Vintage baseball teams play at Pennypacker Mills
By Matt Schickling
Wire Staff Writer
Scott Alberts will be the first to let you know he’s not an athlete.
“I actually don’t play that much because I’m terrible,” he said, wearing his authentic 1860s Philadelphia Athletics uniform. “If you see me in the field today, you’ll understand why.”
Alberts is the president and founder of the Athletic Base Ball Club of Philadelphia, a team of vintage “base ball” revivalists. In 2009, he assembled a rotating team of athletes and vintage baseball enthusiasts across Philadelphia and into Bucks and Montgomery counties.
Then he found a network of about 400 teams that play different classic baseball styles nationwide, from the 1860s to 1920s. The Athletics joined the 20-team Mid Atlantic Vintage Base Ball League and began competitive play in 2010. They play the game according to the rules of the 1864 season, before the sport’s name even became a compound word.
On June 21, the Athletics faced another team of 19th-century reenactors called the Harrisburg Keystones at Pennypacker Mills, a Central Montgomery County historic site.
With their double-breasted wool uniforms, off-white flat caps and various renditions of sideburns and handlebar mustaches, Alberts and his team’s authenticity went unquestioned for the entire day, except one anachronism.
“If I were being truly historically accurate, I’d have nails sticking out through canvas shoes,” Alberts said. “But we don’t want to kill anyone out here.”
When talking about the progression of baseball, Alberts speaks with the candor and sentimentality of a lifelong fan mixed with the educated integrity of a historian. But the genesis for most of his knowledge came from curiosity surrounding a single question.
The Philadelphia Phillies organization was founded in 1883 and did not play at the Baker Bowl, their first well known stadium, until April 1887. Alberts wanted to know where they played during the time between these dates, so he did what every mildly obsessive sports fan would do.
“You know how you get on Wikipedia and click on one link, then another link and three hours later you’ve learned everything about the War of the Spanish Succession?”
Well, he learned everything he could about 19th-century baseball.
“I found all these ballparks that I never knew existed that were the former homes of all these teams that I never knew existed, some of whom played in major leagues that I never knew existed,” he said. “I spent all night on Wikipedia reading about this stuff and various other sites and I saw a reference to underhand pitching.”
He found out that the original game was played quite differently from the modern interpretation. Apart from underhand pitching, which dominated until the 1880s when overhand took prominence, the players also played barehanded — there were no gloves. There was no infield fly rule. Players could catch the ball off one bounce to make an out. The umpire, who dressed in a suit jacket and tophat, could make ball and strike calls at his discretion with the option of making no call at all.
“Every rule change was a solution to a problem that came up or a clarification that was a gray area before, that maybe in the early days was understood by all the players, but as time went on those understandings went away so they had to codify it, and other times it was about making the game more exciting,” Alberts said. “Essentially, the changes were about preventing cheating. Even today, the pitchers and the hitters are always trying to get an advantage on one another.”
So when the Athletics took the grass-only field at Pennypacker Mills, they were well-versed in the rules of the game, and the ways to get around them. Their reenactment holds the same excitement as the modern game with diving catches, long fly balls and base stealing.
The main difference was actually the spectators. Some were dressed in era-appropriate garb shouting “huzzah!” or “well struck!” at the players as they got on base. Others were dressed in contemporary clothing, taking pictures of the players with smartphones and digital cameras.
“In the early days, people were standing in the outfield, standing in foul territory. It was much more of an open environment. There were vendors selling the snacks of the time: roasted nuts, oysters, pickled lamb tongue — a sort-of popular item back then,” Alberts said. “You would have had things that we would not think of at a spectator event.”
But primarily what drove the attendance and wild popularity of the games was gambling. During the course of a baseball game, there’s hundreds of things to bet on: whether a batter gets a hit, the score, the spread, the pitch count, balls and strikes, etc.
“There were bookies in the crowd. It was like going to a horse race,” Alberts said. “It’s been said that the game never would have achieved the status of national pastime if it wasn’t such a good venue for gambling.”
Games would draw people from their homes because they did not yet have TVs. People went to live events if they wanted to watch sports, and baseball exploded in popularity, which continues even into the modern game, but in a much more legitimate way.
“I’m of the opinion that today’s game is better. It’s superior. All the rule changes that got us to where we are now were a solution to a problem,” Alberts said. “But we’re just trying to participate in this fun little historical subculture we have in Southeastern Pennsylvania.”
