Francisco Giants at Great American Ballpark. They'll be giving away 1869-inspired bobbleheads at that one, rustic little dudes with old-timey mustaches. It's a rare kind of doubleheader in the Queen City metro, but if I were around, I'd do it, and not just for the bobblehead.
We've made a lot about the rules of baseball the past couple of years and what effect a few changes here and there could have on the style of play between the lines. We're talking about changes people actually notice, like the pitchless intentional walk and the regulation of pitching mound visits. We've made so much of these changes that it has created a bit of an hysteria, as if the game itself were irretrievably broken, stared into oblivion by the eye of Horus and his math-obsessed minions. And while discussions about change are healthy, they also create an inevitable backlash, especially among longtime fans. The refrains online bound between extremes, going from something like, "Tell Manfred to leave the game alone!" to "Those saber-geeks have ruined baseball!"
When you think about it, those two refrains are completely incompatible. They are also both wrong-headed. The math-heads get plenty of run in this column, so for today, let's consider the rules part of it. On a day when we get to see where the rule book was in 1869, and where it's ended up in 2019, all over the course of a few hours, what better time to consider the journey?
In the spring of (18)69 ... the pitcher was 45 feet from home plate, threw underhanded and was expected to locate each pitch as close to the middle of the plate as possible. None of these things would be a good idea for 2019 baseball. The distance of the mound was established at the current 60 feet, 6 inches in 1893. Pitchers were allowed to throw from any arm slot by 1884. And by 1887, hitters had no say in where a pitcher might throw a pitch.
But there have been numerous other alterations to the pitcher-batter dynamic over the eons. Before 1900, the number of balls needed to draw a walk gradually wound down from nine to the current four. The spitball was outlawed in 1920. The width of the pitching rubber has been changed. We've gone from no mound to mounds that were too high, depending on which park you were in, to today's configuration.
Now, we're talking about the height of the mound again and, for the first time since 1893, the distance of the pitching rubber and putting a clock on the hurler to make sure he is working in a timely manner. Not all of these ideas will come to fruition, and perhaps none of them will. The key thing to consider is that the pitcher-hitter dynamic has always been a matter of experimentation, and if the game becomes unbalanced in some way, there is plenty of historical precedence for using rules intervention to return our game to a state of relative harmony.
In the spring of (18)69 ... a coin toss was held to determine which team got to bat first. The batting orders weren't necessarily limited to nine players, and substitutions weren't one-way streets. You could bring a player back into a game that you'd removed him from. We don't do any on these things anymore, haven't done them for a very long time and likely never will do any of them again. Sometimes evolution hits a dead end.
In the spring of (18)69 ... there was a distinction between fair and foul balls caught on one bounce. Foul balls caught in this manner were considered outs. Also, the definition of a foul ball was different: Whatever the ball struck first determined fair or foul, not where the ball was when it rolled past a base.
In the spring of (18)69 ... baserunners dashing for first base could not overrun the bag. This rule, if still in effect, would badly distort the modern game and should never again be considered, except maybe when Manny Machado is the baserunner in question.
These early rules and customs are quaint for hobbyists and originalists, but clearly the game as we know it has been made better by their elimination. The list of rule changes well beyond those of the NABBP is immense, addressing everything from uniforms to the shape of home plate to the size of the bat to the composition of the ball. It wasn't until 1975 that cowhide could be used in place of hard-to-find horsehide to cover a ball.
The game can never be static. At its best, it has a little bit of everything people love -- homers, but also singles and hit-and-runs and steals and spectacular fielding plays. It has the guile of a wily command pitcher alongside the fire of a strikeout artist. It has free swingers and the Zen-like stoicism of plate-discipline masters. Runs aren't impossible to come by, but they aren't cheap, either.
Most of the time, the game snaps back to itself like a rubber band. For fans who loved the small-ball strategies and soaring stolen-base totals of the 1980s, that version of baseball was completely different from what we saw in the station-to-station 1950s. The pinball machine offensive statistics of the 1930s transmogrified into the deadball-era-like pitching dominance of the 1960s. In between, there were periods of balance, like for the latter half of the 1940s and much of the 1970s and, arguably, during the first half of the current decade.
At the same time, the ebbs and flows of the game have many times been nudged by subtle rules interventions, from the height of the mound to the shape of the strike zone to the kinds of substances a pitcher can put on a ball. If what is happening in the game becomes too extreme, there is a reaction. In that way, baseball is no different from the other major sports except that the change is often slower to occur and meets with more resistance.
While many seem to be anxious about Manfred's openness to experimentation, try to keep in mind that the professional game has evolved in countless ways over the past 150 years. That original version is precious to some, and it's a great thing that there are groups working to diligently keep those memories alive.
I wish I could be there at that park in the woods outside Cincinnati on Saturday. However, I suspect that had baseball not budged from what will be on display during that Red Stockings-Great Western rematch, small suburban parks would be the only place we could watch the game we are so passionate about today.
Extra innings
1. When is the last time you attended an American League game between two good teams?
That's a question I posed to someone in the press box the other night, as we dutifully watched the White Sox tangle with the Orioles on the field before us. I asked, of course, because I was wondering what the answer was for myself. So I decided to figure it out. This is highly personal, subject to my geography and personal schedule, but I think it also speaks to the circumstances of AL fans all across North America.
The primary culprit for me is the Chicago White Sox. Once the Sox shifted into their rebuild, it meant the chances of me seeing a contest between two AL teams over .500 plummeted even though I now see somewhere between 130 and 140 games per season in person. It's a temporary state of things, one would presume, but it's been my reality for a couple of years. Some other mitigating circumstances:
-- Before the All-Star break of 2016, I was exclusively an NBA writer. The playoffs of that league go into June, as we all know. Then you have the draft, free agency, the summer leagues ... and a brief respite to hopefully not think much about sports. Then requests for preview material start. So I didn't make it to too many games during those years.
-- I do rotate some around to different cities, but the non-Chicago teams I've visited most frequently have all been NL hubs -- the Brewers, Cardinals, Braves and Dodgers topping that list. That has been true for recent postseasons as well, as I covered the Cubs in 2016, the NL wild-card game the past two years and then the Dodgers after that. Most times when I have traveled to another AL town, by sheer coincidence it has been while an interleague matchup was taking place, such as when I saw the Dodgers in Detroit in 2017.
I decided to define this problem simply: If I was at a game featuring two AL teams with records over .500, that would qualify, even if those records were something like early-season 3-2 or 4-3 marks. Here's what I figured out:
2016: I didn't see a single game between two AL clubs all season, so there was no possibility here. I was all NBA, all the time, before the All-Star break, then was all Cubs, all the time, until that memorable Game 7 on Nov. 2, 2016. Every time I saw an AL team, they were playing an NL club.
2017: By then, I was full time on baseball -- and loving it. But my ability to sync my game schedule with a White Sox team over .500 was lacking. There was an early series against Kansas City I was at in which Chicago was a game over break-even, but the Royals were just below. The White Sox went out on the road and pushed their record to 13-9 -- a season-high four games over .500. By the time they returned home, they'd dropped to the break-even point and never got back above .500.
There was another opportunity in August, when I was dispatched to cover the Astros-Rangers series, which had been relocated to Tropicana Field because of Hurricane Harvey. Houston was on its way to a title that season and was far over .500. But Texas was just under. The Rangers actually drew to break-even with a win in the second game of the series, but there was no game that started with both teams above .500. When the Astros and the rest of us returned to Houston, it was for an interleague series against the Mets.
2018: The White Sox were 3-2 when they played their home opener against Detroit, which was 2-4. The Tigers won, dropping Chicago to .500. It was the first of five straight losses for the ChiSox, who never again sniffed the break-even mark. I did not attend any AL-versus-AL games all season that the White Sox weren't involved in.
2019: Once again, the White Sox ended a home game at .500 (3-3), this time after beating Seattle on April 5. Once again, Chicago followed that with five straight losses. So my unwanted streak has not been snapped yet this season. But this White Sox team is a lot better than last year's transitional bunch, and if Chicago had not blown a four-run lead in the first game of a doubleheader on Wednesday, it would have been at .500 at the outset of a four-game series against the defending champion Red Sox.
The problem: Boston is under .500! There is no combination of results that will lead to an all-over-.500 matchup this weekend in Chicago. At least on the South Side. On the North Side, the Cubs and Cardinals open a series on Friday with both teams comfortably on the right side of the win-loss ledger. But at least with this year's White Sox, there is still some hope.
As for the answer to my question, it was kind of stunning to realize that I've been a full-time baseball writer for two and a half years, including three postseasons and the first month of this campaign, and never once during that span have I attended a game between two winning American League teams. The last time I did go to a matchup between two good AL teams was on Oct. 23, 2015, when my wife surprised me with tickets to Game 6 of the American League Championship Series between the Royals and Blue Jays.
For all AL fans realizing they are in the same boat, don't worry. Rebuilding is amazing. Soon, this will all be over and high-drama series will be a weekly occurrence. Unless they aren't. Just in case, I've decided to increase my requests to write about AL teams. Let's see ... the Tigers play the Angels in Detroit next week.
(Checking the standings.)
Never mind.
2. The past couple of seasons, the Milwaukee Brewers have succeeded with a pitching staff built in what we once would have considered a backward fashion. That is, they forewent overspending on starting pitchers, instead strategically limiting the exposure of their rotation members, then leveraging one of the deepest and most proficient bullpens in the game.
Given the volatility of relief pitchers, doing this year after year is a tough needle to thread. Over the winter, the Brewers once again sidestepped calls to beef up their rotation via free agency. But they nevertheless looked to become more reliant on their rotation by handing three starting slots to young right-handers -- Brandon Woodruff, Corbin Burnes and Freddy Peralta. The first two of those hurlers were key parts of last year's postseason bullpen.
I liked the gambit. It made me think of other contenders who rode the coattails of a cluster of young rotation studs, though, at 26, Woodruff is a bit older than you might think. I thought of teams like the '86 Mets (Ron Darling, Sid Fernandez, Dwight Gooden) and the '03 Marlins (Dontrelle Willis, Josh Beckett, Brad Penney) and the early '00s A's (Barry Zito, Mark Mulder, Tim Hudson), all teams that won at a high level at least in part due to a precocious rotation trio.
Well, it hasn't exactly worked out for the Brewers this year. Woodruff remains in the rotation, but his ERA is 5.17. Peralta was shelled again on Thursday, has had shoulder issues in the early going and his ERA is 8.31. And Burnes was so gopher-ball prone (11 homers allowed in 19⅔ innings) that he was sent down to Triple-A San Antonio for a while, and when he was recalled this week, it was as a reliever.
The one part that has born out for Milwaukee has been bullpen volatility. Last season, the Brewers ranked fifth in bullpen ERA. So far in 2019, they are 22nd. Milwaukee is still a prime contender in the tough, five-team-deep NL Central, but a team that ranks 26th in ERA+ has some serious run-prevention problems to solve.
3. Someone should convince Bill Murray to do a Caddyshack-inspired homage to one of his gopher soliloquies in reference to this year's Orioles. Of all the on-pace-for estimates you see at the end of April, this one is my favorite: Baltimore allowed 73 homers in April, 20 more than any other team. Seventy-three! It's stupendous! That put the Orioles on pace to allow 394 home runs on the season. The most homers a team has ever allowed is 258, by the 2016 Reds, who followed that by allowing the second-most homers ever (248) in 2017. At their April pace, the Orioles would break the record on July 28.