Tuesday, May 11, 2004
It's not news to anybody who was paying attention that baseball in this country dates back to well before the revolutionary war. The news of a 1791 reference to baseball is pretty cool, though. The fact that Jim Bouton and the fight to save Wahconah park may benefit is even cooler. We've been to Wahconah park -- one of my foul balls was caught there -- and enjoyed the sunset breaks and the incredibly close-to-the-action seats and the illusion of being transported back about 90 years, and if there's any sense in Pittsfield -- no reason to thing there is, but we can hope -- this document may wake up the oligarchy running the town described in the book Foul Ball and create a destination location for true fans.
But what I found really interesting was that the ordinance banning baseball near the new meeting house specified a specific distance -- 80 yards. We may easily surmise then that about 240 feet was the longest anybody could hit a ball under the Massachussetts game of the day. And somebody will eventually get around to figuring out where the ballfield was before the ordinance was passed, since presumably before the ordinance the field was within 80 yards of the site of the meetinghouse described in the ordinance.
This gives us a location of a field from 1791 and earlier, and it tells us how far the ball could be hit.
posted by The Crank 10:37 PM
