Ice, Ice, Baseball: A Delightful History of Baseball Played on Ice

I’m sure you remember the weirdly sub-freezing temperatures we endured a couple weeks ago. That probably wasn’t the sort of weather that makes you think of baseball. Unless you, like me, have ever wondered if anyone has ever tried to play baseball on ice. The answer to that question is yes, and they were successful too! (If you’re like me, then the mom part of your brain probably responded to that by yelling, “That sounds like a good way to get hurt!”)

For this story we’re going to travel further back in time than we normally travel in this newspaper. We’re going all the way to January 1860. James Buchanan was still plugging away at earning the title of “Worst President in US History”, John Brown had recently been hung for the raid on Harpers Ferry, and it was the beginning of an election year in a sharply divided country (extremely relatable).

It had been 15 years since the Knickerbocker Base Ball Club of New York (side eye: New Jersey) and the rules it adopted were formally organized. Those rules spread and became the basis of modern baseball, so the story goes. When people caught baseball fever, they seemed to catch it bad. Which is how we find ourselves in Rochester, NY on what I can only imagine was a frigid January day. A group of players from the city’s best baseball teams got together to play a game on ice. As far as anyone knows, the game, held on January 16, 1860, was the first time anyone held an organized game on ice. It was a spectacle that merited a writeup in the Buffalo Courier Express:

The Democrat pronounces the experiment a detailed success, and says the play was very lively and exciting, not as much difficulty being experienced from the use of skates by the players as was expected. We should think a little practice of this winter mode of playing base ball would render it one of the best sports imaginable—much more animated, exciting and enjoyable than the summer match on green sward. The thumps might be somewhat harder, the collisions more shocking and bloody, the slips and failures more frequent and more provoking; but when the whole action of the play would be so much more intense, the blunders so much more laughable, the unlucky scenes so much more ludicrous, and the fun, in fact, so much greater than in the ordinary play, that we should think it just the sport for our bold, lively club-men. We recommend a trial of it to their consideration.1

Rochester hosted another ice baseball game the following year on New Year’s Day. I don’t have access to any newspaper coverage of the game, but Priscilla Astifan wrote in Rochester History that the spectacle was seen by 2,500 fans, including “many ladies who had forsaken the traditional New Year’s Day custom of ‘receiving gentleman callers in their heated parlors.’”2 3

As everyone knows, if you want something to catch on with the cool kids, you take it to Brooklyn (offer does not apply to the Nets). A Mr. Ellenbeck of Rochester traveled south about a month later to introduce ice baseball to the hipsters of antebellum Brooklyn and serve as umpire. At least 15,000 people attended according to the New York Times, which noted that a third of them were women and children.4

The Atlantics and the Charter Oaks faced off to win a silver baseball. Each team was allowed ten players. The bases, basepaths and positions for the pitcher and catcher were marked on the ice with a “reddish coloring.” The game brought out an eager crowd and a “large Police force was present to preserve order.”5

Of the game the Brooklyn Daily Eagle wrote:

From the frequency of the tumbles, players as well as non-players, the conclusion is inevitable that many a participant in the sports of the day retired to bed with a sore head and aching bones.…nearly every one of the twenty selected were experts in skating, and after a few innings seemed to be quite as much at home, and played as well on runners, as when on terra firma.6

Despite the conditions of the ice and the many falls, no one was seriously injured and the Atlantics won the silver ball by a score of 36 to 27.

Later that month a game of ice baseball was played in Detroit. The Detroit Free Press wrote:

Quite a large number of spectators were present to witness the sport, it being the first game of the kind ever played, in this city, on the ice.7 The playing was somewhat mixed on account of some of the best players being the poorest skaters and some of the poorest players the best skaters. 8

Baseball on ice remained a winter spectacle in Brooklyn and spread into other parts of New York City and beyond during the late 19th century. I ran across mentions of games on ice in Philadelphia9, Chicago10, Superior, WI11, and, naturally, Alaska12.

The Chicago version is particularly interesting. In the late 19th century, Chicago had a flurry of creativity when it came to baseball. On Thanksgiving Day 1887 a group of students had gathered to “watch” the Harvard-Yale football game over telegram. When the football was over a spontaneous game broke out in which a tied-up boxing glove was used as a ball and a pole was used as a bat. Indoor baseball, which later became softball, was born. The softball implements were shifted to Chicago’s baseball games on ice. They used a larger, softer ball and thinner bats.13 As the summer game of baseball grew into a popular sport, star players King Kelly and Cap Anson played baseball on ice to stay in playing shape during the offseason.

No matter where baseball was played on ice, some changes to the regular rules were necessary. There were commonly ten players on each team with the tenth player acting as an extra shortstop. Often times the games only lasted five innings, either due to the cold or due to the extra physical effort in playing on ice. The pitcher threw a deadened, soft ball underhand to the batter. The batter was allowed to over run/over skate every base as long as he turned to the right when he passed over the base. Some games allowed for a batted ball caught on a hop to be called for an out.

Despite the early popularity and glowing newspaper write ups, baseball on ice began to fall out of favor on the east coast before the turn of the century. It didn’t completely disappear from the scene though. The April 1916 issue of Baseball Magazine featured a picture from an indoor rink:

The indoor version of baseball on ice was also popular in the Midwest. A story on the game in Chicago ran in the Tacoma Times in 1916:

Ice baseball as a semi-organized sport fizzled out somewhere along the way. It did continue in the form of ice carnival amusements and promotional events through the 20th century. For example, this video of women playing in Toronto in 1924:

Other than getting a baseball fix in the dead of winter, the main appeal of baseball on ice seems to be the opportunity to laugh at people slipping, sliding, falling, and crashing into each other. The day of yore didn’t have America’s Funniest Home Videos or You Tube, so they made due where they could.

The Brooklyn Daily Eagle acknowledge as much when covering the first game in Brooklyn:

It were bootless to deny the fact that there lurks within the breast a tendency to laugh at the mishaps of one’s neighbors, else whence those peals of laughter when luckless wight measured his length upon the ice?14

Harper’s Weekly concurred while writing about a game in 1884:

…what it loses in science it gains in grotesqueness. Where a grand hit would have elicited applause, perchance a sudden subsidence in the act of hitting may have evoked audible signs of merriment, and the insecurity of steel-shod feet is a fertile source of such balked ambition, and consequent amusement to the on-lookers. And it is safe to let loose one’s laughter on such an occasion, for even the most enthusiastic of professionals—even he whose daily bread depends upon the game—feels that he is in a position in which he can trifle with the game because of the abnormal conditionals under which it is being played.15

The legacy of baseball on ice may live on in the modern game we watch every summer. The rule change that allowed a skater to skate through the bases is often credited with being the inspiration for the rule that allows a runner to run through first base. This is, of course, disputed, as is everything to do with origins and rules in early baseball.

Maybe next time we’re blasted with icy, freezing temperatures you’ll look outside and think, “this is great weather for a baseball game!”

Sports Illustrated

I’m sure you all heard the news about Sports Illustrated last week. When the news broke, people were talking about their most memorable Sports Illustrated covers. This one is mine, the 1997 Baseball Preview Issue. By this point I was utterly obsessed with the Mariners. I still remember the excitement when I opened my mailbox to see Randy Johnson glowering at me over his glove. Sports Illustrated predicted that the Mariners would win the World Series that year. I was old enough to know that I shouldn’t take predictions seriously, but oh, did I believed they would win it all with my whole heart. 1997 is still my favorite, my most loved and my most heartbreaking Mariners season, and it all started with this:

(I wrote a whole four-part series on the 1997 Mariners in 2017 for Lookout Landing.)

The next most memorable was the cover with Ken Griffey Jr. that anointed him The Natural. I got this copy when my high school’s library was getting ride of a bunch of back issues. I took a whole stack of them, but this one was the prize.