Baseball without Borders: The International Pastime

16. Australia: Baseball Down Under

Baseball was first played in Australia in the s when newly arrived Americans played with English and Australian cricketers in Melbourne. Meeting on the cricket grounds in the old Carlton Gardens on Saturday afternoons, the first Australian games took place in the shadow of the great Exhibition Hall, a replica of the original in London. The first recorded baseball match, played at Sydney’s Moore Park on July , , was a pickup game, with both teams drawn from members of the Surrey Cricket Club. For the occasion they called themselves the Surrey Base-Ball Club.1 Just one year later, baseball games were organized in Melbourne when the St. Kilda Baseball Club wanted to give some competition to a touring American Negro music troupe, the Georgia Minstrels. Other American baseball players visited Melbourne during this period, coming from ships in port and other minstrel groups. Local cricketers and ex-patriot Americans sometimes obliged by organizing a game, but interest in baseball seemed to vanish once the minstrels sailed away. Off and on there was talk of forming baseball clubs, but nothing came of it until when a group of men from the United States and Canada got together and formed the Union Base Ball Club. In keeping with the trend of playing against visiting groups, the “Unions” played several matches, including a series against another American minstrel troupe known as the Lewis Mastodon Minstrels. Soon the local team disbanded, only to be reorganized in , when former members of the Unions living in Sydney organized the New South Wales Baseball Association ( ). ฀ 16 | Australia Baseball Down Under ฀ It consisted of two teams, the Sydney and the Union Base Ball Clubs. The soon scheduled a series of exhibition games in which Union and Sydney played each other for many weeks before the “big” game of May , . Sydney beat Union – . When the American ship Mariposa visited Sydney in , the organized a game against the crew. The Mariposa team won – . Only one more club match was played between Sydney and Union before the association folded in , marking the end of a five-year flirtation with the new American game. Baseball enthusiasts and managers soon learned, however, that A. G. Spalding, organizer of the first baseball world tour featuring American Major League players, intended to send two teams to the colony in . This was to be the turning point in the development of Australian baseball. The Spalding Baseball Tour of Australia introduced Australia to the American game. The tour was brash, expensive, and lavish—all of the things that other nations expected from Americans. Spalding, who had been a successful baseball player himself during the formative years of the sport in the United States, denied that he was trying to displace cricket as Australia’s national pastime. Rather he hoped baseball would become “one of the kindred field sports of the country.” A reporter, however, quoted Spalding as saying,“Baseball is a sport for the masses, cricket for the leisure classes. Baseball takes two to three hours. Cricket takes two to three days.”2 Spalding also expressed concern that the major English-speaking countries—Canada, the United States, Britain, Australia, and New Zealand—shared too few sports in common. The Spalding tour was much more than just “the latest thing” from America. Bringing a new sport from a leading English-speaking nation to a group of prosperous British colonies was a unique occurrence in the Australian sporting and social calendar of the s. The primary influence on Australia in the nineteenth century was Britain. This was reflected in virtually every aspect of Australian culture, but most directly in the ball game that Australia chose as its own. Cricket was British culture in Australia. It was the game of the average Australian, regardless of class or circumstances, and it was integral to both British and Australian nationalism. It was unthinkable that Spalding’s tour in Australia could supplant British cricket with a new American game based on Baseball Down Under rounders. Spalding acknowledged this from the beginning and wisely promoted American baseball as a complement to rather than replacement for Australian/British cricket. Spaulding’s group of twenty players, several journalists, a cricket coach, a manager, two assistants, Spalding’s mother, a few players’ wives, and two professional entertainers—Professor Bartholomew, a daredevil balloonist and parachutist, and Clarence Duval, the Negro mascot of the tour—first toured the continental United States by rail before...