I found this article in the December 25, 1875 issue of the St. Louis Globe-Democrat and have been sitting on it for about a year. The problem is that I don't know for sure if the Christmas game between the Brown Stockings and the Empires ever came off. I'd like to believe that there was a baseball game in St. Louis on Christmas Day 1875 but I haven't been able to confirm it.
Charlton's Baseball Chronology does have this entry for December 25, 1862:
At Hilton Head‚ SC‚ a baseball game is played between teams selected from the 165th New York Volunteer Infantry‚ Duryea Zouaves. The match draws a crowd of 40‚000 soldiers and is the talk of the military world for weeks after.
3 comments:
That Hilton Head game is routinely cited in discussions of baseball and the Civil War. The 40,000 figure is ridiculous. It is physically impossible for that many people to watch a ballgame without some serious architecture. I suppose it is possible that the game was at a racetrack with a grandstand, but even then that number is too high. I have never seen any defense of that number, but it is repeated regularly by the credulous.
No real point to this: just getting it off my chest.
I have a love/hate relationship with Charlton's Baseball Chronology. It's a lot of fun to read but it's seriously full of errors. I don't want to trash James Charlton but he should consider coming out with a new, cleaned-up edition of that thing.
40,000 people is fairly ridiculous. I just pulled Baseball In Blue & Gray off the shelve and it looks like A.G. Mills is the source for the story. Do you know of any source that confirms a game being played on Christmas 1862?
No, I don't know any better source, and that is the book I would have turned to myself.
There are, by way of comparison, some contemporary accounts of large crowds at games. The Atlantics/Athletics matches of the mid-1860s were a big deal, at least in Philly. Going from memory, I believe the number 10,000 was bandied about, but the accounts also make clear that only a fraction of those were actually inside the park. The affair had something of the air of a modern Michigan-Ohio State football game. I have seen similar numbers for a July 4 game in Chicago in the late 1870s, with an elaborate account of how they were climbing all over the stands to fit in. I suspect that Chicago had a ballpark advanced enough to make the number at least somewhat plausible. For a game without a grandstand or bleachers, I would be skeptical of any number higher than a few thousand.
I wouldn't be surprised if there really was such a game at Hilton Head. There are unambiguous accounts of soldiers playing baseball, so there is nothing unlikely about the event itself: just the inflated numbers.
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