My recent posts (here and here) on 19th-century Cuban baseball and the ten-man game provoked some fascinating discussion on SABR’s 19th-Century Baseball list (which can be found at Yahoo! Groups). The list is open to SABR members; non-members can join for three months.
Some of the stuff the baseball historians there came up with is just too fascinating not to mention here:
1) The ten-man rule was proposed by Chadwick in 1874, apparently as a solution to the problem of the fair-foul hit (the favored weapon of Ross Barnes, Dickey Pearce, and others, made illegal in 1877). Robert Schaefer’s article in The National Pastime (number 20, 2000), “The Lost Art of Fair-Foul Hitting”—which I have not yet read, but plan to—should contain much more on this. An interesting question then arises: did Cuban players practice the fair-foul hit? If so, for how long? (This last point was first raised by Rod Nelson on the 19cBB list.)
2) The supposed “first organized baseball game” in Cuba, played in December, 1874, may have used the nine-man rule; but the first game in Cuban League history, on December 29, 1878, used ten players a side. So it had been adopted by 1878 (at the latest) and lasted until (at least) 1882. (This is from César González.)
3) By the 1890s, Cubans had exported their version of the ten-man game to Yucatán, where the tenth man came to be known as “El Rey Xiol” (“King Xiol”)—which is really a transliteration of “right short.” (Also from César González.)
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