The American National Game Base Ball by Currier & Ives

The American National Game Base Ball

Let’s start with the original iconic image of baseball, the Currier & Ives lithograph titled “The American National Game of Baseball. Grand match for the championship at the Elysian Fields, Hoboken, N.J.” 

This hand-tinted print was produced by the popular illustration firm of Currier & Ives in 1866 when the game was on the verge of becoming a professional sport rather than an amateur’s social game.

Prior to photography, images were captured by hand.  The drawing was engraved or etched on a metal plate which was inked in a solid color (black), then pressed onto large sheets of paper.  The resulting prints were colored by hand in an assembly line  factory where each person applied a single color.  Since reprints were produced at different times, various versions of the image exist, from simple black and white to highly colored.

Through most of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries,Currier & Ives produced a wide variety of scenes, both historical and contemporary, that reflected American culture.  Many of them displayed the pastoral yearnings prevalent in society as it grew more urban and less rural. This same attitude led to the creation of Central Park, a respite of rural tranquility in the midst of the wild hurly-burly of the city, and the rural cemetery movement in which cemeteries were established as parks where families could enjoy a picnic in a bucolic setting.

This portrait of baseball reflects that pastoral image, an image that clings to baseball even today.  The setting is the Elysian Fields in Hoboken, New Jersey, which is the site where tradition holds  that baseball as we know it sprang forth from Alexander Joy Cartwright as Athena sprang forth fully formed from Zeus’s head.  The Knickerbockers, Cartwright’s club, played a game at that field in 1846 because they could not play that day in Manhattan, and as Cartwright is purported to have written down rules that could be common among teams, this spot is the mythical birthplace of baseball.

At the time the print was first produced, baseball was taking the country by storm. Amateur teams played one version or another in cities and towns across a good portion of the country, with a heavy concentration in the northeast.

This image is important as a historical document not only because it commemorates the origin of the game, but because it captures the specifics of the game as it was played then.  The path from home to pitcher’s spot, the dirt paths between bases,  no infield dirt we take for granted, no outfield wall.  Spectators form the outer reaches of the field of play.  The players play barehanded, the catcher stands some distance back of home base and does not crouch, the lone umpire takes his position off to the side.  The pitcher throws not overhand but underhand.   The team at bat lounges off to the side, no bench, no dugout.

Baseball like no other sport  cherishes its history so this image of the game is one that is embraced. “The American National Game of Baseball” is a classic piece of Americana, the type of image that would later be produced by Norman Rockwell.