Early baseball in Alabama/Game 1
From SABR Encyclopedia
| Spread of baseball: Home -> Alabama -> Early baseball in Alabama/Game 1 |
| Location | Alabama |
|---|---|
| Year | 1864 |
| City | Mobile |
| State | AL |
| Country | US |
| Was NY rules baseball | Unknown |
| Played by | Locals |
Alabama was reportedly the 1864 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."
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.
Spring Hill College is in western Mobile AL, which in on the Gulf of Mexico and near the Mississippi border. It is a Jesuit institution established in 1830.
Query: Does the Diaro article elaborate on the play, and the rules of play, used at the Alabama school?
