The Knickerbocker Base Ball Club
Founded on September 23, 1845, at the instigation of Alexander Cartwright, the Knickerbocker Base Ball Club was an exclusive social organization limited to forty members who paid a $2 initiation fee and $5 annual dues.
Many of the twenty-eight original members had been meeting regularly since 1842 to play baseball a couple of times a week during the spring and summer.
A four-man committee was appointed to draw up the club's constitution and by-laws, which became the first codified baseball rules. Evidently, two men did most of the work: Cartwright and the committee chairman, Daniel L. "Doc"Adams.
Cartwright has been given most of the credit for formulating the club's rules, but it's not known how the work was divided. Nor is it known whether the rules were genuinely new, or whether they simply formalized the game the Knickerbocker members had been playing.
There were twenty rules, several of which had to do with internal club matters. Thirteen of them specifically related to the game itself:
4. The bases shall be from "home" to second base, forty-two paces; from first to third base, forty-two paces, equidistant.
8. The game to consist of twenty-one counts, or aces, but at the conclusion an equal number of hands must be played.
9. The ball must be pitched, and not thrown, for the bat. ["Pitching" meant tossing underhand, as opposed to throwing overhand.]
10. A ball knocked out of the field, or outside the range of the first or third base, is foul.
11. Three balls being struck at and missed and the last one caught is a hand out; if not caught is considered fair, and the striker bound to run.
12. A ball being struck or tipped and caught either flying or on the first bound is a hand out.
13. A player running the bases shall be out, if the ball is in the hands of an adversary on the base, or the runner is touched with it before he makes the base; it being, understood, however that in no instance is a ball to be thrown at him.
14. A player running who shall prevent an adversary from catching or getting the ball before making his base, is a hand out.
15. Three hands out, all out.
16. Players must take their strike in regular turn.
17. All disputes and difference relatives to the game, to be determined by the Umpire, from which there is no appeal.
18. No ace or base can be made on a foul strike.
19. A runner cannot be put out in making one base, when a balk is made by the pitcher.
20. But one base allowed when a ball bounds out of the field when struck.
There are several things here that make the Knickerbocker version of baseball different from most previous versions that we know about. There was no "home" in the Massachusetts game or the old New York game, for example; in those sports, the hitter was stationed somewhere between fourth base and first base. For that matter, the distance between second and third was often less than the distances between first and second and between third and fourth.
The provision for foul territory was also new. In rounders and other early versions of baseball, the ball was in play wherever it was hit; and, in fact, it was often in play even if the hitter swung and missed, or if he failed to swing at a good pitch.
The new rules also did away with the old practice known as "soaking", that is, putting a runner out by hitting him with the thrown ball while he was between bases.
The Knickerbockers rented a playing area at the Elysian Fields in Hoboken, New Jersey, for seventy-five dollars a year. They also rented a room, for business purposes, in Fijux's Hotell in Manhattan for two dollars a meeting.
They played at least fourteen intra-club games before their first real match, against "the New York Club" on June 19, 1846. Cartwright umpired. Much has been made of the fact that the Knickerbockers lost, 23-1, at their own game, but they didn't use their "first nine" and several of the New York players were actually members of the Knickerbocker Club.
As gentleman amateurs, the Knickerbockers emphasized proper conduct. Fines were established for using profanity (6 1/4 cents), arguing with a decision of the umpire (25 cents), or refusing to obey the team captain (50 cents).
They also subscribed to the basically English principle of sportsmanship. After a game, whatever the outcome, they treated the visiting team to a gala dinner--a tradition that was carried over into college football, thirty years later, during its formative period.
Similar clubs were organized by young professional men in and around New York City within the next few years. They copied the Knickerbocker by-laws and even their uniforms. The Knickerbockers wore white flannel shirts, blue woolen pantaloons, and straw hats. The Eclectic Club, one of their early rivals, wore white shirts and caps with blue trim, blue flannel pantaloons, and red belts, while the uniform of the Brooklyn Charter Oaks featured pink shirts decorated with white stars, white pantaloons with pink stripes, and blue-peaked white caps.
For more than ten years, the Knickerbocker Club virtually ruled baseball. When they changed their rules, other clubs followed. And in 1857, when a dozen clubs held the sport's first major conference, "Doc" Adams of the Knickerbockers was elected president and also took charge of the rules committee. Adams was largely responsible for fixing the base paths at 90 feet and for establishing the nine-inning game.
When the National Association of Base Ball Players was founded in 1858, the Knickerbockers began to lose their influence, and the club died out entirely in the early 1870s, after baseball had become thoroughly professionalized.