America's pastime

An invented origin, a clause that lasted a century, and the habit of calling things traditional

A The sport's official account of its own origin was manufactured, and the manufacture is documented. In 1905 a commission was appointed to establish where the game came from, chaired by men who had already decided that it must be American and not, as an inconvenient body of evidence suggested, a development of English children's games. Its conclusion rested on a single letter from an elderly mining engineer who recalled that a boyhood acquaintance had invented the sport in a New York village in 1839. The acquaintance was a soldier who left no reference to the game in any of his papers and was, in 1839, a cadet at a military academy some distance away. The commission published the finding, a museum was built in the village, and the story is still told there.

B The motive for the exercise was not historical curiosity. The sport had become a substantial business whose promoters were selling it as a national institution, and a national institution with English parents was harder to sell. The commission's chairman had said in advance what he expected to find, and the evidence assembled to the contrary — printed references, illustrations, the recollections of people who had played the earlier games — was set aside without being examined. The actual descent is not mysterious. English games in which a ball is struck and the striker runs between fixed points are described in print from the eighteenth century, one of them under a name recognisably close to the modern one, and they crossed the Atlantic with the people who played them. What happened in America was not invention but codification, and it happened for the same reason it happened in other sports: clubs that wished to play each other required an agreed set of rules. The distinction between inventing a sport and standardising one is not a quibble. Standardisation is the harder achievement and the one that determines what a game becomes, since the choices made at that moment — how far apart to place the bases, how a runner is dismissed — decide the balance between attack and defence for as long as the rules survive.

C The document usually credited with that codification was drawn up by a New York club in 1845. It fixed the foul lines that made the field a wedge rather than a circle, established that a runner was put out by being tagged rather than by being hit with the thrown ball — a change that permitted a harder ball and therefore a longer hitting game — and set the bases at a distance that has never needed revision. The claim that one member invented these rules single-handed is a later embellishment of the same kind as the commission's, and the club's own records suggest a committee. It is worth noting how well the choices have aged. A sport in which the distance between bases has not been altered in a hundred and eighty years, while the players have become dramatically faster and stronger, is a sport whose original geometry was either fortunate or unusually well judged.

D Professionalism arrived quickly and was resisted in the usual sequence: denied, then tolerated, then organised. A league of clubs formed in 1876 on a principle that shaped the next century, which was that the league would be run by the owners of the clubs rather than by the players' association that preceded it. The owners then adopted a clause binding a player to his club indefinitely, renewable at the club's option, so that a player could be traded or sold but could not choose his employer. It survived, in one form or another, for ninety-nine years, and was defended throughout on the grounds that without it the wealthiest clubs would buy every good player and competition would collapse — an argument that has been made in defence of similar arrangements in every professional sport since, with results that are still disputed.

E The same owners maintained an exclusion that appears in no rule book. There was never a written prohibition on Black players; there was an understanding among club owners, established in the 1880s, that none would be signed, and it held for six decades. The consequence was a parallel structure of leagues, well organised and often more entertaining than the segregated version, whose best players were widely known to be the equals of anyone. When the exclusion was broken in 1947 it was broken deliberately, by one executive who recruited a player selected as much for temperament as for ability, and the parallel leagues collapsed within a few years as their audience and their talent were absorbed.

F The clause binding players lasted until it was tested in arbitration rather than in court. Two pitchers played a season without signing contracts, arguing that the renewal provision could be exercised only once, and an arbitrator agreed. The immediate consequence was a labour market in which established players could choose their employers, and salaries rose by an order of magnitude within a decade; the longer consequence was a series of disputes, several of them ending in stoppages, of which one cancelled a season's championship for the first time since the sport had been organised.

G The pattern running through all of this is that almost every element of the sport treated as timeless was contested when it was introduced. The rules, the professional structure, the composition of the teams and the terms on which players are employed were each settled by an argument that could have gone the other way, and were each subsequently described as tradition by whoever had won. The invented origin story is therefore not an anomaly but the clearest example of a general habit: a sport that changed constantly has always preferred to present itself as something handed down.