Lost in pastime

Matt Walsh raised his hands in the air after the baseball bounced over his head in right field and dropped into the overgrown bushes. It was a ground-rule double and the batter was awarded second base. But the game was paused. The search was on. They were playing that afternoon in Chester County by 1864 rules, which meant no baseball was left behind.

Baseballs, the umpire told the spectators, were expensive in the sport’s early days so games did not continue until a lost ball was recovered. What would happen, someone asked from the sidelines at French Creek State Park, if the ball could not be found?

“It gets dark,” Chris Goering deadpanned.

The 52-year-old Walsh, in a wool uniform, searched through the brush for the baseball. A teammate jogged over from center to help. Finally, there it was. The game could continue.

The Athletic Base Ball Club of Philadelphia plays the game throughout the summer the same way they did in the 1800s. The pitchers throw underhand, the fielders play gloveless, and an out can be recorded if a fly ball is caught off a bounce. And a baseball — which is handmade just like it was back then — is never left behind.

“We want to take history to the max. We want to represent what baseball was like in 1864 to the best of our ability,” said Matt Albertson, 36. “We’re not trying to talk like they did in 1864. That would be really cool, but I don’t think a lot of people are into that.”

Scott Alberts was watching a Phillies game in the summer of 2009 when the broadcasters referred to the Baker Bowl as the first home of the Phillies. That couldn’t be true, Alberts thought, since the Phils started four years before the Baker Bowl opened in 1887. So he researched online about the team‘s early days, falling into an all-night rabbit hole of baseball history.

“Then I found a comment about the first year of overhand pitching,” said Alberts, 46, who studied history in college. “I was like, ‘Wait, what’s going on here?’”

Alberts learned more about the game’s early rules, thinking it would be a fun thing to try one afternoon with his friends and a case of beer. A week later, his mother returned from a vacation in Maryland with a tourist magazine that featured an article about two teams playing baseball as if it were the 1800s.

“I was like, ‘These jerks stole my idea,’” he said.

Alberts called the Maryland clubs, which put him in touch with teams in Delaware and New Jersey. Philly, they told Alberts, needed a team and they pushed him to start one. He connected with Ryan and Eric Berley, who started the ice cream shop Franklin Fountain in Old City, and hoped they could help him find the right people. Instead of passing Alberts on to someone else, the Berleys, who played high school baseball at Penncrest, said they wanted in.

Alberts and the Berleys met at McGillin’s Ale House that fall and hatched a plan. They connected with the local chapter of the Society of American Baseball Research and hung fliers in the ice cream shop, which has an early 1900s theme.

They soon had a team and were committed to making it as historically accurate as possible. If Civil War reenactors played beer-league softball, it would probably look like the Athletic Base Ball Club of Philadelphia.

“The guys who joined the club were artists, musicians, historians, baseball nerds,” Alberts said.

“They weren’t the best baseball players in the world, so we wanted to emphasize the history and make it a fun, supportive environment, which I think we’ve achieved.”

The team was named after the original A‘s, who played “the New York game” at 25th and Jefferson and won Philadelphia‘s first championship in 1871. The current A‘s range from the mid-20s to late 60s. Some played high school baseball while others retired after Little League.

Albertston learned of the team in 2015 while finishing his master’s degree in history. A baseball fan, he was delaying his schoolwork by digging up old articles about the A‘s managed by Connie Mack. He stumbled upon the website for the Athletic Base Ball Club and went to a game to check it out.

“I was like, ‘I want to do this’,” Albertson said.

The uniforms were made by a husband and wife in Connecticut and the caps were hand-sewn in York County. Other vintage baseball teams — there are about 300 in the country — wear polyester or match wool tops with nylon pants, while Athletic is fully committed to wool like the original A‘s. It’s not as bad as it sounds.

“Once you start to sweat, it kind of turns into air-conditioning,” Albertson said.

The first inning of Athletic‘s game at French Creek featured a dropped pop-up, a booted grounder, and a line drive that bounced in front of the right fielder and over his head.

“We’re not very good,” Albertson said. “I’ll put it to you that way. So we try to have as much fun as possible.”

At last, the inning ended.

“Come on, guys,” Albertson shouted as he ran in from the outfield. “What are we being paid 50 cents a game for?”

Playing without gloves can be a challenge as the third baseman has to remember that the second baseman is barehanded before he zips over a throw. A line drive is no easy task.

“My first game, someone hit a line drive at me,” Alberts said. “Here I am at shortstop with no glove and I just hit the dirt. It was the first shot fired in anger against me. I hear a voice from the outfield: ‘Quite an education, isn’t it?’ That’s how we learned how to play.”

The scoreboard is an oversize chalkboard, the umpire wears a top hat, every player has a nickname, and there are no pitcher’s mound or base paths. Forget the errors in the field, Athletic is about the experience. Albertson bats while puffing a cigar and Dan Gordon drinks with water from a copper mug. They explain to the crowd between innings how a runner cannot safely overrun first base and why the umpire does not call balls and strikes on every pitch.

When a fan asked for a photo, Gordon, 46, explained how people in the 1800s rarely smiled in photographs because it took so long for a camera to take a picture. Even their facial expressions are authentic.

“We’re just like everyone else. We all have day jobs. We might have been athletes in high school, we might have never thrown a baseball. We get people from all walks of life.”

There’s always more history to dig up, often leading Athletic players to the rabbit holes that Alberts fell into. They’ve gone to archives of the Baseball Hall of Fame, talked to historians, and searched the Free Library of Philadelphia for artifacts. They’ve seen statistics from the 1880s and can’t understand how there were so many strikeouts.

“They knew stuff that we don’t know,” Alberts said. “Sure, we’re not the best athletes of our generation, but you‘re like, ‘There shouldn’t be that many strikeouts.’ Now we’re messing with pitch grips and stuff.”

The team plays about 15 games a season and tries to practice when it can. The players travel to Lancaster County and Cape May and participate in tournaments in Rhode Island and New York against other vintage teams. There’s a whole circuit of teams that play by vintage rules, including clubs in West Chester and Newtown.

Alberts and the Berleys started the club but have since passed over control. Yet it still rolls on every summer. What started as a way to play vintage baseball soon became much more. It became a community. Even their wives are friends.

“Some of these guys are my best friends now,” Alberts said. “I’ve seen clubs come and go around the country. A lot of the teams have a very centralized leadership model. There’s like a magic man at the center of it all and he calls all the shots. That works to an extent, but that tends to burn people out. We haven’t had much of that. We’ve been very democratic from the start and diversified the responsibilities. You give people a meaningful role, they feel invested, and then they want to stick around and keep it going. It’s not your project that they’re participating in. It’s their project.”

They played at French Creek against a team of park rangers from Hopewell Furnace, Valley Forge, and Washington Crossing. The opposing slugger, Washington Crossing ranger Matt Truesdale, was the one who hit that ground-rule double. His next time up, he crushed the ball into the woods on a fly. Home run. It was time for Walsh to find the baseball again.

“When he hits again, don’t throw it there,” Albertson shouted, as even in the 1880s they knew about pitching around the batter.