Sunday, April 18, 1999
Vintage baseball comes home
Game brings classic style to Cincinnati
BY JOHN ERARDI
The Cincinnati Enquirer
The birthplace of professional baseball reverts to its prenatal days at 12:15p.m. today at Cinergy Field.
Before today's Reds game, a Cincinnati team called the The Shamrocks, which plays by 1860 rules, will face a “picked nine” of players from elsewhere in the country in a demonstration of old-time baseball.
It is part of the Vintage Base Ball Association's annual convention, being held at Heritage Village in Sharon Woods Park, where the Shamrocks play their home games.
Old-time baseball is enjoying a renaissance.
Ultimately, one of the jewels that might emerge from this rebirth is a present-day version of the 1869 Cincinnati Red Stockings, the team whose coast-to-coast play inspired the creation of professional baseball.
This could portend good things for:
• The Home of Professional Baseball museum being planned as part of the Reds' proposed new ballpark and ...
• Heritage Village, whose village green — surrounded by historic buildings, far from the sight and sounds of automobiles — is regarded as one of the premier old-time baseball venues in the country.
“It's a game where you have to learn the rules, so the game doesn't have to be stopped constantly to remind the players of those rules,” said Bob Vitz, who began playing for the Shamrocks in 1988, their first year. “You're doing more than playing a game. You're putting on a show.”
The pitching is underhanded; the batting swing much flatter; there are no gloves, but there is also no infield-fly rule, so you're able to turn infield pop-ups into double plays; any hit ball that touches fair territory is a fair ball, no matter how soon it spins into foul ground; and any hit ball caught on one bounce is an out.
“You can tell when you watch it's not a softball game,” said Jon Scharf, executive director of Historic Southwest Ohio, which owns and operates Heritage Village. “You can tell by the clothes they wear and the rules they play by.”
Al Dieckmann, who was raised in Winton Place and lives on Long Island, will be one of the “picked nine” players in today's game at Cinergy Field. When he first started playing in 1995, there were four teams on Long Island; there are now 11, playing in two leagues.
More than 60 vintage base ball teams exist in the country, including 15 in Ohio, most notably The Muffins of Columbus, who have done more to spread the gospel and inspire the formation of other teams than any other club in the country, Dieckmann said.
Among the other players in today's game will be Darryl Brock, author of the novel If I Never Get Back, in which the 1869 Red Stockings play a prominent role; and Bill Ryczek, author of When Johnny Came Sliding Home, a book about post-Civil War baseball. One of three vintage teams on Long Island for which Dieckmann plays is the Brooklyn Atlantic, whose 1870 team stopped the Cincinnati Red Stockings two-season winning streak at 81 games, in a thrilling — but controversial — 11-inning contest (8-7).
An Atlantic fan jumped on the back of Red Stockings right-fielder Cal McVey in a key play toward the end of the game.
“We'd love to see the Red Stockings team be formed again; I speak for every member of the Brooklyn Atlantic when I say that,” Dieckmann said. “We'd give them (the Red Stockings) a chance to even the score.”
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