Review: Gómez, C.G., 2007. A New Perspective on Mexican Baseball Origins (and others)

Baseball in California 1860s

Where did baseball come from?

Finding out requires quite a lot of careful work.  MLB’s official historian spent a lifetime on the subject and concludes the game as we know it is a tapestry woven from traditions and practices from across 19th century America.  There are obvious and documentable turning points, but no clear beginning.

The same is true of baseball in the USA’s southern neighbor. In the most recently published account of the game there, historian Jorge Iber concedes, “It is challenging to document baseball’s origins in Mexico.”

No one, it seems, thought it worthwhile to record the arrival of something so ephemeral.  After all, it’s just a stick-and-ball game, a rudimentary feature of many cultures and nothing likely to attract anyone’s attention – until years later, once the game has grown into a profit-generating business.

Anthropologist Alan Klein gives perhaps the best overview of sources on early Mexican baseball.  These are largely non-scholastic manuscripts, some based on interviews with primary sources claiming to have participated in or observed events related to the history they describe. The compilers of these oral histories were not above bending the facts to support a partisan view of the game having origins within the writer’s own community. 

One account sets the earliest game played within the borders of modern Mexico in the Sonoran port of Guaymas. Sonora is a state in Mexico’s northwest that shares a land border with the US to the north, the state of Chihuahua to the east, and to the west, across the Sea of Cortez, Baja California. In 1877, US Marines from the USS Montana docked in Guaymas and during their visit played a game of baseball before a group of bemused locals. This story is reported in Klein’s Baseball on the Border, as well as Bjarkman’s Diamonds Around the Globe, but researcher César González-Gómez provides convincing evidence to show this account is built around dubious facts. (Iber’s chapter on Mexico in the recently published Baseball Beyond Our Borders conveniently glosses this contested period.)

González-Gómez has found that there was in fact a ship named Montana, but that it did not carry Marines nor did it belong to the US Navy. It was more prosaically a passenger and cargo ship travelling between San Francisco and the Gulf of California.  It could not have arrived in Guaymas in 1877, because only months earlier, in December 1876, it caught fire and sank, an event documented in The New York Times.  It would seem entirely possible a group of Americans travelling on the passenger ship Montana played a game in Guaymas on a date previous to the ship’s sinking, but González-Gómez appears uninterested in such speculation, moving on to provide evidence that Sonoran citizens knew about and played baseball at least a decade before the purported Montana visit.  A number of records document Sonaran students at Santa Clara College (today Santa Clara University) who were part of teams participating in the Pacific Base Ball Convention of August 1866.  A newspaper report from a game of 1867 documents the participation of two of these Mexican scholars.  Did these students play baseball when they returned to Sonora?  There is no record, but González-Gómez likes to think they did. The first account of a game in Sonora does not appear until 1892, and features four players who attended Santa Clara College.  On this and other evidence, González-Gómez speculates that baseball came to Sonora much as it did to Cuba, as an import carried by local sons who had learned it in their time abroad.  It was in the beginning a game played and promulgated by sons of “prominent families involved in successful business[es].”

The story of Primitivo Cásares fits this pattern quite well.  In a 2017 essay, González-Gómez describes the life of a planter’s son sent north to study at Harvard University, where he served as president and founding member, in November 1858, of the Lawrence Base Ball Club.  (The club featured another Latin player, José Eulogio Delgado, who is considered one of the first South American graduates of a US university and went on to become Peru’s minister of finance.) Primitivo Cásares’ career was cut short by yellow fever, which he contracted shortly after returning in the 1860s to the Yucatan to manage his family’s estate. There is no evidence Cásares organized baseball games within Mexico, but it’s possible to imagine he, and other returness like him, did so and thereby introduced baseball to their countrymen.

In another paper from 2011, González-Gómez reviews the published accounts of baseball played in Mexico at an even earlier period, that of the Mexican-American War of 1846–1848. In this case the actors were entirely Americans, soldiers of the US military encamped at forts and bases dotted across the newly occupied towns of Mexico.  Only three contemporary sources are currently known, letters written by soldiers, and none specify what kind of baseball games were being played, an important consideration at a time when there were regional variations and as yet no leagues and no national game. Four additional sources were written some years after the war and may not be entirely reliable. An especially fanciful one claims soldiers used as a bat the wooden leg of Mexico’s leading general, Santa Ana. The leg was in fact captured when the general fled (and is housed now at the Military Museum of Springfield, Illinois), but there is no evidence that it was ever used in a baseball game.

All of the published research I’ve seen on Mexican baseball is based on a handful of sources; none yet include the work of González-Gómez, whose two articles reviewed here appeared in Base Ball, still publishing today and offering digital back issues and subscriptions.  González-Gómez kindly provided copies of his articles for my inspection.  He currently publishes at Vice Sports and Cuarto Bat.

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Gómez, C.G., 2007. A New Perspective on Mexican Baseball Origins. Base Ball, 1(1), p.13.

Gómez, C.G., 2011. March, Conquest, and Play Ball: The Game in the Mexican-American War, 1846-1848. Base Ball, 5(2).

González Gómez, C. (2017). Un estudiante de Harvard en 1858: El primer beisbolista mexicano en Estados Unidos. [online] Vice Sports. Available at: https://sports.vice.com/es_mx/article/bm9ap8/un-estudiante-de-harvard-en-1858-el-primer-beisbolista-mexicano-en-estados-unidos [Accessed 9 Dec. 2017].

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Image description via Heritage House auctions:

1860's Baseball Photograph--One of the Earliest of the Sport! What appears at first glance to be just a bucolic image of a one-room schoolhouse set against a horizon of rolling hills asserts its elite significance upon closer inspection. At far right, we see a batter at the ready, a crouching catcher behind him. To the left, a pitcher preparing to fire, and fielders set to retrieve.

While we cannot assert with complete assurance that it is the oldest photograph of our national pastime, there's little doubt that it is the earliest to picture the sport in California, a geography identified by the "Churchill & Wilson Photographers, Pixley, Cal." stamping on verso. That's a small town on the edge of the Sequoia National Forest, about half the vertical distance between San Francisco and Los Angeles.

The sharp and nearly pristine sepia photo measures approximately 8x4.5", with the cardboard mount extending each dimension by about an inch. Minor foxing and handling wear are noted only in the interest of full disclosure, as our online imagery will convey that the piece displays without any real distractions.

https://sports.ha.com/itm/baseball/1860-s-baseball-photograph-one-of-the-earliest-of-the-sport-/a/7195-80399.s

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