Document points to Pittsfield as baseball's 'garden of Eden'
Abner Doubleday, shame on you. The mythic inventor of baseball has some explaining to do.
Not only has Cooperstown, N.Y., long been debunked as baseball's birthplace, but Pittsfield officials yesterday released a 1791 document that the National Baseball Hall of Fame called "irrefutable" evidence of the first written reference to the game ever found.
The document, a Town Meeting ordinance found buried and forgotten in the public library, forbids Pittsfield residents from playing "baseball" within 80 yards of the new meetinghouse and its fragile windows.
The Town Meeting bylaw reads: "For the Preservation of the Windows in the New Meeting House . . . no Person or Inhabitant of said town, shall be permitted to play at any game called Wicket, Cricket, Baseball, Football, Cat, Fives, or any other game or games with balls, within the Distance of Eighty Yards from said Meeting House."
Ted Spencer, vice president and chief curator of the Hall of Fame, said the Hall regards the document, authenticated by the Williamstown Art Conservation Center, as an undisputed precursor to the earliest previous reference to baseball -- an 1823 newspaper article about "base ball" in Manhattan. "This is a wonderful story," Spencer said. "This is a great piece of history in the development of the game."
The Pittsfield reference was found by baseball historian John Thorn about a year ago in a 19th-century book about the city's history. Thorn relayed the news last month to former New York Yankees pitcher Jim Bouton, who lives in Egremont and is a partner in a project to renovate and reopen Pittsfield's historic Wahconah Park. Then the original document was located, verified by the conservators, and displayed to the public yesterday at a news conference at which Mayor James Ruberto declared Pittsfield to be baseball's "garden of Eden."
Thorn said he stumbled on the discovery during a serendipitous Internet search about the origins of baseball.
"What's so delicious about it is its accidental quality. Its existence was unknown," Thorn said. "Baseball's history is far earlier than we would have thought 10 years ago."
Spencer said that baseball's true birthplace might never be known -- a soldier at Valley
As Bouton sees it, baseball had been a nuisance in Pittsfield for decades before the national pastime was born in Cooperstown in 1839, as legend formerly had it.
"That's a myth," Spencer scoffed about the Doubleday story.
"That's a total myth." In fact, he said, the first written rules for the game date to 1845 and a New York team called the Knickerbockers.
"I'm tremendously excited," Ruberto said of the discovery. "Pittsfield has had a long tradition of minor-league baseball, and this just fits with everything we have known about Pittsfield being a baseball town."
Wahconah Park, located on a site where baseball has been played since 1892, had long been an attraction for baseball traditionalists until minor-league baseball there ended last season. Bouton said he expects to begin renovations in July, and to have the park lovingly "downgraded" with old-fashioned wooden seats in time for the 2005 season.
The 1791 discovery can only help put Pittsfield on the itinerary for amateur baseball historians who also pass through nearby landmarks such as the Hall of Fame, Fenway Park, and Yankee Stadium, Bouton said. "This was a bolt from the blue," he said. "Baseball, to me, has always been about the past."
Thorn said Pittsfield can lay claim, with some general justification, to its self-applied moniker of baseball's garden of Eden.
"I think that's pretty fair because they're celebrating the spirit of early baseball," Thorn said. "The message here is that baseball grew up in rural areas, and in urban areas, too. It was growing everywhere like a field of dandelions."
