The narrative of baseball as an American invention is difficult to overcome, but Beachville, Ont., holds claim to one of the first documented games of baseball in North America.Nicole Osborne/The Globe and Mail
If you squint just right, you can almost see it. Way back before this was a church yard, back when it was just a meadow behind the long-gone blacksmith’s shop, players would gather here to swat a calfskin ball with a stick of wood.
If baseball in Canada has sacred ground, then this long, sloped lawn in southwestern Ontario might just be it. It was here, in 1838, that one of the first documented games of the sport was played in North America. While it may seem like a sleepy farming community today, Beachville, Ont.’s place in the game’s early history defies the narrative that baseball is somehow exclusively an American pastime.
As Canadians ride the roller coaster of a Toronto Blue Jays playoff run, baseball historians are reminding bandwagon fans that Canada was a baseball country long before it was even a country – and certainly before it began to see itself as a hockey nation.
Stephanie Radu, curator of the Beachville District Museum, holds a tally stick, a tool used to keep score at early baseball games.Nicole Osborne/The Globe and Mail
“I think sometimes we’re seen as a foreign invader into the American game,” said Bill Humber, arguably Canada’s top baseball historian and author of Old Ontario at Bat: Baseball’s Unheralded Ancestry.
“The weight of that opinion is so profound, it’s kind of like a rock coming down a hill. It’s pretty hard to kind of withstand. But as I try to point out, it’s simply not true.”
The rolling farmland of southwestern Ontario is the same fertile soil that was once home to Fergie Jenkins, the first Canadian in the Baseball Hall of Fame. It is also the location of the oldest continually used baseball ground in the world, Labatt Memorial Park in London. In the 1870s, professional teams in Guelph and London were international champions, routinely beating American clubs. This part of Canada has as much claim to the early development of baseball as anywhere else.
We know about the game played in Beachville on June 4, 1838, because of an account written in Sporting Life nearly 50 years later by Dr. Adam Ford, who described watching men from Oxford and Zorra townships battle it out on that field. Their version of the game was a little different than the one the Blue Jays play – there were five bases, baserunners could only get out if they were “plugged,” or hit with the ball, and batters stood at “knocker’s stone,” not home base – but it’s still, unmistakably, baseball.
On this field, one of the first documented games of baseball was played in 1838.Nicole Osborne/The Globe and Mail
Despite the work of historians to verify Dr. Ford’s account, however, the narrative that baseball was invented and developed exclusively by Americans remains hard to overcome. It seems to be ingrained in American mythology itself.
“We have a lot of American visitors who have been coming, and they’re absolutely shocked. They’ve never heard any of this history before,” said Stephanie Radu, curator of the Beachville District Museum.
The only sign hinting that Beachville Baptist Church’s yard is hallowed ground is a large baseball bat fixed to a neighbour’s garage, with the words, “Centre Field 1838.” But even with an old wagon in the outfield and a line of trees where first base should be, the grass here still seems to be crying out for a game of catch.
A decorative sign on a house boasts the field's place in baseball history.Nicole Osborne/The Globe and Mail
Some American historians have tried to punch holes in Dr. Ford’s memory of the Beachville game, noting he was recalling an event he’d witnessed many years prior as a child. Major League Baseball’s official historian John Thorn called it “all baloney,” saying the idea that a seven-year-old child could remember the exact dimensions of a field and the precise names of all the players defies belief.
Canadian historians, however, insist it’s credible – noting that June 4, the birthday of King George III, was a holiday at the time in Upper Canada, and it was common in that era to have parades and military training followed by recreational games such as baseball. They point out many of the players named in Dr. Ford’s letter are part of families that still live in the area today.
“This is a Canadian game, too, and that game in Beachville is Exhibit A,” said Andrew North, a director of the Centre for Canadian Baseball Research who maintains the research library at the Canadian Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum in nearby St. Marys.
“Americans, I don’t think they intend any disrespect. I think rather that they are simply not interested in anything that happens beyond their borders.”
Mr. North, a lifelong San Francisco Giants fan, said Canadians have indeed played an important role in the evolution of baseball. The game was developed on both sides of the border, he said, and there were recorded references to it here decades before the now-debunked claim that Abner Doubleday “invented” the game in Cooperstown, N.Y., in 1839 – a full year after Dr. Ford said he witnessed it being played in Beachville.
Memorabilia on display at the Beachville District Museum.Nicole Osborne/The Globe and Mail
Nicole Osborne/The Globe and Mail
“My feeling is that if Ford hadn’t attempted to gild the lily by providing all this extraneous detail, nothing would have been questioned in the first place, even from south of the border, because the basics of the story are straightforward and eminently believable,” he said.
Mr. Humber said Canadians, then, should feel that when they’re watching baseball, they’re watching a truly North American game. It should be no surprise that Jackie Robinson broke baseball’s colour barrier with the Montreal Royals before he became famous in Brooklyn. Or that a century before the Blue Jays were granted entrance to Major League Baseball, Albert Spalding was trying to bring a franchise to Toronto. Or that Babe Ruth hit his one and only minor league home run in Canada, not the U.S., before he went on to become a star south of the border.
Canada, it turns out, is as tied up in the history of baseball as the U.S. is. Fans of the game already seem to know this, Mr. Humber said.
“The very enthusiasm of the public for the Blue Jays says we recognize, in the depth of our souls, that this is as much a Canadian game as an American one,” he said.
Editor’s note: A previous version of this article incorrectly referred to the magazine in which one of the first accounts of a baseball game was published as The Sporting News. It was Sporting Life.