Sunday, December 23, 2007

Griswold's Notice


I posted before about the notice that Merritt Griswold placed in the Missouri Democrat regarding the game between the Cyclones and the Morning Star. The notice is a rather substantial piece of evidence supporting the claims that Griswold made in his letter to Al Spink regarding the origins of baseball in St. Louis.

The above image is a copy of the notice as it appeared in the Missouri Democrat in July of 1860. Interestingly, while several sources have the game being played on July 8, the notice states that the game was to be played on the 9th.

The image was taken from the January 2007 newsletter of the St. Louis Amateur Baseball Association, which can be downloaded here. The SLABA newsletter is one of the few sources on the internet that doesn't regurgitate the Fruin myth when talking about the origins of baseball in St. Louis.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Thanks for posting this. I am always interested in first games, as evidence of how the New York game spread.

You have a typo: surely it did not appear in 1960.

As I recall, Griswold also said he had published the NY rules in the paper the previous winter. Has any sign of this turned up?

Jeffrey Kittel said...

Typo is fixed (and the crimson of embaressement is slowly fading from my face).

Griswold says that he published a list of rules and a diagram showing the layout of a baseball field and the positioning of players in the Missouri Democrat but I've yet to find it. As you said, this was in the winter of 1859/60. I have faith that it will turn up soon enough.

Jeffrey Kittel said...

Speaking of typos, I should really learn to spell one of these days. "Embarrassment" is the way that word is spelled I think.

I saw a thread bomb one time that said something along the lines of "Your poor grammer and spelling makes me want to cry." That's how I usually feel about my own "mastery" of the English language.