Early baseball in Alabama/Game 1
From SABR Encyclopedia
| Line 6: | Line 6: | ||
|State=AL | |State=AL | ||
|Country=US | |Country=US | ||
| + | |Site=Spring Hill College | ||
|NYBaseball=Unknown | |NYBaseball=Unknown | ||
|Locals=Locals | |Locals=Locals | ||
Revision as of 01:08, 6 August 2012
| Spread of baseball: Home -> Alabama -> Early baseball in Alabama/Game 1 |
| Location | Alabama |
|---|---|
| Year | 1861 |
| Note on date | date is inferred |
| City | Mobile |
| State | AL |
| Country | US |
| Site | Spring Hill College |
| Was NY rules baseball | Unknown |
| Played by | Locals |
Alabama was reportedly the original source of Cuban baseball.
"Baseball thus appeared in Cuba as early as the end of the U.S. Civil War and was thriving there only a few years later. Bats, balls, leather gloves, and rules for playing the new North American pastime were first carried to Havana by a pair of brothers, Nemesio and Ernesto Guillo . . . when the teenagers returned from a half-decade of high schooling at Alabama's Spring Hill College in 1864. Within mere days they were organizing rudimentary contests . . . in downtown Havana. Less than four years later, the Guillo brothers . . . had formed the Havana Base Ball Club."
Spring Hill College is in western Mobile AL, which is on the Gulf of Mexico and near the Mississippi border. It is a Jesuit institution established in 1830.
OPEN ISSUE1: Does the Diaro article elaborate on the play, and the rules of play, used at the Alabama school? Can we ascertain when and how organized ballplaying, either the New York game or other forms, arrived at the school?
OPEN ISSUE2: Civil War historian Bruce Allardice points out that ballplaying at Spring Hill may have occurred in 1861 or so, rather than in 1864, as most southern academies lost both their students and faculties to the War and closed for its duration.
Sources
Peter C. Bjarkman, Diamonds Around the Globe (Greenwood Press, 2005), page 2. A key source for this story is an interview with one of the brothers in Diaro de la Marina, January 6, 1924.
