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The Rise in Popularity of Club Baseball in Britain

Baseball caught on unusually quickly throughout the north of England as well as in Scotland. Baseball was recognizable due to its similarity to the children’s game of rounders, in that the object of run scoring (similar to scoring a rounder) was instantly and easily understood. The game was seen as an adult’s version of rounders—a fast, exciting, and delightfully rough-and-tumble tonic against the game of cricket, which quickly became redefined as a game more suited to the upper class of the south, due to its perceived genteel and leisurely (some would say stuffy and plodding) nature. The game of baseball also appealed both to football fans who enjoyed its neat fit as a bridge sport between football seasons, and to those sporting people who never became particularly enchanted with football or cricket in the first place.

Within two years of baseball’s introduction to the British public, a major industrial-based association, putting on display the best talent the nascent British game had to offer and thus attracting the keen attention of the press and local residents, had sprung up among the iron, shipbuilding and textile employees of the Lancashire and Derbyshire regions. In addition, numerous baseball associations, mainly of industrial, trades, and university and collegiate origin, sprang up quickly in Staffordshire, Cheshire, Durham and Northumberland in 1881; Cleveland, Lincolnshire, Liverpool, Shropshire and Northamptonshire in 1882; and in Nottinghamshire, Walsall and Scarborough and the East Riding in 1883.

The game also spread quickly south, with associations set up in Surrey, Berkshire and Buckinghamshire that same year of 1883; London, Norfolk, Sussex, Essex, Kent and Middlesex in 1884; Cambridgeshire, South Hampshire and Dorset in 1885; and Somerset and Suffolk in 1886. By the spring of 1887, over 2,700 clubs and nearly 100,000 players were registered to forty-seven baseball associations throughout England, Scotland and Wales. This exponential growth would not have been possible had baseball not immediately caught the fancy of the middle and working classes outside of Britain’s largest cities.

Also important to the growth of the game were cup competitions established within and among the associations. Beyond locally-contested cups and derbies established between area-adjacent clubs, the establishment of the Baseball Association (BA) Cup in 1882 is seen as a critical growth step for the sport, with the establishment of the SBA (Scottish Baseball Association) Cup and the Welsh Cup in 1883 following soon after. (It should be noted that while baseball spread like wildfire in England and Scotland, its uptake was much slower in Wales, where rugby ruled supreme; and in Ireland [outside of the Ulster Province], where baseball was derided as a “foreign sport”.)

By 1887, over 300 clubs from around the island were participating in that year’s English BA Cup, culminating in the “Mad Dash Cup Final” in which champion Derby County defeated Burnley 4-3 in ten innings on Vivian Sharp’s daring consecutive stolen bases and subsequent scoring of the winning run on a passed ball, to the delight of over 15,000 fans crowded into the Kennington Oval in London.