The National Pastime offers baseball history available nowhere
else. Each fall this publication from the Society for American
Baseball Research (SABR) explores baseball history with fresh and
often surprising views of past players, teams, and events. Drawn
from the research efforts of more than 6,700 SABR members, The
National Pastime establishes an accurate, lively, and entertaining
historical record of baseball. A Note from the Editor, Mark
Alvarez: It's slipping by unnoticed, but 1993 is the 100th
anniversary of modern baseball. A century ago this past April,
pitchers for the first time in official play toed a slab sixty
feet, six inches from the intersection of the foul lines. This was
the last of the great changes made in the game during the vigorous,
experimental, unrestrained, untraditional nineteenth century. The
diamond was set. A hundred years ago, baseball was already the
national pastime, but it was still a relatively young sport. If we
superimpose our year on 1893 and look back, baseball's development
seems remarkably rapid. The game broke free from its town ball
roots about the time Pesky held (or didn't hold) the ball and
Slaughter scored from first. The great, professional Cincinnati Red
Stockings took the field the year the Mets stunned everyone by
winning a pennant and a World Series. The National League was
founded in the year of Mark The Bird Fidrych. A walk counted as a
hit just six years ago. In 1893, a 50-year-old baseball fan had
lived through the whole history of the New York Game. Even
youngsters of 30 had been able to watch the development of the
sport into a business calculated to make money for magnates, who
three years before had crushed a player revolt and who now seemed
determined to run the over-large big League into the ground. They
didn't of course. Outside forces, including Ban Johnson and an
improved economy, would soon reinvigorate the game. (Our troubled
sport could use another such jolt any time now.) Sometime this
season, maybe you can catch a few rays in the bleachers, or lie in
a hammock tuning a lazy ear to a Sunday afternoon broadcast,
or--best yet--perch on a grassy hill overlooking a high school
game, give the game's past century a thought. And pass it on.
Modern baseball is 100 years old.
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