When Sunday Baseball Came to Brooklyn

Abstract

On Sunday, May 3, 1874, police in Brooklyn, New York, arrested seventeen boys, ranging in age from ten to seventeen, and hauled them to court where each was fined the nontrivial sum of $2. The boys were not accused of stealing, disturbing the peace, trespassing, interfering with the services of a nearby church, or uttering foul language within earshot of respectable citizens. The “green fields in the suburbs” where they had gathered were remote from stores, churches, homes, and tender ears. Their crime? They were playing a game of baseball. Sunday baseball, it seems, was illegal in Brooklyn, New York.1 Sabbatarian laws—“Sunday blue laws” in common parlance—were common in nineteenth-century America, especially in areas dominated by Protestants who maintained religious values and practices inherited from their Calvinist forefathers. Brooklyn’s original European settlers were the Dutch, whose Reformed Church sprang from traditions similar to those of English Puritans. But it was New Englanders, direct heirs of those Puritans, who came to dominate this old agricultural community as its East River shoreline began to sprout docks, warehouses, and workshops during the last years of the eighteenth century and when Brooklyn Heights emerged a few decades later as “America’s first suburb” on a steeply rising bluff directly across the river from lower Manhattan.2 The people who pioneered this new form of American community on the Heights were, for the most part, well-to-do merchants, bankers, and brokers who had migrated to New York from Massachusetts, Connecticut, and other New England states. Now they began to make much shorter daily migrations, by steam ferry, to build spacious homes beyond the crowded and noisy city, and to form a pious, well-ordered, and church-oriented community of like-minded believers.