Before Novembers brought football weather

by Jack Neely

All fall that year, Knoxville looked forward to November. As always, November brought cold weather, falling leaves, turkey hunts, elections. But judging by the amount of space it got in the newspaper, to many Knoxvillians November meant one thing and one thing only.

That was, of course, baseball. In 1867, November was time for the Grand Base Ball Tournament, the climax of Knoxville's season.

It had been a wild year. The city was rebounding from the Panic of '67; by November, the local iron industry was white hot. "The blaze of brick kilns is seen lighting up the sky at night in every direction," the Knoxville Herald reported. People were moving here daily, just for the good jobs in the foundries, so many we didn't have places to keep them.

But Knoxville wasn't so busy that the city couldn't take a few weekdays off to go to the Tournament. Except for horse races and various other dubious sports involving uncomfortable animals, baseball was the only game in town.

Base Ball, as they always spelled it, often capitalized, had caught on amazingly fast in Knoxville. Sam Dow had begun organizing teams in downtown saloons shortly after Appomattox, enlisting bored Union and Confederate veterans to become Base Ballists. Baseball was new to the South in general, but by 1867, teams were coming to Knoxville from all over to be part of it. Even Atlanta's team, the Gate City Club, showed up to play Knoxville's teams: the University Club, the Holstons, and the Knoxville City Club.

"Prominent gentlemen of the city" sponsored the contest and donated the prizes. Among the most enthusiastic promoters was Perez Dickinson, the 54-year-old merchant prince of Knoxville, famous for his stately Island Home. First place was "a magnificent silver-mounted bat." Second place was "a beautiful stand of colors." Third place was "two Silver-Mounted Balls." And fourth was "a Very Handsome Score Book."

The Herald paraphrased Sir Walter Scott:

Where is the man with soul so dead
Who to himself hath never said
Ain't I glad I am a Base Ballist?

If you were a visiting Base Ballist arriving in Knoxville for the Tournament, you'd get off the train at the station on Depot Street and walk toward town up Gay Street. By the time you reached Asylum Avenue, you'd look down the steep hill to your left, and see, across a clearing between cluttered Gay Street and First Creek, the Base Ball Grounds. (The infield was where they later built the Woodruff's building; home plate was somewhere in what's now the basement of the brewpub.)

You might pause to get the lay of the land, but then you had to walk on to Cumberland, to the large hall on the second floor of Capt. Koehler's Saloon. That was headquarters for the Base Ball Committee of Arrangements, and if you had nine guys with you and brought your own bats, they'd sign you up for the tournament.

A few Knoxvillians had still never seen a ball game. The newspaper promised it was "as lively as the circus, and no less acro-bat-ic." (Get it? Acro-Bat-ic?) Women were especially urged to come, to boost morale. "The fair/Are expected there," rhymed the Herald.

"At an early hour," the newspaper reported, "a stranger in the town would have sensed that something unusual was going on. The hungry crowds of young men, the boys in their neat uniforms of blue or red, and the general interest depicted in every countenance would have shown him that some event of unusual importance was about to take place."

That culmination came on a Tuesday and Wednesday, starting each day at 9 in the morning. The National Club was said to be an all-Union team, but whether that meant they were former federal soldiers or early organized laborers I don't know; they played the Cumberland Club. In a game that lasted just over two hours, the Nationals won, 52 to 28. A player was touching home an average of once every 97 seconds. And that wouldn't even be the most impressive score of the week.

The Knoxville Club, made up of heirs and successful young businessmen, mostly Union veterans, had introduced baseball to Tennessee on this field only two years earlier—Sam Dow, the original manager, was pitcher—but they weren't faring well in their own tournament. The College Hill Club of Greeneville beat them, 78 to 27. The game was called in the 6th inning, apparently just as a humanitarian gesture. But then the Holstons—made up of old-family Knoxville boys, most of them former Confederates—gave the hometown fans something to cheer about, beating several of the visiting teams. The Holstons also trounced the hapless Knoxville Club: 90-25.

Perez Dickinson and other officials urged a final match between the Holstons and Greeneville's College Hill Club, to determine the championship of Tennessee. Dickinson emphasized that first prize, the "elegant bat." But the College Hill boys had had enough. Two key players, the shortstop and the catcher, were "badly disabled." They settled for second place and went home to Greeneville.

If there's anything that makes Base Ball different from baseball, it's the casualty list. Baseballs were made of hardwood, there were lots and lots of hits, and no one wore gloves. In those postwar days, the injured were sometimes listed as "the wounded."

The Herald sorted them out in a tongue-in-cheek triage. The wounded were to be divided into the "totally disabled," the "partially disabled," and the "lazily disabled." The first group were those who had to walk with crutches or a cane. The second group had black eyes, sprained wrists, and teeth knocked out. The third group, though, were "lazy fellows who think it takes them a day to recover from the effects of the game" and spend that day "rehearsing their deeds of skill to admiring listeners."