At a time when we are awaiting the start of the MLC and fixtures have been announced, it is pertinent to look back at the history of cricket in the US and ask the question why the sport lost put to Baseball despite being a competitor in the 19th century.
Before 1860 (and to a limited extent afterwards), cricket enjoyed its own popularity in the US, and the question as to whether cricket or baseball would ultimately capture the American sporting heart was still unanswered.
The earliest record of cricket in the Americas was found in the ‘secret diary’ of William Byrd II of Virginia and the date, believe it or not, is 25 April 1709. Subsequent references to cricket date back to Georgia in 1737 and an advertisement in a New York paper for players in 1739. The first recorded American cricket match was in New York in 1751 on the site of what is today the Fulton Fish Market in Manhattan.
Cricket, records indicate, remained popular in the Americas until the 1860s and the first recognized international match between Canada and USA was attended by over 10,000 spectators at Bloomingdale Park in New York in 1844. Tours to and from the US were common until the 1880s, and the best moment for US cricket came when a United States side defeated the West Indies in an international match in British Guyana in 1880. Though matches between Americans and British residents were played on the American West Coast right through the 1880s and 1890s, cricket, by the turn of the century, had given way to baseball. By the end of the Civil War, baseball’s ascendance to the top of the American sporting pantheon was inevitable, if not already complete. Though cricket would experience a revival in the 1870s, it would never again compete with baseball as either a participatory or a spectator sport in the United States. The most compelling question to emerge from
this development is simply ‘Why?’ What were the factors that allowed baseball to prevail over cricket, despite the latter’s longer history both inside and outside the United States.
It is the question about the foreign nature of cricket that leads to the most compelling of arguments surrounding cricket and baseball. There exists a body of evidence that points to emergent American nationalism as a critical component of the battle for American sporting loyalty. American nationalism in the mid-nineteenth century was still somewhat a novel concept. Carl Degler has argued that the American nation emerged in part due to the Civil War, before which American nationalism was lacking. The threat of southern secession and the potential for the United States to break up less than a century after independence provided an arena where the nation was truly formed. It is therefore no surprise that an American sporting nationalism would assert itself at this time as well. Thus, the 1850s became the critical moment in this battle for sporting supremacy. As American nationalism emerged and strengthened, baseball, continually forged and moulded to suit the needs of Americans, began to assert a stronger hold on the American public, eventually pushing cricket forever into the margins of American sporting life. It was during this decade that calls for a national game were heard, and it was this decade that saw the term ‘national pastime’ first written. The need to create a national game grew out of the American desire to ‘emancipate their games from foreign patterns’.
Porter’s Spirit of the Times, a prominent sporting periodical of the time, demanded a game peculiar to the citizens of the United States, one distinctive from the games of the British or the Germans. The New York Times also pined for the independence of American sports. Once baseball had become the unequivocal American sport, great pains were undertaken to protect its American heritage.
It is almost certain then that the adoption of baseball over cricket, even if structural arguments are given credence, had much to do with nationalism. The establishment of an ‘American’ game was an extremely popular topic of the sporting media of the time.