Here we have a rare guest chapter, by DocBrown, with a few details courtesy of yours truly. I'll be threadmarking this right around the "Yankee Stadium" purge chapter, I think. It can also be presumed that Chuck Oswald once again was named after Chuck Musgrave, like 1.0, but in 2.0, Joe Kennedy makes that decision.
ROUNDERS: THE WORLD SPORT
PART I
Chuck "Mustache" Musgrave of the Hoboken Green Caps (later Athletics) up to swing
The future world-wide sports phenomenon known as rounders originated in Hoboken, New Jersey. The sport owes its existence to an earlier English children’s game also called rounders. It was English immigrants fleeing the collapsing monarchy who brought it to Hoboken, where the natives and immigrants modified the game and made it their own. When these first players of rounders grew up, they took it to the local athletic club, located at 301 Destiny Avenue, Hoboken, where a statue was erected in 1935 following a fire that destroyed the original building. The club began touring around their area, playing ad-hoc local teams of blue-collar workers and a few middle-class men looking for a fun evening. It quickly escalated into something serious and widespread. By 1872, it was being played all over the Northeast and Midatlantic regions.
While for the most part the clubs played internally, once or twice a year the various athletic clubs would play against each other. It was during these inter-club games that an early problem came to light: the inconsistency in rules. The confusion usually served to provide a quick laugh, but overall made the games a frustrating environment for player and spectator alike. With the growing popularity of the sport, the major athletic clubs that played rounders assembled in Hoboken in 1874 to create a consistent set of rules. The Hoboken Committee settled things such as field size, positions, roster size, and the number of innings. With common rules set up, the clubs established the National Rounders Association (NRA), which was divided into two leagues. Each year, the best team from each league would face off against each other in the “National Championship”, commonly referred to as the Musgrave Cup in honor of the first MVP and later Commissioner of the NRA, Chuck "Mustache" Musgrave.
Earliest known photo of a rounders game
Original 8
- League A
- Boston Blue Caps
- Dover Purple Caps
- Hoboken Green Caps
- Sandusky Red Caps
- League B
- Camden Gold Caps
- Hartford Brown Caps
- New York Orange Caps
- Shicagwa White Caps
Hoboken dominated the early NRA, winning 4 of the first 5 Championship titles. Then came the Philadelphia Yankees in 1879. Lead by former Camden Gold Caps star pitcher Sam Langley, the upstart team was formed when half of the Gold Caps were fired by the local Athletics Club Chairman. They were only allowed into the NRA due to the shenanigans of Hoboken, a decision that would come to haunt them. In 1880, the Yankees swept National Championships in an upstart victory against the Hoboken Athletics and began the 10-year-long winning streak that would cement the Yankees as “America’s team.” In 1894, after almost two decades of playing in a poorly built park, "unfit for Better Men of Pinnacle Blood," Custer sponsored the construction of a new, grand stadium in downtown Philadelphia for the Yankees. When it was completed, it was a truly colossal structure, and it was the largest athletic facility in the entire world. Nicknamed "The House that Custer Built," Philadelphia Grand Ballpark became a national icon. In 1927, it would also be the site of a massive gathering and purge of the Industrial Clans upon the orders of Custer's successor-son, President Joseph Steele.
Aerial photo of the Philadelphia Yankees' stadium, circa late 1920s
Throughout the 1880s to the start of the Great World War, the popularity of rounders continued to spread across the nation. Some teams folded, others relocated, and new teams joined the NRA such that by 1910, the organization looked like this:
- Liberty League
- Cincinnati Sluggers
- Crawford Wolverines
- Haddonfield Brewers
- Hoboken Athletics
- New York Highlanders
- Philadelphia Yankees
- Sandusky Red Caps
- Shicagwa Brown Caps (fmr. Hartford)
- Toronto Blue Caps
- Destiny League
- Boston Patriots
- Camden Minutemen
- Lewis City Pioneers
- New York Giants
- Oshkosh Vikings
- Philadelphia Keystones
- Pittsburgh Pinnacles
- Prophetstown Palookas
- Shicagwa Slammers
Despite the continued popularity of rounders, the NRA refused to allow any teams to form West of the Mississippi (save Lewis City, whose mayor threatened to raise taxes on ships going up the Mississippi to Shicagwa unless his Pioneers team was allowed into the NRA). The athletics clubs in Oregon, New North Anglia, and Redemption were so fed up of being snubbed by the NRA that they formed their own league, the Pacific Rounders Organization (PRO), in 1900 and included the following teams:
- Coastal
- Barnumsburg Trekkers
- Salem Generals
- Springfield Pioneers
- Evanstown Mercuries
- Mountains
- Aurora Bisons
- Shoshoni Falls Mountainmen
- Spokane Giants
- Yuta Stars
EUROPEAN VACATION
Rounders wouldn’t be called a world sport if it was just limited to the RU. Europeans had heard of that “strange game” of rounders as early as 1873 but it never really caught on. It was only during the 1889 Imperial Exposition that the sport received any serious attention from the average European. The
Wild West Spectacular, led by Bison Bill, would regularly play games of rounders during their off time at the expo and regularly invite curious onlookers to join in. The spectators tricked in on the impromptu games and by the end of the expo Paris FC faced the Americans in a highly attended game that ended in a tie. After the expo, rounders, or as the Europans called it, "baseball," spread like wildfire. Baseball clubs spread across the continent, necessitating the creation of the Ligue Européenne de Baseball (LEB) in 1901. While football would never fade away on continental Europe, baseball would always be its equal in enduring popularity.
Interestingly, Britain herself was not part of the LEB. Unlike the rest of Europe, England and Scotland never attended the Imperial Exposition, and therefore were not exposed to rounders. Instead, modern rounders was introduced to Britain through Winston Churchill and the ENP. Churchill encouraged the various Young Men’s Christian Associations (YMCA), which were funded by the ENP starting in 1902, to play rounders instead of football. Once Churchill came to power, football was banned overnight, the professional teams now forced to play rounders or fold, as "football is a deviant mongoloid invention." All chose the former, thus giving birth to the British Rounders Association. The banning of football flew in the face of its ancient British history, but at the time it was so popular with Catholic Latin Europe that it was deemed unfit for Britannic culture and its ancient history erased overnight.